All language is foreign
to those who do not speak or understand the words being spoken.
There are over 14,500
films available on DVD in the domestic market place where the language spoken is
not English. Overall the category of
“Foreign Language” films accounts for 9.3 percent of all releases.
Those are healthy numbers
by any standard — roughly one in every eleven SKUs is released to DVD as a
feature film in a language other than English.
Think about that … one out of every eleven DVD releases since the
inception of the format.
We thought that it might
be interesting to take a snapshot of where — throughout the world — these films
are coming from. The results, when
broken down into major language groupings, are very intriguing.
A few caveats and
observations before delving into these release numbers.
First, not all foreign
language films released on DVD are represented here. Nothing goes into the various tracking
databases without dates (sometimes titles just magically appear), SRPs and a domestic
source of distribution — a DVD release (NTSC standard) set to Region Zero can
be distributed anywhere in the world, especially through internet sales. Without a source, a release date and a price,
it doesn’t exist.
To cut down on this chaos
certain basics have to be met for a DVD release to be counted … it is not
rocket science, but some entities — especially those operating in the
categories of Religion, Special Interest and Foreign Language — seem to go out
of their way to be obtuse. It makes you
wonder, is it a hobby or a business for them?
And if you think that
just capturing new title data from Amazon.com gets you the majority of new
arrivals on DVD you’d be mistaken. That
key source, while helpful, only represents half of the SKU count — across the
board — each week.
You should also consider
this: Up until about 2005 most of the current recognized distributors of films
released on DVD from the Indian subcontinent played whack-a-mole with pirates
operating in the United States. You
would literally see more information about piracy complaints and legal battles
than you would actually see as “legitimate” new DVD release information.
Once they, collectively
speaking, got organized and began to compete in the domestic market for sales
of their films (which are often turned in 30 to 60 days after a theatrical
break) the mix of product being offered in this category changed dramatically.
And don’t make
assumptions that Spanish is the obvious language choice being so close to
Mexico … after a flood of titles that began in 2003 — and peaked just two years
later — the SKU counts have steadily dropped.
In 2005, for example, there were over 800 Spanish-language films
released on DVD in the domestic market.
Last year, just 70!
We suspect that most
Spanish-language speakers are availing themselves of the various DVD and
Blu-ray language options for current “Hollywood” theatrical releases and are
less concerned about so-called “homeland” productions. The tracking numbers each week seem to point
this … otherwise we would see a more robust Spanish-language release schedule
to meet the demand.
Various sources list the
number of foreign languages spoken on this planet at somewhere between 5,000
and 10,000 (makes you wonder if anyone really knows). However, for the world of home entertainment
the top 20 languages account for 98.6 percent of all DVD releases. It is a universe of haves and have-nots …
those that express themselves in film and those that cannot … or in some cases,
will not.
As you might suspect,
European “Romance” languages (based on Latin) is the number one grouping with a
38.7 percent share. The obvious players
here are Spanish (Mexico, Spain and South America), French, Italian and
Portuguese (chiefly from Brazil).
The Dravidian languages
of Southern India (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu) are next with 19.9 percent. India, or “Bollywood” is nothing like the
domestic market … there are five major languages competing for audiences.
Of note, Hindi, which most American audiences
would associate with films from India is not a Dravidian-based language — the
country is divided north and south when it comes to languages spoken
(interesting).
In third and fourth place
with 10.2 and 9.9 percent respectively are Sino-Tibetan (mainly Cantonese and
Mandarin) and Macro-Altaic (chiefly Japanese and Korean) languages.
We then drop down to
fifth and sixth place with 6.1 and 5.0 market shares — Madhya (Hindi) and
Germanic (German, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Flemish
and even a couple of
Afrikaans releases).
Slavic rounds out the top
seven language groupings with a 3.3 percent release share — these include
Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Slovenian, Croatian, Bulgarian, etc.
These seven main
groupings account for 93.1 percent of all Foreign Language category releases. Again, there are the haves and have-nots
when it comes to the production and commerce of feature films released where
the language spoken is something other than English.
