On International Mother Language Day

In honour of International Mother Language Day today, I thought I would do my first Substack video! It only took 399 tries but here it is, talking about what International Mother Language Day is and why it is so important. I wish we did not need a day to celebrate and raise awareness around linguistic and cultural diversity and to remind the world that every language is important, but here we are.

Right before I filmed this video, I finished a call with a writer who interviewed me for her Substack. It was a wonderful conversation and I will share it soon, but one of her question got me thinking a lot about something I read a couple of weeks ago and have been meaning to discuss here. I talk about it in the second video below, but a little preview: It is about the controversy around the movie The Brutalist and how its director and editor used AI to enhance the Hungarian accents of actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. Hollywood got angry not because of the accent modification, but because apparently the director did not disclose the information, and since it is up for a few Oscars, it became a big thing.

I was of course only interested in the part about altering the actors’ accents with AI. It is not the first time this has been done in the movie business, and AI is often used to alter voices, for example to sound younger in a movie that covers a long period of time with the same actors. The editor of The Brutalist, Dávid Jancsó, used Respeecher, a Ukrainian software company to help Jones and Brody sound “convincingly Hungarian”.

Here is my little rant about it, but I want to clarify a few things after the video as I don’t think I got my entire point across and I have also uncovered a few more things about all of this recently. Some of the things I write more about after the video:

What is “accent perfection” and more importantly, who decides?

What does it even mean to “speak superb English in a native accent”

Do we inherit accents from our parents?