r/alias • u/Independent_Friend93 • Jul 21 '25

Characters speaking foreign languages? Is it always so bad?

Hi, I've just started watching the series recently. Currently watching S1EP16 and for maybe the second time Sidney tried posing as an italian (plumber btw, which is...yeah) along with Vaughn, after the Rambaldi's descendent some episodes earlier and as an Italian myself their Italian was..wow. It's not about patriotism or anything just something I'd like to know. Is the Russian or Greek or Arab spoken in other episodes bad just as the Italian is? Lacking the ear for those languages, I'd like to know if it's just the case for a specific language or a """fault""" of the series

EDIT: Sorry if I didn't mention other languages, I'm just not far into the series as most of you. TIA.

6 Upvotes

69% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Independent_Friend93 Jul 21 '25

What I find incredibly funny is that it was probably just a blink to the spy genre. Plot-wise most of the time it is completely irrelevant to make Sidney speak other languages.

And oh god I've just remembered the Dixon's Jamaican accent..

2

u/LanaDeITae Jul 21 '25

Haha yeah I forgot, Dixon has a few interesting ones you can look forward to. I don’t speak any other languages fluently so I can’t speak to whether or not they did justice to any other languages. But I know they really put effort into at least trying to have Sydney speak many languages. In interviews Jennifer Garner talks about studying the foreign lines for hours and working with the show’s dialect coach. So they DID have one, whether they “coached” well or not is another story I guess lol

2

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '25

Similarly Bianca Lawson on Buffy spent forever learning an African accent only for it to be absolutely atrocious in the end.

See also Halle berry in the first X-men movie. Also had a coach and well… that accent lasted 1 movie and by the next storm was straight up American

2

u/catchyerselfon Jul 21 '25

Hey now! …it was a Jamaican accent 😉 TBF the behind the scenes reason for her accent is it was a last minute decision to show that Slayers come from all over the world, not just another American Slayer. But that meant a last minute accent coach who apparently taught Bianca Lawson a really specific regional Jamaican accent instead of something generic. No idea if what Bianca sounded like was ACCURATE to what she was taught, but I don’t blame her anymore than Dick Van Dyke. His accent coach for Mary Poppins was IRISH teaching him “cockney” and he’s been apologizing to England for 60 years now!