‘My Fair Lady’: A linguist on how the movie holds up 60 years later
Accent prejudice, misogyny, Professor Higgins’s grammatical error and a fairly accurate depiction of what linguists do.
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On October 21, 1964, the iconic and much-celebrated film My Fair Lady premiered in Hollywood. Sixty years later, the film remains an enjoyable rollick full of catchy songs, but is not a wholly accurate depiction of what linguists do – certainly not nowadays at least.
Linguists are far from the academics who are most frequently depicted in films. It’s normally the white-coat, work-in-a-lab, scientist-of-some-nondescript-sort professors who get to give stark warnings or unsettling research insights to the maverick protagonist. But My Fair Lady is a film all about linguistics (and also class, love and terrible Cockney accents – more on that later).
In the film, Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), takes under his wing a Cockney flower seller called Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn). He wagers with his friend and fellow haughty linguist, Colonel Pickering, that he can teach her to speak “properly”.
It seems at first there is no hope but – hoorah! – Eliza finally grasps it, suddenly blurting out “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” in a perfect imitation of Queen’s English.
Doolittle then dazzles at an embassy ball,...
