Have you ever gone back to watch old shows and movies and realized how blatant the stereotypes are? Even in kids’ movies, there are countless examples of racism and sexism that are appalling by today’s standards. From the way Native Americans are portrayed as savages in Peter Pan to the passivity and lack of meaningful characterization of traditional Disney princesses such as Aurora (from Sleeping Beauty) and Cinderella, it is important to understand problems in traditional narratives that we can improve upon in modern storytelling.
But when you hear about problematic stereotypes, how often is the discussion around language? The way accents and dialects are treated tends to fly under the radar, and there’s no reason why it should. Consistently using southern accents to mark stupidity or Russian accents to mark villainous intent is still a form of harmful stereotyping. It shouldn’t be surprising that these language biases are also present in children’s media. In an analysis including dozens of Disney films, for example, foreign accents tend to be associated with villains (Lippi-Green, 2012). And Disney movies are not alone, as the trend of villains using non-American accents holds true for animated TV shows (Dobrow & Gidney, 1998). The point here is not to stir up more fear about how the media is corrupting us, but instead to acknowledge harmful ideas and think about how to move forward. If you don’t want your kids internalizing stereotypes about women and people of color from these movies and shows, we should pay attention to other stereotypes such as language as well.
Which means we need more research on how other forms of media such as video games represent language. Old Disney movies and pre-2000s TV shows are less relevant nowadays, and if you have kids you’ll know how popular video games are today. Yet most of the work with language and video games seeks to understand if video games can be a viable tool for improving language skills (Chen & Yang, 2013; Sobhani & Bagheri, 2014; Rankin, Gold, & Gooch, 2016), which is a worthwhile topic of study but doesn’t answer the question of how video games represent language. In this, popular news does a better job than scientific studies at establishing the basis of language stereotypes in video games, such as pointing out that non-American accents represent an “exotic” character in Final Fantasy XII, and that in Starcraft uses southern US accents to represent units that are unrefined and weak in battle (Brice, 2011). While these articles lead the discussion on language stereotypes in video games, they are not scientific in the way that academic studies about accents in movies and TV have been. If we are going to be rightly appalled at the racism and sexism present in older shows and movies, we should see how much harmful stereotypes are present in video games as well, and language representation is an avenue that we have yet to explore.
Works Cited:
Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent. Routledge, 2012.
Dobrow, J., & Gidney, C. (1998). The Good, the Bad, and the Foreign: The Use of Dialect in Children’s Animated Television. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 557(1), 105-119.
Chen, H. J. H., & Yang, T. Y. C. (2013). The impact of adventure video games on foreign language learning and the perceptions of learners. Interactive learning environments, 21(2), 129-141.
Sobhani, M., & Bagheri, M. S. (2014). Attitudes toward the Effectiveness of Communicative and Educational Language Games and Fun Activities in Teaching and Learning English. Theory & Practice in Language Studies, 4(5).
Rankin, Y. A., Gold, R., & Gooch, B. (2006, September). 3D role-playing games as language learning tools. In Eurographics (Education Papers) (pp. 33-38).
Brice, Mattie. (2011). Speaking in Accents and the American Ethnocentrism in Video Games. Pop Matters. https://www.popmatters.com/151275-speaking-in-accents-and-the-american-ethnocentrism-in-video-games-2495918135.html