Re: Conlangs in fiction/movies

Chris Peters wrote:

> ... I also noticed some often-repeated word/sentence endings, which
> suggest inflection, but that's the best I could suss out.
>
> One thing that helped out a lot with the "nonsense syllables with an
> American accent" problem in that movie was that Jovovich is not a native
> English speaker.  She hails from some Eastern European country or another.
>
> **** EDIT ****
> IMDB says she's Ukrainian.  So I wonder if her speech pattern in the
> movie (in both English and Conlang) was essentially the same problem,
> only filtered through her natural Ukrainian accent?
Almost, though not quite right. Her family moved to the US when she was
five. Her mother's Ukrainian (from the east of the country, I assume),
and she was born there; her father's a Montenegrin Serb; and she can
speak English, French, Serbian and Russian quite fluently.

It's more likely that the fact she's a polyglot makes it much easier
for her to avoid the nonsense-spanglish that most US films and shows
end up using to represent imaginary languages.

K.

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