An Article by The Conversation. Read this and other similar articles at www.theconversation.com
The 2025 slate of Oscar nominees recognizes many writers, directors and actors whose scripts and performances don’t necessarily reflect their own cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley, both white, co-wrote “Sing Sing,” a story about rehabilitation through art in a maximum security prison where the characters are almost entirely people of color.
Meg LeFauve has now earned her second nomination for penning a script that gives voice the gamut of emotions surging through a young girl in “Inside Out 2.” She’s in her 50s.
The director of “Conclave,” Edward Berger, its writer, Peter Straughan, and its lead actor, Ralph Fiennes, are all self-proclaimed lapsed Catholics. Yet they brought to life a political thriller set in the Vatican.
“The Brutalist” was written entirely in English, but much of the film’s dialogue is in Hungarian, with two leads who are not native Hungarian speakers.
Most screenwriters endeavor to craft characters outside their own backgrounds and experiences. But concerns about authentic language representation and cultural accuracy persist, and accusations of cultural appropriation and lazy research are commonplace.
“Emilia Pérez,” for example, has been heavily criticized not only for unrealistic portrayals of gender transition but also for inauthentic depictions of Mexican culture and accents.
We surveyed over 50 current members of the Writers Guild of America, and they broadly told us that sensitivity to linguistic representation has increased since the 2010s.
Several commented that there’s been more commitment to hiring writers who represent the characters’ voices and backgrounds. There’s also more “freedom to include diverse characters and worlds… but a commensurate emphasis on authenticity and a higher bar for what that means,” as one writer explained.
“Authenticity” was consistently cited in our survey as a principal consideration when writing dialogue. Other concerns included scripts’ intelligibility, historical accuracy and believability.
In our study, we also reviewed screenwriting manuals published as far back as 1946.
Manuals didn’t begin to raise explicit ethical concerns, such as the use of inaccurate linguistic stereotypes in dialogue, until the 1980s. For example, many older films, such as “Gone with the Wind,” often used phonetic spelling in their scripts, with features such as g-dropping – “quittin’” for “quitting” – to mark only the speech of lower-class or racially marginalized characters, despite the fact that all people, regardless of background, have accents.
In fact, limiting oneself to standard U.S. English restricts diversity in the written dialogue itself. Some writers may want to use dialect or language to convey character authenticity on the page.
Our survey respondents described this as “flavor” – the strategic use of dialectal words or phrases to create distinct voices, with limited phonetics. Jesse Eisenberg, in his Oscar-nominated script “A Real Pain,” lightly blends American English with occasional Yiddish words to great effect: “… landed in Galveston for some fakakta reason,” or “crazy” reason.
AI chimes in
Attempts at authenticity can become muddied when AI gets involved.
When making “The Brutalist,” Corbet controversially used AI technology to refine the movie’s Hungarian dialogue.
Some questioned the film’s authenticity due to the use of AI, arguing that nothing can be authentic if it’s achieved artificially.
But the film’s creators, including editor and native Hungarian speaker Dávid Jancsó, defended this choice. They argued the technology actually enhanced the language’s authenticity, particularly since Hungarian’s system of vowels and consonants is especially hard for nonnative speakers to capture accurately.
Whether writers use phonetics or standard language, and whether producers use AI or dialect coaches, questions of ethics and linguistic authenticity will remain. It’s important to research language choices and dialogue, and to consult the diverse speakers portrayed in scripts.
These are among the many essential checks and balances that are becoming bigger parts of the filmmaking process.
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