Animated shows aren’t too careful in depicting how dialects actually work; they often use sloppy approximations of an accent as opposed to accurate renderings. The two generalized indicators of a Slavic accent, according to the study, are pronouncing words like “darling” as “dah-link,” and “we” as “vee.” Often, accents have a combination of features associated with a patchwork of nationalities. But what’s true in all of these cases is that the accent is portrayed as foreign in a way that’s clear to the viewer. To Gidney, the common denominator in all of these vague foreign accents is “the binary distinction of ‘like us’” versus “not like us.” “Villainy is marked just by sounding different,” he added.

But Gidney and Dobrow’s findings suggest that there’s something more specific at play than a general American bias against foreign accents. They said that the use of German, Eastern European, and Russian accents for animated villains is likely reflective of America’s hostility toward those countries during World War II and the Cold War. They have continued to find these same accent trends through the past few decades, even as the political and social climate changes and the nation’s zeitgeist is marked by different ethnic and global tensions. Gidney and Dobrow noted that, contrary to what researchers might have expected, children’s TV today is no more likely to use, say, Middle Eastern or Korean accents for villains than it was in the past. Slavic accents, German accents, and the like are still the voices of choice for “bad” characters.

Since the publication of their initial research, Gidney and Dobrow have expanded their study to better understand the rationale for accent trends by speaking with kids’ TV executives involved in casting and development. What they’ve been finding in conversations isn’t that the showrunners think this custom is “a good idea”; rather, “it’s a conventional idea,” said Dobrow. Dobrow and Gidney suggested that these showrunners are simply imitating the tactics of commercially successful shows. Rosina Lippi-Green, a linguist who has written on the uses of language in Disney movies, added that these tendencies likely have to do with the “age and training” of the showrunners themselves. In other words, showrunners may be making decisions on the basis of what was popular and successful in the shows they grew up watching.

Yet Dobrow and Gidney noted that stereotyped uses of language aren’t an industry-wide norm; they said that networks such as PBS make a concerted effort to prioritize racial and ethnic diversity and accuracy in their programming, and that progress is being made in the industry more broadly. Accent signaling is also a more subtle form of ethnic stereotyping that can coexist with improvements to the ways in which children’s shows depict the world and the people who occupy it; many of the shows that Gidney and Dobrow have studied in recent years feature a broader array of ethnicities or more females in traditionally male-dominated roles than do older shows—even shows that continue to use foreign-accent tropes. Take Kim Possible, for example: while the protagonist, Kim, is a female superhero, she also encounters many villains with non-American accents.