History Main / JustAStupidAccent

** In ''{{Asterix}} and the Picts'', [[ScottishEnglish vaguely Scots gibberish]] in a Scottish-looking font is used to indicate when the Pictish warrior [=MacAroon=], who spends the story struggling with confidence issues and a bad throat, is mumbling; indicating that unless he's speaking very clearly, his thick accent makes it impossible for the Gaulish characters to understand him. (In RealLife, Pictish and Gaulish were probably mutually intelligible, in much the same way as British English and the Scots language are today.) When he's feeling more confident or healthier, he speaks in normal letters.

** In ''{{Asterix}} and the Picts'', [[ScottishEnglish vaguely Scots gibberish]] in a Scottish-looking font is used to indicate when the Pictish warrior [=MacAroon=], who spends the story struggling with confidence issues and a bad throat, is mumbling; indicating that unless he's speaking very clearly, his thick accent makes it impossible for the Gaulish characters to understand him. When he's feeling more confident or healthier, he speaks in normal letters.

* DanielDayLewis in ''Film/TheUnbearableLightnessOfBeing'' is an Irishman portraying a tragic Czech lothario by putting on an accent that is a mixture of TV-presenter British and cold-war-spy-movie Russian. The effect is less than suave, more like distractingly ridiculous.

* GilbertAndSullivan's ''The Grand Duke,'' which features a German theater troupe with an English lead actress, plays with this one: everyone speaks unaccented English, except for the English character, who is written with a thick German accent.

* TheCompleteWorksOfWilliamShakespeareAbridged does ''Theatre/{{Macbeth}}'' in (deliberately) terrible Scottish accents.

* Sellers again, as the eponymous ''DoctorStrangelove''

** [[LampshadeHanging Lampshaded]] in ''HistoryOfTheWorldPartOne'', the source of the above quote.
** Also present in ''YoungFrankenstein,'' where the (ostensibly Romanian) townsfolk speak English with bad German or Cockney accents. Inspector Kemp's is the worst - like Inspector Clouseau, his own countrymen can't understand him half the time.

* The film version of ''MemoirsOfAGeisha'' is extremely bad about this. Not only do the Japanese characters speak [[GratuitousEnglish Engrish]] with a bit of GratuitousJapanese thrown in, but they actually hold conversations with an [[{{Eagleland}} American]] ([[RaceLift who was Japanese in the book]]) with no explanation given as to how they can understand each other.

* In ''TheMaskOfZorro'', almost all of the Spanish noblemen speak English in Spanish accents for the entire film, except for one whose accent is British, but there is a translation scene in which Catherine Zeta-Jones is addressed by a Mexican peasant woman who does NOT speak English. She speaks [[{{Mayincatec}} Nahuatl]] for a moment, and then her daughter translates into Spanish-accented English. It's a pretty good choice, in that no California Spanish noblewoman would be expected to speak an Indian language.

* ''K19TheWidowmaker'' has Creator/HarrisonFord and LiamNeeson hilariously attempting Russian accents. However, they still manage to sound just like Creator/HarrisonFord and LiamNeeson.

* This is especially glaring in ''TheSoundOfMusic'' where the Austrians (good guys, but definitely German-speaking) speak normal English and the Germans (bad guys, ALSO German-speaking) speak English with a German accent. Possibly justified on another level - German as spoken in Germany sounds quite distinct from Austrian German (especially to an Austrian), so representing that difference this way makes it an AccentAdaptation.

* ''CatalinaCaper'' as observed by Tom Servo in ''MST3K'': "Oh, what are you, Creepy Girl? Are you French, Italian, or one of those swarthy Gypsy types, heh heh? Your accent certainly implies a Romance language but I just can't be sure! But we can definitely rule out a Germanic language..."

* Especially perplexing in ''TheKarateKid Part II'': Most of the film is set in Okinawa. There are quite a few scenes where Daniel is nowhere around, and every character on-screen is Okinawan. However, they ''persist'' in speaking in broken, heavily accented English rather than subtitled Japanese, the most notorious example being Miyagi-sensei and Sato. The few times anyone DOES speak Japanese, it's either translated for Daniel's benefit by someone else (the elder Miyagi-sensei's words upon waking to see his son sitting beside him), or not translated at all (Chozen's rant as he runs away during the storm).

* Parodied in ''DuckSoup''. Chicolini (Chico) has disguised himself as Firefly (Groucho), and when Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont) asks why he's talking like that, he replies, "Well, I think maybe sometime I go to Italy, and I'm practicing the language." Impressed, Mrs. Teasdale gushes, "Your dialect is perfect."
* In ''{{Congo}}'', TimCurry speaks the entire time in VampireVords.

* Played straight by TomCruise in {{Valkyrie}}, with a German accent, but then averted by the rest of the cast, who speak plain English. All the characters in the movie are German, but Cruise is the only American actor, so it almost makes sense, sort of...

* Played with in ''TheWarriors'', which greatly expands on the plot of the 1979 cult-classic film. You visit various neighborhoods around New York City, including two "ethnic" ones: East Harlem and Chinatown, which are, respectively, the home turfs of the Hurricanes and the Savage Huns. The Hurricanes are bilingual in Puerto Rican Spanish and American English, while the Huns likewise know both Cantonese and American English. Members of both gangs keep switching from one language to another, even when talking amongst themselves!

* Sorta... Australian news programs, when dubbing a news report, will usually use a translator with an appropriate accent.
** TheBBC does as well.

* Whenever creator/artist SergioAragones addresses readers in [[GrooTheWanderer his comics]], he "speaks" with a heavily-accented English. This has occasionally caused him trouble in real life. Once when he was invited to be a speaker for a panel at a convention, the con organizers politely provided him with a translator... despite Aragonés knowing perfect English and only using the goofy accent as a gag. He politely pretended not to speak English so as not to waste the translator's time.

* After the Formula One 2007 Grand Prix of Europe, race winner Fernando Alonso got into a somewhat heated argument with his future (from 2010 on) Ferrari teammate Felipe Massa. The two had more or less kissed and made up by the time the argument had subsided (they shared a personal friendship before and after the incident), but the most notable part of this altercation among the sport's viewers was that they were both talking to each other in Italian. Massa is from Brazil and Alonso is from Spain and obviously Italian is neither driver's primary language. Neither is Italian their ''secondary'' language, as both speak fluent English.

* After the Formula One 2007 Grand Prix of Europe, race winner Fernando Alonso got into a somewhat heated argument with his future (from 2010 on) Ferrari teammate Felipe Massa. The two had more or less kissed and made up by the time the argument had subsided (they shared a personal friendship before and after the incident), but the most notable part of this altercation among the sport's viewers was that they were both talking to each other in Italian. Massa is from Brazil and Alonso is from Spain and obviously Italian is neither driver's primary language. Neither is Italian their [i]secondary[/i] language, as both speak fluent English.

* After the Formula One 2007 Grand Prix of Europe, race winner Fernando Alonso got into a somewhat heated argument with his future (from 2010 on) Ferrari teammate Felipe Massa. The two had more or less kissed and made up by the time the argument had subsided (they shared a personal friendship before and after the incident), but the most notable part of this altercation among the sport's viewers was that they were both talking to each other in Italian. Massa is from Brazil and Alonso is from Spain and obviously Italian is neither driver's primary language.

* After the Formula One 2007 Grand Prix of Europe, race winner Fernando Alonso got into a somewhat heated argument with his future (from 2010 on) Ferrari teammate Felipe Massa. The two had more or less kissed and made up by the time the argument had subsided, and had kept a friendship but the most notable part of this altercation among the sport's viewers was that they were both talking to each other in Italian. Massa is from Brazil and Alonso is from Spain and obviously Italian is neither driver's primary language.

* Used all the time in ''MissionImpossible''. Possibly combined with TranslationConvention -- as the show would frequently feature signs and lettering in the background written in [[AsLongAsItSoundsForeign foreign-looking gibberish]][[hottip:*:e.g. "Zona Restrik" for "restricted zone", or "Fumin Prohib" for "No Smoking", etc.]], we can assume that the characters are ''actually'' speaking a different language rendered as accented English in the show.

* This is especially glaring in ''TheSoundOfMusic'' where the Austrians (good guys, but definitely German-speaking) speak normal English and the Germans (bad guys, ALSO German-speaking) speak English with a German accent.
** ...except that German German sounds quite distinct from Austrian German, so this is actually a pretty useful TranslationConvention--everyone speaks roughly the same language, but the Germans sound quite foreign.

** Dwarves - Funny story here: by WordOfGod, just as the Rohirrim are Middle-Earth's counterpart to the Anglo-Saxons, Dwarves are the counterpart to the Jews. That is, just like Jews, Dwarves in Middle-Earth are dispossessed of their homeland, and while speaking the language of the land, have their own private language which is nothing like it: Tolkien constructed Dwarvish (or Khuzdul) according to the rules of Semitic, including [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root triconsonantal roots]]. Their origin story (in ''The Silmarillion'') even echoes the sacrifice of Isaac. So logically, you'd think they should have Yiddish accents or something. However, in the movies, they decided to give Gimli a Scottish Lowlands accent, because it has "an old-sounding feel to it". (This takes after pretty much every fantasy dwarf since Tolkien. Heaven knows where they got it.)
*** They may have intended Gimli to have a Scottish Lowlands accent but he actually sounded Welsh instead. This isn't surprising since his actor is Welsh.

** There's also a character from ''Russian'' East Stereotypia, who randomly uses [[InSovietRussiaTropeMocksYou Russian reversals]].

* ''Film/TheLordOfTheRings'' - Utterly subverted. Background: Creator/JRRTolkien's Middle-earth has lots of languages spoken by different peoples and nations; in the Third Age, Westron (the "Common Speech") spread as a ''lingua franca'' for trade and politics (and also as mothertongue for some, e.g. the hobbits). In the novels, Westron names and speech are always rendered as English, while other languages may stay original or be rendered English too depending on the situation.) When the live-action films were made, a great deal of time and thought was put into what accents each character should use, because it reflected their background. They * do* speak their own languages from time to time, not just "we're representing someone speaking in Russian by having him speak in English with a heavy fake Russian accent". Because the Hobbits only speak Westron and they are the viewpoint characters, most of the dialogue is in English. The accents they figured out are:
** Gondorians - speak with a Received Pronunciation accent, proper London English, because Westron is a descendant of the language of their Numenorean ancestors (Adunaic, no longer in use), and thus Gondorian is the "correct" version.

** Dwarves - Funny story here: by WordOfGod, just as the Rohirrim are Middle-earth's counterpart to the Anglo-Saxons, Dwarves are the counterpart to the Jews. That is, just like Jews, Dwarves in Middle-earth are dispossessed of their homeland, and while speaking the language of the land, have their own private language which is nothing like it: Tolkien constructed Dwarvish (or Khuzdul) according to the rules of Semitic, including [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root triconsonantal roots]]. Their origin story (in ''The Silmarillion'') even echoes the sacrifice of Isaac. So logically, you'd think they should have Yiddish accents or something. However, in the movies, they decided to give Gimli a Scottish Lowlands accent, because it has "an old-sounding feel to it". (This takes after pretty much every fantasy dwarf since Tolkien. Heaven knows where they got it.)

** Rohirrim - Horse barbarians from the North that settled next to Gondor and allied with it, they speak with a Rhotic accent (some think this is an "American" accent, but other English-speaking regions like Cornwall also sound like this). The actual language of the Rohirrim is always represented through Old English in the texts (to convey a lingual familiarity to the hobbits/readers), so their Rhotic accent is a hint that Common Speech really isn't the mother-tongue of Theoden (who is actually mentioned as having a very odd accent in the books, since he grew up speaking Elvish in Gondor, due to his father's political exile, and only learned Rohirric when he returned), Eomer, and Eowyn.