British English in American Movies: the Smart, the Bad and the Exotic

This paper investigates how language is used for characterization in American movies. Two movie genres, the American 'superhero' movies and American movies portraying a professional setting are considered. The conversations from the movies included in the corpus are analyzed in order to identify possible correlations between the accent of the movie character and personality traits or roles. In particular, the research takes into consideration the use of the American and British English varieties. The results of the analysis provided evidence of a greater variety of different accents in the superhero genre, which suggests that this genre relies more heavily on language as a tool for characterization. The study revealed that 'bad' character traits, as well as foreignness, command/authority, intelligence/expertise often correlate with a British English accent.