Essay 2

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Essay #3

This analysis will be done on the movie The Butler. The Butler is a movie that came out last year. It follows the life of a black Butler named Cecil Gains who worked at the White house from the Eisenhower administration all the way to the Regan administration. In this analysis I intend to describe the verbal and nonverbal cultural patterns in the film and analyze their significance. As well as answer questions like: What social and cultural identities do the characters in the film acquire either voluntarily or involuntarily? Do any characters struggle with his or her identity? How so? Are any stereotypes evident in the film? Explain. Is prejudice evident in the film?
Verbal
First I will discuss The Verbal cultural patterns I saw in this movie. In this movie there was a clear difference in the dialects and accents between southerners. “Dialects are distinguished by differences in vocabulary grammar and even punctuation.”(227) “Accents are simply variations in pronunciations that occur when people speak the same language” (227). The first examples of those two are the difference in speech between President Johnson and President Kennedy. Kennedy the youngest president has a very distinct Boston accent, while Johnson has a very strong southern accent. (http://dialectblog.com) “This accent features Fronted pronunciation of words like father and palm, so these are pronounced faðə and pa:m.” Johnson’s southern accent is to where “words ending in -in, -en, -im and -em are pronounced with the same vowel” (http://dialectblog.com) . We also see a difference in Cecile’s accent and his son Louise’s accent. Cecil has a southern accent while Louise has a much more northern accent. This difference can be attributed to Cecil growing up...

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...king about all the sacrifices his son made for racial and ethnic equality began to question his place as butler and how he had always felt about race relations. Yes stereotypes and prejudice are present in this movie. Stereotypes are learned early in life and usually stick with you (172). Prejudice is an irrational generalization of a group of people. (173

Work cited:
"American Accents." Dialect Blog. Worldress, 2011. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
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Samovar, Larry A., Richard E. Porter, and Edwin R. McDaniel. Communication between Cultures. 7E ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub., 1991. 152+. Print.

Work cited:
"American Accents." Dialect Blog. Worldress, 2011. Web. 25 Mar. 2014.
WebsiteLinkTagsEditDelete
Samovar, Larry A., Richard E. Porter, and Edwin R. McDaniel. Communication between Cultures. 7E ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub., 1991. 152+. Print.

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