Depicting World Englishes in Disney’s Animated Movies

As a result of the spread of English as a medium of communication globally, many varieties of the language emerge. The depiction of those varieties can be seen in some animated movies produced and released by Disney Studios. Animated movies are mostly watched by children and by watching these movies they actually expose themselves to different kinds of English varieties. Finding out how world Englishes are depicted in these children’s animated movies is necessary to be able to find out whether those movies introduced children to different varieties of English language or not. This descriptive study tries to find the relation between the use of certain English varieties in relation to the characters’ genders, roles, and casts’ ethnicities in four Disney’s animated movies (i.e., Ralph Breaks the Internet, Toy Story 4, The Lion King (2019), and Frozen II). The findings showed that there were a few introductions to different varieties of English language done by the characters in the movies. The current study also proposes some pedagogical implications for the use of these four animated movies to introduce varieties of English language to young learners and concludes with recommendations for further studies.