Teaching children to discriminate?

Rosina Lippi-Green’s (1997, 2012) classic quantitative study of linguistic representation in animated Disney films of the 20th century found these films to be discriminatory. Her main and most publicized finding was that characters who spoke varieties of American English tended to be morally good, while characters with a foreign accent were often evil and untrustworthy. Following a methodological discussion of Lippi-Green’s approach as it relates to our own, we investigate the degree to which her results also describe 273 characters from Disney’s successful “Revival Era,” starting with The Princess and the Frog (2009) and ending with Encanto (2021). We find, among other significant developments, that the foreign-accented characters in these more recent films are distinctively good. Also examined are other relationships between characters’ language, moral standing, gender, and age. Notably, female and younger characters tend to speak Standard American English, and they tend to be more moral than male and older characters. We end by discussing some possible causes of the main developments.