What makes scripted media linguistically good?


There are so many streaming platforms these days that it is hard to keep track. Everyone and their grandmother is making scripted media, and although progress has been made towards more consistently inclusive and representative media, there is one area that still needs great improvement : accents and dialect.

TV and movies get accents completely wrong. So much focus is placed on the words themselves, particularly the production of words in a specific order designed to move the plot along. But actual oral communication is much more complex, and involves a great deal of verbal and non-verbal input from the listeners. Spoken communication is a constantly evolving cha-cha among all parties involved.

Natural language is neither finite nor linear. When a person is speaking, they are constructing and developing their words and ideas as they go along. The person (or people) listening to the speech are comprehending as the speech develops. They are also participating in the conversation, both in the form of passive interjections and as a conversational partner. So there is a lot of mental processing going on during oral communication. Nobody waits until another speaker is done to start comprehending. And nobody is paying attention 100% of the time.

Natural speech is far from precise and accurate. It contains many different types of what are called “disfluencies”: disruptions in the steady flow of speech. This is because human speakers are making it up as they go most of the time. They regularly get pieces ‘wrong’, like grammar, word choice, meaning or sentiment, on both production and comprehension sides.

Anyone who has ever had to prepare for a presentation knows this to be true. Speaking perfectly, using the exact words intended for a prolonged period of time is very difficult. And that is when only one person is speaking. Normal, daily speech is full of blips, gaffs, missteps and awkward pauses, all of which are completely natural and very ordinary. 

But scripted media eliminates these truths about spoken language, and presents polished, streamlined, highly grammatical speech as being normal.

Characters utilize language that is too perfect, and linguistically and dialectally unnatural. This is because of how scripts are produced. The scripts are constructed by a team of writers who use words to convey a plot along. Then these words are spoken by actors pretending to be characters who have varying degrees of backstory. But this is not how accents and dialects occur in the real world.

For example, every speaker on the planet is multidialectal, to different degrees. In scripted media there are generally only dialects of geography. But the dialect continuum is much broader than this. There are dialects of age, gender, education, ethnic group, social class, and sexuality to name a few. Every speaker’s linguistic repertoire has many influences, and many dialects are mutually intelligible. Multilingual speakers codeswitch between their varieties regularly and often.


Dialect does not mean “a non standard variety of language


This assembly line of script production ofen results in completely unnatural language, with stereotypical dialects and phony accents that are spoken by precisely zero people in the entire world.

To be worthy of watching, scripted media must pass a test in two categories: dialectal diversity and conversational realness.

Dialectal Diversity

  • A variety of dialects
  • Dialects of age, education and gender, not just geography
  • Real dialects, not just phonetic mimicry
  • People understanding and communicating with different dialects
  • Characters code switching between dialects in different situations
  • Multilingual speakers not just for setting the location
  • Dialects spoken by all, not just bumpkins, criminals or the lower class

Conversational Realness

  • Misunderstandings
    • not knowing what words/phrases mean
    • Not understanding the sentiment being expressed
    • responses that indicate partial understanding/guessing
  • Interruptions
  • False starts
  • Speakers making mistakes
  • People not paying attention

Some media already contains some of the aforementioned elements. But to pass this test, and be truly worthy of watching, they must be deployed naturally and not solely for comic effect. There are longstanding comedy tropes centred around conversational realness, such as narrative mishaps occuring because characters were not paying attention, or foreign characters hilariously misunderstanding words. But these are cheap gags. For true conversational realness the elements must be included in ordinary, non-critical plot point conversations. They can still be funny, but they should exist as more than just the core of jokes.

Why is this important? 

Media representation directly affects how people view themselves and influences how they live their lives and understand the world around them. What is shown on screens affects how people see others, and spoken language is no exception. Over years of viewing, people repeatedly consume false information about how natural language is spoken, which is reinforced through repetition across different platforms and types of scripted media. These misconceptions of language become ingrained in the mind and contribute to damaging and exclusionary stereotypes.

A few examples: 

  • only foreigners don’t know what words mean
  • only funny mistakes happen
  • accents show the nature of a character
  • most people speak the normative variety
  • only people on the outskirts speak other dialects
  • multilingual speakers don’t mix their languages

Linguistic representation creates visible role models for all speakers, not just the ones who present very fluently or speak the prestige dialects.


Millions of eyes watch any given tv show, and millions of ears hear the language used. Those brains internalize the way that language is portrayed, which perpetuates and reinforces sociolinguistic stereotypes.

Spoken language is multifaceted and goes by very quickly in conversation. This makes linguistic sterotypes subtle and easily ingrained, particulary when routinely enforced over decades.

Media companies love a formula. Safe, routine approaches keep bringing in the viewers and the bucks. It is easy, for example, to give evil villains vaguely Russian accents, because it is reliable, recognizable, and it sells. It is quicker to tell a story with perfect, streamlined, fully grammatical sentences and no misunderstandings.

But the simple truth is that they have to do better. For quality storytelling and for linguistic representation, media needs to be dialectally diverse and conversationally real.


Scripted media has a duty to combat pervasive negative misconceptions about language, because they have been creating them for decades.


Everyone deserves an authentic portrayal. The neurodiverse, the multilingual, the middle class, the chatty, the overeducated, the nervous, the unstressed, the racialized, the well-off, the mentally ill, the shy – to name just a few influences on the ways we speak. 

Scripted Media does not need to be 100% authentic because it is an art form. Artists often take liberties with reality in order to convey a story or a message through performance. This is often how we get great new words and beautiful poetry. However, those liberties must not be at the expense of real speakers and natural speech. The language used in scripted media and the system behind how this language is chosen, created, performed and perpetuated simply needs to be improved.

@mathewssonya

#stitch with @catieosaurus If a movie or a tv show doesnt have enough miscommunications and conversational blips in it, it isnt worth watching. And not just miscommunications that are the centres of jokes. Ordinary miscommunications and language blips. #movielanguage #tvshows #movies #lingtok #linguisthere #representationinthemediamatters #representationinmedia #representationmatters

♬ Awkward Silence – The Elevator Music Jazz Trio