Ma come parlano questi?: Lingua e verosimiglianza nel cinese parlato al cinema (ma non solo)

In the last decades, a large amount of Western movies and other genres of visual fiction, from popular productions like TV series to authorial works like operas, refer to China and the Chinese through the insertion of dialogues in Chinese, so that in some cases a proper multilingual context is represented. On the other side, Chinese speaking cinema also deals with characters speaking in languages that are definitely not-Mandarin, from English to Japanese to Chinese dialects. The different approaches to problems that are closely related both to the audience’s cultural background and linguistic competence and to the authors’ yearning for verisimilitude and realism are examined through a detailed survey of emblematic cases.