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Thirty-eight-year-old actor and voice artist Hank Azaria has worked in stand-up comedy, theater, television, and film since the early eighties. He did not become well known, however, until 1989, when he began providing voices for the Fox network's animated comedy series The Simpsons. As one of only three male voice artists in the regular cast, he gives life to approximately ten animated characters each week, including Moe the Bartender, Police Chief Wiggum, and Apu, the Kwik-E-Mart owner (Greenberg, pars. 8-9). His role as Apu, played with a thick Hindi accent, won him an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Voiceover Performance" in 1998 ("His Life," par. 7).
Having established himself as a talented voice performer capable of lending a foreign accent to English, Azaria subsequently has appeared in two different films playing the role of a Hispanic character. The first character is the Guatemalan housekeeper named Agador in the 1996 film The Birdcage. The second character is the Spaniard named Hector in the 2001 film America's Sweethearts. In both films, Azaria's English comes across unequivocally as non-native. Neither film's credits, however, indicate that a dialect coach was assigned to the actor. Thus, the speech of both characters reflects, for the most part, the creative efforts of Azaria, who as a Sephardic Jew grew up hearing and understanding the Judeo-Spanish spoken by his parents and grandparents (Greenberg, par. 4; Wolf, par. 9). Azaria, in fact, credits his grandmother's speech and personality as a source of inspiration for his portrayal of the Agador character (Smith).
In The Birdcage, the Guatemalan voice of Agador is well done and believable. Scharf, for example, claims that Azaria "steals every scene in which he appears" in the film (par. 4). Azaria was nominated for a 1997 Screen Actors Guild Award for best male supporting actor for his portrayal of Agador in this film. In America's Sweethearts, on the other hand, the Spanish voice of Hector is not believable but overexaggerated and partially inaccurate. Using as a basis of analysis the phonetic features that one might expect to find in the English of a Guatemalan or Spaniard, this article examines the features used by Azaria in the speech of Agador and Hector, respectively. Other linguistic aspects of these characters' English, such as their vocabulary...