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How American audiences learned to stop worrying and love subtitles

Laura Clark
Actors Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai.
"Shōgun," starring Emmy-winning actors Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai, featured more than half of its dialogue in the Japanese language with subtitles. (©FX Networks/Courtesy Everett Collection) (©FX Networks/Courtesy Everett Collection)

Shōgun was a big winner at the 76th Emmy Awards Sunday night, picking up a record 18 Emmy Awards and making history multiple times over while doing it.

In addition to its actors Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai becoming the first Japanese actors to win top acting awards in a drama series, the FX show about feudal Japan in 1600 became the first majority non-English language winner of the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy Award.

Seventy percent of the 10-episode series, based on the 1975 James Clavell novel of the same name, featured Japanese dialogue with subtitles.

That language barrier didn’t stop American audiences from watching in droves. The critically acclaimed series became FX’s most-watched show ever through its first nine weeks based on global hours streamed.

Shōgun’s unprecedented win, coupled with its overwhelming popularity — one that’s led to the show moving from a limited series to a drama series with at least two more seasons on the way — is the latest example of American audiences’ growing embrace of subtitles.

A 2022 survey by online language-learning platform Preply, which polled 1,265 Americans, found that 50% of viewers watch content with subtitles most of the time. That number jumped to 70% for Gen Z. Another study from 2021 said that four in five viewers ages 18-25 said they use subtitles “all or part of the time.”

The stronger — if reluctant — acceptance of those onscreen captions for uses beyond pure accessibility is fairly new. It was a mere four years ago, at the 2020 Golden Globes, when Bong Joon Ho, director of Best Foreign Language Film Parasite told audiences, “Once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

Parasite went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture that year. It was the first non-English language film to do so.

That wasn’t the only factor that helped shift American audiences’ aversion to subtitles around that time.

In the midst of a global pandemic that kept people inside and fueled a rise in streaming content and social media usage, TikTok became the most downloaded app of the year. The short-form video platform brought everything from music to comedy to activism to millions of handheld screens. Many of those millions began watching with the sound off and the captions on.

The pandemic also ushered in a streaming boom, and one show from South Korea — Squid Game — became Netflix’s top series of all time.

Milton Liu, executive director of the Asian American Media Alliance, told Yahoo Entertainment it wasn’t only Squid Game that U.S. viewers have been flocking to.

“We've had shows like Warrior and films like Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and The Farewell. Even going back to shows like Fresh Off the Boat,” he said. “As we see America become more diverse, we're seeing that the audience [wants] to understand exactly what is going on, because that's the culture of America right now.”

After Shōgun’s Emmy win, he said: “Great storytelling transcends subtitling.”

Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos, who helped bring Squid Game to the streamer and doubled down on other so-called K-dramas from Korea, told the New York Times that “great stories can come from almost anywhere in the world.”

“They can very conveniently sit on the shelf — I’m doing air quotes right now — next to your favorite show, and you will discover an incredible story from Korea or an incredible story from Italy or incredible story from Spain that you would never otherwise have access to and maybe no awareness of before,” he said.

Americans’ embrace of subtitles and captions isn’t solely focused on foreign languages. Many U.S. viewers have been turning on subtitles or captions, which also describe the sound on screen historically for the hearing impaired in addition to showing or translating the words, for English-language series.

“With streaming, there’s just access to tons and tons of different content, including content that is linguistically different than what you might be used to,” Melissa Baese-Berk, a professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago, told Yahoo Entertainment.

Peaky Blinders, the British Netflix series that takes place in post-World War I England, and Derry Girls, another series available on Netflix, which takes place in 1990s Northern Ireland, are two examples of English-language shows that often call for captions.

“Derry Girls is in a variety of English that’s totally different than what mainstream American viewers are used to listening to or seeing onscreen,” Baese-Berk explained. “One dimension that we don't often think about when we're thinking about different dimensions of diversity is linguistic diversity. And so we're just seeing way more of that. And that could be different accents that we're not used to seeing represented on screen or even different languages.”

Viewers are also turning on subtitles to account for less-than-ideal sound mixing and audio quality on their TVs, laptops, tablets and phones.

Nearly three in four respondents mentioned “muddled audio” as a reason for turning on captions, according to Preply’s survey results.

“When you get to films that were made to see in a theater, when you bring it back into the home to watch, you're talking about films and shows that may have not been compressed for a home theater,” Liu explained, adding he also uses subtitles at home when the audio isn’t great.

With viewers often complaining about louder commercials or not wanting to disturb roommates or sleeping children, subtitles have been a go-to alternative for keeping the actual volume low.

The short answer is yes.

“Getting the same information through two different modes is really helpful in interpreting that information,” Baese-Berk said.

Research shows that captions “benefit everyone,” including viewers who are deaf and those who are not, by improving the “comprehension of, attention to and memory for the video.”

According to Cognition Today, “research consistently shows that subtitles reduce the mental load … of watching a movie, and counterintuitively, makes watching a movie easier.”

Baese-Berk recalled the popular 2000s TV series The West Wing as an example of a show she’s now using captions for while watching reruns.

“Watching West Wing in reruns later in life, there's stuff that I just missed when I watched it in real time, because it's a very talky show,” she said. “So there's little quips that I just don't remember, and it could be that my memory is bad, but I think it's also that there's stuff that goes by so quickly. And when you see it on the screen too [with captions], you can recognize the funny thing that's happening or the important thing that you just missed.”

With shows like Shōgun and Squid Game showing strong viewership and gaining awards attention, that 1-inch barrier is looking smaller and smaller.

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