The International sounds international

If you're interested in a well-made thriller about global finance and corruption, go to see the new Tom Tykwer film, The International, which stars Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Luca Barbaresch. And if you're interested in how global English sounds when spoken with seven different accents, go to see The International.

Which "Englishes" will you hear? Well, there's British (Owen), American (Watts), German (Stahl) and Italian (Barbaresch) to start with, and as the film races from Berlin to Milan to New York to Istanbul, you'll also hear French English, Liberian English, Turkish English and a few other varieties that I couldn't quite put a name on.

Does this make The International difficult to understand? Not really. A plausible film about the world-wide money business should reflect reality, and part of that reality today is the English language with its many different voices. In this trailer, you'll hear some of them.

One final linguistic point about The International concerns the term "bad bank", which has become part of this year's vocabulary. A "bad bank" is a financial institution created to hold useless assets owned by "good" banks. The idea is that without these assets, the "good" banks will be able to get back into business again. In The International, however, "bad bank" has a very different meaning.