Joseph Calise
October 26th, 2015
Dr. Hesson
Language in Society
Aladdin Essay 2 When talking about linguistics in the movie Aladdin, different dialects between characters correspond directly to stereotypes from a socioeconomic and racial lens. The sentence structures from both Aladdin and Jafar in this clip expose many properties of language including morphology, syntax, as well as the patterns of phonetics. Based on dialect and linguistics throughout the clip as well as the entire movie, it is evident that Aladdin is seen as the more trustworthy person when compared to Jafar. Aladdin, being from the Middle East would be expected to have some kind of an Arabic accent. When you hear his voice, based on his tonality you can tell right away that he is speaking Standard American English. That right there is a big contradiction to his ethnicity, as Aladdin is taking place in the Middle East during ancient times, way before Standard American English was even being discussed. That being said, Disney evidently feels the need to make its more trustworthy characters speak Standard American English. In the book Language Matters, “ Some people produce one pattern because they are following a set of rules; other people produce a different pattern because they are following a different set of rules,” (Napoli and Lee
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Rather than saying dying in here, Iago says, “I’m dyin here” which is clearly a simplification of voiced consonant clusters. This is very similar to Caribbean English Creoles, where we would see a phrase such as “I’m going to do it” change to “I’ma do it.” Also by Iago telling Jafar to hurry up, it shows that he too is in on the villainous duty, essentially landing his role as a villain in the clip as