Gaffer Tape said:
twooffour, your argument against dialects makes no sense to me. See, the thing is, EVERYBODY has a dialect of some sort. Even if you stuck everyone with the same "American" sound... guess what, that's still a dialect! The only people who refer to "American" as "no accent" are Americans! Everybody has to has to have some sort of speaking pattern. It's inevitable. And if you can accept that everyone in space can sound like an American, why can't you accept that they can sound like any other Earthly nationality? Why is it that space farers sounding like Americans is totally realistic, but space farers sounding Asian completely blows the suspension of disbelief? Either you can accept all of it, or you can't accept any of it, but it doesn't make any sense to criticize one and not the other because it's doing exactly the same thing either way: giving an Earth dialect to non-Earth people.
Then you probably haven't paid attention.
This has nothing to do with English being somehow more realistic than other languages. It's merely about USING THE AUDIENCE'S NATIVE LANGUAGE in order to facilitate a direct connection.
If the movie's in French, it'll obviously be in French - just so that people can understand everything that's going on without having to read subtitles, or stuff like that.
The native language mostly appears neutral to its native speaker, i.e. merely as "language". However, as soon as you start putting actual, foreign languages into it, they'll be immediately recognized as "ah, that one belongs to that ethnicity or nation", and suspension of disbelief is suddenly much more strained.
Worse, by having aliens identifiable as "Asian" or "Russian" or whatever, you immediately draw the viewer's attention to the fact that, well, our guys aren't just talking to each other, but they talk ENGLISH, and hence must be British or Americans. What had previously been an innocent adventure film with everyone talking in an understandable language, suddenly becomes some sort of cultural/political allegory.
I'd say this applies even more to foreign languages, and ACCENTS, than dialects. Dialects can still be easily perceived as "characterization" - southern drone for the down-to-earth hillbilly type, aristocratic BE for the fine cultured villain, King James' Olde Butcherede for the "ancient wizards from the ancient times, of wizardry".
But careful - the two "urban" robots in Transformers were just merely "dialecting" as well, and look where that got 'em.
However, as soon as you've got a sleazy French guy, he'll be a FRENCH, and directly perceived as such. The viewer will immediately start wondering whether this is some kind of allegory, satire, or maybe just the author's stereotypes played straight, and the glass house is immediately shattered.
So if you've ever wondered why everybody's complaining about the Neimoidians, but hardly anyone gets offended by Vader saying "thy bidding", the above might be the reason.