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In this paper, I discuss the use of the English language in movie dialogues where, logically, other languages would have been used by the fictional characters. A shared characteristic of many Hollywood movies (as well as countless other fictional narratives, written or performed) is the notion of linguistic replacement. Even when the depicted story would realistically have taken place in a different linguistic setting, the language(s) are replaced by the base language of narration; in my case, English. Using a taxonomy of semiotic strategies proposed by Petr Mareš as a point of departure, I discuss examples of linguistic replacement from a corpus of twelve recent, commercially successful Hollywood movies with European and American settings. I argue that even though the different strategies (e.g. the use of L2 accents or the presence of the replaced language in filmed writing) fulfill more complex symbolic functions than that of compensatory realism, there has been a recent shift away from linguistic replacement altogether.

Der vorliegende Beitrag beschreibt einen innovativen Ansatz zur Förderung berufsbezogener Sprachkompetenzen von Fremdsprachenlehrpersonen in der Schweiz. Grundlage dafür sind die berufsspezifischen Sprachkompetenzprofile für die Primarstufe und die Sekundarstufe I, welche anhand einer sprachlichen Bedarfsanalyse erarbeitet wurden. Nach einer Situierung der Thematik in der aktuellen Forschungsliteratur sowie im Schweizer Bildungskontext werden Aufbau und Entstehung der Profile erläutert und die Resultate einer Befragung von Lehrpersonen zur deren Praxisrelevanz zusammengefasst. Anschliessend werden anhand von Beispielen mögliche didaktische Umsetzungs- und Implementierungsformen der Profile skizziert.

Hollywood movies have been aprime site for the representation of intercultural and multilingual encounters for decades. As such, they are not only of interest to everyday cinemagoers or home viewers, but have increasingly attracted the attention of scholars from various disciplines, including sociolinguistics. A main focus of much previous work, such as Shohat & Stam (1994), Lippi-Green (1997) and Berg (2002), has been on issues of misrepresentation and negative stereotyping of characters constructed as the 'Other', such as speakers of non-standard Englishes, or indeed languages other than English. This has raised the question of the extent to which the English-language cinematic mainstream embodies the fictional counterpart of real-life linguistic discrimination, or linguicism. In this article, I present and exemplify three different quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of mono-versus multilingualism in movie dialogues. These include an account of language choice patterns in a corpus of multilingual Hollywood movies, an analysis of metalinguistic content proffered by movie characters in the dialogues, and the reactions of movie viewers to these phenomena in an online message board. While the insights gained from the first two approaches do point towards patterns of linguicism, this is not generally the case for the audience reactions, which tend to be more favourable towards a rich and balanced depiction of multilingual phenomena in movie dialogues.

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