MovieChat Forums > Sophie's Choice (1983) Discussion > What do Polish people here think of Mery...

What do Polish people here think of Meryl's accent?

posted 16 years ago by rorystevens
24 replies | jump to latest

So, I'm curious... to me, as an American, Meryl was totally convincing as a Polish person.

However... I understand that with most accents that are learned by actors, they're almost never going to sound authentic to the native speakers of those accents.

I'm actually taking dialect lessons right now to learn a Polish accent, and I'm really stressed out about getting it to sound authentic. Obviously, I'd love to do it as well as Meryl. But my dialect coach tells me that it's going to be a "Hollywood Polish accent," something that Americans can understand, and it's not necessarily going to sound good to native Polish people. He told me a story about how one time, years ago, he worked on a film where the actors had to speak with Scottish accents. The film was being filmed in Scotland, and the local Scots were saying, "That is NOT HOW WE TALK!" He told the producer about this, and the producer told him, "Originally, I was using REAL Scottish actors, but the thing was... nobody could understand what the hell they were saying!"

So... an accent can't be TOO PERFECT or else the audience won't be able to understand what the actor is saying.

So, for any Polish people reading this board... what did you guys think of Meryl's accent? Did it sound authentic, or did it sound like a "Hollywood Polish accent?"

[–] NuYorkie 16 years ago

You got a very good point here. Meryl didn't sound authentic but she did a good job imitating a nondescript Slavic accent. It's a challenge to absorb the phonetic habits of a non-native English speaker and be aware of them all the time while talking, for example, a tendency to pronounce voiced consonants as voiceless('k' not 'g' etc.). So "big" can sound like " beak " when spoken by people with a thick Polish or Russian accent.

[–] ytopp201 16 years ago

i think meryl's polish accent was excellent in this film. my mother has a heavy, genuine polish accent and i notice that what you call "hollywood polish" and "hollywood russian" often sound very similar. they really dont in real life, just like to a pole or russian, polish & russian do not sound similar. meryl's was a "softer slavic" accent, much like polish. effortless. she really is amazing.

[–] ewan_rox_my_sox 16 years ago

Every summer I go to Krakow (it's one of my my favourite places on earth) and I think Meryl's accent was in no way different to the english speaking poles I know. I can understand how some people might think it's not strong enough but Sophie might have eased her accent in order to be coherent whilst living in America.

[–] sagaylo 16 years ago

Had never caught this film in its entirety, but was very impressed by Streep's linguistic effectiveness in the portrayal. I didn't pay that much attention to how authentic her accent sounded, but the mere fact that she obviously studied the lines she had to speak in Polish and delivered them very convincingly, albeit perhaps from phonetic memorization, was enough to earn my respect, as one who has struggled in foreign language classes.

[–] BitterBlue911 15 years ago

I'm German and all I can say is that I was absolutely blown away by the way she spoke GERMAN with a polish accent. Sounded very authentic to me, just like any woman I could meet on the street who came originally from Poland. To top it all off (as it was also pointed out in the movie) Sophie spoke German very well, with only a slight accent. Meryl delivered it so well, if I was told she's fluent in German I would not in the least be surprised. Hearing her talk in "my" language somehow made me like her even more than I already did...

[–] MovieWatcher82 15 years ago

I don't think she has a Polish accent in her German - a few of my colleagues at work are from Poland and every one of them speaks fluent German with more or less heavy accent. But no one of their accents sounds like hers does. To me, Ms Streep's German in this movie sounds more like the language the people from the South German / Austrian area spoke in the thirties. I remember some very old people here talking this kind of accent, but it's nearly gone...

By the way, my original language is German with heavy Bavarian accent :-)

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Listening is everything. And it's where you learn everything.

Meryl Streep

[–] monikalacko1 14 years ago

well i'm polish and i disagree. she speaks german very well but she has a slight polish accent. i also speak german (with an austrian - vienna accent) so i do know what i'm talking about :) her performance is just mind blowing.

and her polish - isnt perfect to be honest... she does sound like a foreigner but not like an american. she sound like a slavic woman (for example slovakian) speaking polish - which is a compliment coz slovakian and polish pronanciations are almost identical. she has problems with "sia" "cia" end other sound witch are almost imposible for foreigners to pronance :)

[–] rorge_retson 12 years ago

The trivia section highlights the fact that Meryl actually learned Polish and German for the film, in order to lend authenticity to the role. Given this, it would make sense that her German was spoken with a Polish accent. I would bet that this is what she was shooting for. Very, very impressive - I have new respect for her.

[–] EibhlinnSavage 14 years ago

I am not Polish, but I know many Polish people who speak English and Meryl sounds very similar to me.
Her accent may not be a perfect Polish accent, but it's definitely not a fake sounding, stereotypical one which is so often used in Hollywood. Tom Cruise's Irish accent in Far and Away, most notably is so stereotypical it's insulting. And I yet have to hear a convincing French accent not performed by a French actor. They don't even make the effort to make them sound believable, they're just stereotyped heavy French accent, even when they speak French (latest example in 2012 with French speakers speaking some weird sounding French).

Eibhlinn Savage

[–] levpoldkahnt 14 years ago

I myself am not Polish as well, but I am German and I happen to have a few polish friends.
Their parents immigrated to Germany when they were already adult, so they speak German with a very heavy polish accent.
And this is where Meryl was remarkable!
I mean, she is an American who speaks German with a polish accent.
And she does it perfectly!
I was blown away by her performance in that movie!!

FYC:Das weiße Band, Park, Rahim, Swinton, Waltz, 'Nique

[–] actusreus13 14 years ago

I am a native speaker of the Polish language and just watched the movie. In the scene where she lies in bed with Nathan and they are reading poetry in Polish and then translate into English, her Polish sounds like gibberish; absolutely incomprehensible. However, in the flashback scenes from the concentration camp she does a very good job. She still has a clear accent but speaks very fluently and is easily understandable. As one of the posters said, she has problems with soft endings such as "cia" and "sia," which are very difficult for non-native speakers to pronounce. But overall, I was rather impressed, especially in long and complex passages where to even sound fluent would be a huge challenge without studying for a long time.

[–] katspajamas22 14 years ago

I'm just going to copy paste what I wrote in another thread a few moments ago:

I thought she was amazing. My future in-laws are from Poland, and let me tell you, she NAILED IT! Perfection. I do know that her accent while speaking Polish wasn't exactly perfect. It didn't sound the same to me and this was confirmed by my mother-in-law. But her accent speaking English was superb. In fact, her Sophie reminded me VERY much of my future mother-in-law, from her inflections, to the way she spoke, to the kinds of mistakes she made while speaking in English (there were some things that could have come straight out of her mouth, like her mistake when talking about the officer ripping the ham from under her skirt), even to her expression and mannerisms while searching for the correct English word. I could go on and on about her performance. It was out of this world.

All Americans deserve equal rights....appletini.

[–] zaba-mon 14 years ago

I am from Poland and I have classes from English phonetics, and I must say that Meryl in her performance does all the mistakes in pronunciation that our teacher pointed put as typical Polish mistakes. There are scenes when she pronounced some words too correctly for a typical Pole, but overall she was surprisingly good at imitating a Polish speaker of English. I was even more surprised with the scenes when she spoke Polish, of course she made some mistakes, but I must admit that Polish has a very difficult pronunciation, and she did it very well. Sometimes she sounded more like a Russian speaking Polish, but nevertheless I was very impressed with how good she was at it. The only thing I didn't like was the way she pronounced the names of her Polish friends: Wanda and Józef. The first letter of Wanda is said like the first letter of for example "vet", and not "wet", and her ‘Józef’ sounded more like ‘Joseph’, but these are very minor mistakes, probably not very noticeable even for Polish speakers.

[–] theLunchMovie 13 years ago

I'm not Polish, nor would I claim to have lived in a predominately Polish neighborhood or have lots of Polish friends, so my opinion may not carry the weight the OP is seeking. But I think it should be noted that Meryl Streep's performances here in particular, and in the early 80's in general, represent a game changing step in a new direction from which there was no return. Watching her in this era is like watching some of the best actors of the 30's and 40's, and then seeing how Marlon Brando turned the acting world on it's ear in the early 50's.

Maybe Streep's accent here is perfect, maybe it's lacking. We could ask the same about her rural accent in SILKWOOD. Personally, I was convinced by both, and I liked both performances and both films. The end result is that after these performances, suddenly every actor was required to make at least an attempt at the accent of the nationality/region they were playing. Allow me to offer an example of the way it was before Streep:

I used to watch movies during lunch hour at my job -- we'd take 2-3 days to watch a movie. We watched THE TRAIN with Burt Lancaster playing a fighter in the French Resistance during WW2. My coworkers, most of whom were born in the late 70's/early 80's didn't even realize until the 2nd day that Lancaster was supposed to be French! In 1964 when an actor has a voice like Lancaster's, why bother faking an accent, since he has this sort of built in authority. But I guess without Burt attempting an accent, my coworkers figured he'd wear a beret and carry a baguette to denote his Frenchness! And after they figured out that the American sounding guy was French, the rest of the movie was ruined for them, which is too bad for them 'cause it's a helluva movie!

This is the legacy of Meryl Streep. Once upon a time actors focused solely on the emotional/mental core of their character. She raised the bar on what was required to be believable. She raised the bar so far that, while many critics were fine with her accent in OUT OF AFRICA, I recall some taking Redford to task for not going full-on Monty Python with his British accent in the same film. Suddenly not only were some American actors able to play characters of other nationalities, but as we have seen in recent years, British actors have gotten better than some Americans at nailing American regional accents! Maybe Meryl Streep nails every accent she attempts, or maybe she just nails the expectation of American audiences; either way, there is no turning back from what she began in SOPHIE'S CHOICE.

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[–] Kwiat_W 13 years ago

I'm Pole. While in real life I wouldn't thought that Meryl is Polish, I must say that she has the best fake polish accent I have ever heard and I would never describe it as "Hollywood". She did a very good job here. However when she actually tries to speak polish she sounds ridiculous. She can't even pronounce her own name. Still, I applaud her for the effort.

[–] Lyndhen 13 years ago

I'm very impressed with her Polish accent, which I find almost impossible to do- she has the tongue position right, the closed mouth and the staccato pronunciation off pat.