u/Easteregg42

Hey there from Germany,

i was recently an extra in a film production with US actors playing some Germans. And while waiting on set for things to happen i was thinking about something i witnessed before in Movie and TV but was experiencing now in the flesh (and had time thinking about):

Actors who are faking a language they are not actually speaking.

Don't get me wrong, i got no real problem with it and don't expect actors to actually learn the language of a role they are playing - it's nice if they can but if they don't that's fine. However, so far i've seen two approaches to that issue: Either fake the language phonetically or speak english with a faked accent.

For a native speaker, it sounds pretty weird to hear "your" language being faked but given that it's for an international and mostly english-speaking audience i understand that it's mostly a non-issue and only affects a very small portion of the audience. After all, i myself probably wouldn't hear any difference if this happens not with german but with french, spanish or italian for example.

But i was wondering: Does it make a difference for native english speaking people if the actors pretend to speak the actual language of their role or speaking english with an accent of that particular language?

Ist ja US-Amerikaner.