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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1241

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Falling in love again and again: Marlene Dietrich and the iconization of non-native English

Authors: Bell, Allan; Andy, Gibson
Submitted by: Bell, Allan Graham (Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand)

Staged performance offers sociolinguistics rich sets of data as performers stylize their language and push the limits of linguistic creativity. There is a class of performers who present in English although this is not their native language. The most stellar was Marlene Dietrich, whose career spanned 50 years across the mid 20^th century.  Dietrich was ‘discovered’ in Berlin by the pioneering Austrian-American film director Josef von Sternberg. His 1930 Berlin-made ‘talkie’, The Blue Angel/Der Blaue Engel (shot simultaneously in English and German) made her a star, especially through the song which became her signature tune, Falling in love again/Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss. Dietrich became an icon, her image widely established and circulated as an enduring international cult figure. She is buried in Berlin, where her archive is the centerpiece of the Museum fuer Film und Fernsehen.

Dietrich’s performances can be theorized as Referee Design (Bell 1984, 2001) by which speakers target linguistic codes other than their own. Analysis of Dietrich’s pronunciation in the 1930 original of ‘Falling in love again’ shows her English as markedly non-native. Her subsequent Hollywood films enregistered (in the sense of Agha 2003) her non-native accent and baritone quality as the first and lasting voice of the femme fatale. For three decades from the 1940s she toured a live show renowned for her stunning costumes. Comparison of a 1964 stage performance of ‘Falling in love again’ reveals her English as much more native but still retaining a hearably different accent, which is now valorized as her distinctive voice. Dietrich’s decades of repeated performances established her iconicity, and her appearance and vocal style - both its timbre and pronunciation - were widely circulated, referenced, imitated, and occasionally parodied. Living the femme fatale persona in her own life, and cultivating her image with extreme reflexivity, Marlene Dietrich achieved the ultimate ingroup identification. In language and appearance, she became her own referee.

References

Agha, Asif, 2003. ‘The social life of cultural value.’ Language & Communication 23: 231-73.

Bell, Allan, 1984. Style as Audience Design. Language in Society 13:: 145-204.

Bell, Allan, 2001. ‘Back in style:  Re-working Audience Design.’  In Penelope Eckert & John R Rickford (eds), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation. New York: Cambridge University Press.  139-69.