5d ago

What's your favorite movie that is in a language which you do not speak?

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Pan’s Labyrinth for me
- I love it because it's one of the few dark fantasy movies natively made in Spanish. The dead fascists are a bonus.
  One of my favorite details that is easy to miss if you aren't a native speaker is that Pan speaks in medieval Spanish. It honestly almost sounds like French
  
  I can't find anything to really support the note about the faun speaking an early version of Spanish; do you have a link I could read/watch?
  I've found people noting that Doug Jones is dubbed by the Spanish voice actor into Castilian (rather than any Central or South American dialect) and that his language is formal and somewhat archaic.
  
  Quick correction, Castilian and Spanish are he same thing. It's not an old dialect or an old language. Spain has lots of languages, and the renaming of Castilian to Spanish was a "recent" (last 100 years) attempt from a dictator to delegitimize all of the other languages (also prohibiting them from being taught in schools or being used officially).
  Also I strongly dislike the use of dialects here, although there are many different accents the language remains the same. If we start to call Mexican or Argentinians Spanish into dialects we might as well call Texan or Californian English as dialects as well, since they're equally different.
  Also, also, Mexico (the largest Spanish speaking country by population is in North America), not sure why you only mentioned South and Central.
  That being said, yes, the Faun speaks very formally. It's not necessarily archaic, but the sort of language one might expect in a court room. But yeah, that used to be the colloquial Spanish a while back.
  
  Thanks. I really wrote "Castilian" to mean that sources on the web suggest his dialogue is at least somewhat modern Spanish Spanish (so to speak) -- but I'm ignorant of the differences between Spanish spoken in the Americas, including North America as you rightly point out, and the Iberian peninsula. I didn't mean to suggest that Castilian was archaic.
  
  Looked into it a bit more. It seems it's not exactly medieval Spanish but just old and really formal Spanish, akin to Shakespearean. Nevertheless, not something you'd hear nowadays. Everyone else just speaks with a Spaniard accent, there's no Latin American dialects in the movie.
  I remember looking up the script a little while ago. Here's an excerpt
  
  You will see a luxurious banquet. Don't eat or drink any of it while you're there
  (Fwiw, I'm from Latin America so Spaniard accents all just sound weirdly posh to me, like that video of a British kid complaining about the ice cream man)
  
  Thank you, that's interesting to know!

241 comments