Il doppiaggio dei cartoni animati Disney: una storia di atteggiamenti linguistici

In the context of the long and prestigious history of Italian dubbing, this chapter examines the proposed solutions to the problem of how to render in Italian the variety of English accents encountered in cartoons. Using the Disney production as a case study, the chapter will document how the Italian rendering of diatopic or diastratic accents is a useful observation point onto the history of the Italian language and language attitudes in Italy throughout the 20th century. The very first solutions (The Aristocats, Lady and the Tramp) have gone down in history for the brilliant use of Italian regional accents, which appealed to widespread stereotypes. In the 1980s, dubbing abandoned the use of marked Italian varieties, adopting a neutral Italian and without particular characterisation, even if the presence, in the dubbed language, of typical modules of spoken Italian, however, grows to structures branded as ungrammatical. To render the range of varieties found in the English of Disney cartoons, the Italian voice actors resort to paralinguistic effects, with an impressive set of vowel effects, keeping as the basic language of the translation a variety that can be characterised as neostandard in its morphosyntax but so neutral that it does not correspond to any variety actually existing in the Italian linguistic repertoire.