Basic Trope: People associate particular stereotypes with certain languages, such as French being seductive.
- Straight:
- Alice uses her knowledge of French to seduce Bob.
- Whenever Bob is angry at someone, he screams at them in German because he thinks it sounds intimidating.
- Claire has a conversation with her friend in Cantonese. A well-meaning passer-by steps in to try and defuse the 'argument'.
- David swears like a sailor, but whenever he does, he does it in Italian.
- Eve speaks Latin to make herself seem smart.
- Flash speaks with a thick Kansai accent to act big and tough. Reactions may vary from actually scaring people or making a dumbass out of himself.
- Exaggerated:
- The French language is depicted as a form of Charm Person. Its use is restricted to licensed professionals.
- German is the Black Speech. Children cry and plants wither whenever anyone orders a Wiener schnitzel.
- Downplayed:
- Alice uses French to put Bob at ease.
- Bob snaps at people in German to get their attention. ("Achtung!")
- Justified:
- Bob spent a couple of years in France as a young man and had a passionate affair, of which he has blissful memories. He still associates the language with those feelings.
- Alice had a strict German piano teacher as a child, and still associates that language with stress and misery.
- Bob knows that people naturally associate a German accent with malice, for some reason...
- Inverted: Bob can't see how anyone finds French, the language of snooty waiters, remotely sexy. But the sound of German makes him think of that glorious Oktoberfest that he met Hilda, the busty pigtailed milkmaid...
- Subverted:
- Alice tries to speak French so she can seduce Bob, but she fails miserably. Turns out Bob really dislikes the French.
- Bob is angry at someone and yells at them in German. Said someone is a German-speaker (or native) who responds with "Ernsthaft?"
- Double Subverted:
- Her feelings hurt, she reverts to her native Russian to hurl abuse at Bob. He's instantly captivated.
- So he, in response, tries Russian. The German speaker then gets into an argument.
- Parodied:
- Every time a man hears a word in French said by a woman, they immediately fall in love with her.
- Alice is actually being extremely pissed with Bob's insistent attitude, so she suddenly lapses in a string of weird and convoluted insults in her native French. And since Bob didn't understand a word of what she said, he now believes that she has just said something incredibly romantic, like a declaration of undying love!
- At first, Alice's French dialogue is subtitled, but after a few sentences the subs start going off on tangents about how dreamy she sounds, eventually not translating anything at all.
- Instead of coming off as either a Boisterous Bruiser or The Idiot from Osaka, Flash somehow manages to invoke a different reaction: The epitome of masculinity or someone who's a regular at Ram Ranch (The latter is due to the Kansai accent being translated into a drawl in America).
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Either no-one speaks a foreign language, or nothing is made of it when they do. The characters are interested in what they can/can't understand, not about how any particular language sounds.
- Enforced: "You know, why don't you make Alice speak some French? Maybe that'll make the viewers go up!"
- Lampshaded: "Whoa, Alice! You sound so hot in French!"
- Invoked:
- Alice takes French lessons to sound sexier on purpose.
- Bob the Stern Teacher isn't German, doesn't teach German, and barely speaks any German... but he finds that yelling the occasional angry phrase of it shuts his students up like a shot.
- Exploited: Alice happens to speak French. She can't help it if guys drop everything they're doing to fawn at her feet every time she opens her mouth, but she certainly doesn't mind it...
- Defied:Translation: "I am not trying to chat you up! I'm very very angry! Stop smiling like that!!"
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: Alice, Bob and co have a conversation about which languages they find sexiest.
Retour à Tout sonne plus sexy en français?
