This is one of the most fascinating things I’ve seen all week. A short video showing how Voldemort’s laugh was dubbed in different languages:
Listening to the video confirmed that I’m a native speaker of Russian because that’s the laugh that sounded the most natural to me.
I’ve detested my native language since childhood, which has resulted in me choosing my profession and trying to escape into other languages.
Being a linguistically minded person who’s really into language but who feels animosity towards their own is quite an experience, let me tell you. I’m not saying it’s all bad because, hey, it makes me a living and it’s really cool to be multilingual. Most people have no idea what it’s like to be near-native in several languages. But I have no idea what it’s like to feel towards my own language like I feel towards Spanish or English.
I will have to ask my mom about this. She is a cradle-speaker in 3 languages and near-native in 1 more. Two of which she could have querencia about.
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Speak 3 languages — Trilingual. Speak 2 languages — Bilingual. Speak 1 language — American.
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“Voldemort’s laugh was dubbed in different languages”
What I noticed (admitting I have no idea of the whole context, knowledge of which might affect how I would perceive things).
Ukrainian: sounds almost sad, like he’s about to start crying
Japanese: sounds even sadder… he’s laughing but dead inside
Russian: sounds evil, already imagining horrible things he’s going to do
Vietnamese: gloating but less evil than Russian
The rest don’t make much impression….
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“a linguistically minded person who’s really into language but who feels animosity towards their own is quite an experience”
A whole lot of cognitive dissonance going on….
In my case, I like my first language just fine. But…. I no longer think of it as ‘English’ but as ‘American’. In many, many ways British and American seem more like mostly mutually intelligible separate languages (like Swedish and Norwegian or Czech and Slovak) than the same language.
So…
American (largely includes Canada… great! wonderful language!),
British (weird amalgam of a lot of things, some of which are okay, others which I’m not crazy about and some of which I can’t stand),
Irish (so close to getting it…)
Australian (I feel like I’m not in on the joke)
“International” English (fluent second language speakers who use it a lot with each other – the most banal boring language in the world and often sounds horribly rude)
Euro-English – as used in EU documents…. werid sci-fi thing that makes no sense….
As I recall (memory can play tricks…) my tolerance for non-NA English diminished as my Polish got better (another native speaker or two here told me similar things).
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To me, All of them sounded like standard evil villain laughs with the exception of the Japanese and the French ones. The Japanese one sounded like he was crying? Or perhaps ghostly. And the French one just sounded cheerful. Like a real laugh. It makes me think that the French voice actor wasn’t talented.
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