Similarly, in Disney’s Brave (Andrews and Chapman 2012), the medieval
Scottish princess Merida, while speaking in an authentic but anachronistically modern Scots English accent (a real Merida would have spoken Gaelic), acts and speaks like a modern American girl; one of the songs she sings, “Into the Open Air” (Mandel 2012), is a modern love song, not exactly the kind of sentiment that would have been expressed or probably felt by a medieval Scottish princess in an atmosphere of dynastic succession. In real medieval Scotland, Merida would probably have whiled away her short life in a dungeon for resisting her parents’ plans to marry her off to a political ally. In interpreting such texts, the listener makes an automatic shift towards the normative ideological situation of his or her own society; if it’s normative, it’s invisible. Therefore, ancient Scottish society is signified by a few carefully selected signifiers – red hair, kilts and claymores – and the viewer accepts the scheme. Disney’s layering of modern American social norms onto the cultures of other times and places is heavy-handed, but given the commercial success of their products, it evidently works.
Kirsten Hempkin performs a similar analysis of comparative cultural stereotyping and awareness in “Scottish and Slovene Songs in the Intercultural
Classroom,” but using authentic Scottish and Slovenian folk songs, rather than commercial song lyrics (2013). Hempkin points out that although the language of Robert Burns is difficult for Slovene students at first, after a while the students come to appreciate the similarities between the two different cultures, and moreover, in the comparison they come to clearly understand how cultural stereotypes work.
Quoting Byram, Gribkova and Starkey (2002), Hempkin states that this kind of intercultural competence is essential for learning a second language properly
(2013: 175).
As I have pointed out elsewhere, traditional folk songs take on new meanings as they are adapted over time and performed in different places (Kennedy 2014) .
Even in basic language classes, students can discuss how songs can be interpreted and how the same lyrics can mean different things to different people.