For Want of Words -- A few notes on Language and Identity

I know you are the Muskos' regiment:
And I shall lose my life for want of language;
If there be here German, or Dane, low Dutch,
Italian, or French, let him speak to me; I'll
Discover that which shall undo the Florentine.
-Parolles, All’s Well that Ends Well, William Shakespeare

I must be an English major or something – I seem to be seeing patterns of the linguistic variety in more places than I ought. Consider this blog post a musing on language as well as a movie review.

Last weekend was a weekend for entertainments of the cinematic variety, and since the LOTR marathon got culled owing to many primary participants being in Cork at the time, we settled down to watch Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. A clever and violent little film, but very good; I recommend it to those of you have a strong constitution when it comes to your history being challenged and your usual dose of movie gore tripled in true Tarantino style.

The film, whilst it is being an inglorious bastard to many of its characters, is also making fun of a number of its own elements, including the genre of American war films in general. (This much most everyone who saw the trailer knew.) Here we have heroes doing unheroic things in an unheroic fashion, the momentum of this coming to a head in Hugo Stiglitz, the mass-murderer roped in by the Basterds who gets a superhero-esque title fly-in when his name is mentioned. The film industry gets another well-timed baseball bat to the knees with the premise of the film within the film, the propagandist Nation’s Pride (which, if you’ve been living where I have for two months, sounds a lot like a company that bakes bread.)


What little we see of the film is full of hammy, overdramatic acting at its finest, and from the reactions of the audience you’d think it was Oscar award-winning material. It is here that we find the angelic, pristinely uniformed, bring-him-home-to-your-mother-for-tea-and-scones hero we’re used to seeing in war films. Beside the Basterds, Private Fredrick Zoller (a very cute Daniel Brühl) is nothing more than a fop. And how we hate him!


The Basterds, headed up by their ridiculously other-end-of-the-war-movie-stereotype leader, Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt in a flash of comic genius) are the absolute parody of the World War two action hero. These guys aren’t fighting for nationalism – they’re just out to, as Raine succinently puts it, “Kill us some Natzis.” The Americans are counterbalanced by a brilliant cast playing the Europeans, and here Tarantino gets out the baseball bat again, this time taking a wack at American identity in the world today.

This is where the bit on language comes in – I told you I’d get there eventually! All the other characters in this film speak at least two languages – Colonel Landa, the German head honcho in France regarding the jewish problem, converses easily in French, German, Italian, and English, and I’m pretty sure if there had been a few Red Guards wandering in and out we would have found he speaks Russian, too. (The actor portraying Landa, Christoph Waltz, apparently had to study really hard to get his English as good as it is in this film. Lemme tell you, he nailed it. This man is AWESOME.) But the Americans only speak one language – English. This, of course, lands them into trouble when their more culturally competent allies (including a deliciously British, upper-crust, toffee-nosed-and-useless army officer/film critic played by Michael Fassbender) all get shot in an underground barroom brawl, leaving only one maimed moviestar (the always gorgeous Diane Kruger) to help carry out their plans.


The point is obvious – If the Americans really want their finger in every pie and their ear at every door like Landa is, they’d better make sure the ears at the doors know what’s being said about them and their average citizens can at least converse in something other than their mother tongue.

Language is always a great way to show intercultural competency (and I use that term only because it seems to be a concept being feted in the academic administrative world at the moment.) In Literature class now, we’ve just finished reading Brien Friel’s Translations, a wonderful little play about the land survey of the 1830s that went around ‘standardizing’ Irish placenames by Anglicizing them. The play is written and performed under the understanding that, while all the characters are delivering their lines in English, some are really speaking in Gaelic. The two British officers sent in to conduct this survey (only one of the many translations of the title) take two opposing roles, one the man willing to learn the language of the place he is in, and the other the consummate imperialist ready to let translators do his job for him even if some of his meaning is lost in the process.

Several of the characters speak in Latin and Greek as well as Gaelic and English, and Friel’s message with these characters is the same as Tarantino’s – the more languages you know, the more perceptive you are to the world around you and the more open you are to change.

Studying as I am now in the Gaeltacht region of Ireland (essentially a linguistic heritage zone) I’m seeing and studying the importance of language as men like Douglas Hyde and Franz Fanon see it – as a tool for revolution and change. The language you use shapes the world you see – more languages, bigger world. Different language, different world, different identity. The gaelic speakers around here order their thoughts differently, becuase thier language is structured in a slightly different way. Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League (a community effort to revive the old pre-English Irish culture) and the first president of Ireland, postulated in his “Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” speaks along the same lines regarding language as Fanon does later in Les Damnés de la Terre regarding culture as a whole: “We must teach ourselves to be less sensitive, we must teach ourselves not to be ashamed of ourselves, because the Gaelic people can never produce its best before the world as long as it remains tied to the apron-strings of another race and another island, waiting for it to move before it will venture to take any step itself…I would earnestly appeal to every one, whether Unionist or Nationalist, who wishes to see the Irish nation produce its best … to set his face against this constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions, and ideas. I appeal to every one whatever his politics -- for this is no political matter -- to do his best to help the Irish race to develop in future upon Irish lines, even at the risk of encouraging national aspirations, because upon Irish lines alone can the Irish race once more become what it was of yore -- one of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming peoples of Europe.”

Language is powerful. Language shapes our thinking, and our identity. In my own writing, I love pulling in language phrases distinct from my own English base, though it’s often said that writers should avoid doing this. I believe the criticism comes from the manga fanfiction community where those fans with Japanese cultural jealousy (for a complete explanation of what that is, see my Galway Rover Blog) throw in their unnecessary token words with wild abandon to somehow prove they are worthy of writing Japanese characters in a Japanese context. There, the usage is to prove inclusion in a group – I use my foreign words to prove difference, because of that removal from the text that they create. If my readers don’t understand it, good. Now they know how it feels talking to my trilingual poet in real life. (I also find linguistics a good way to show off your research skills, but this doesn’t work all the time and sometimes it’s just plain annoying – see Kate Horsely’s Confessions of a Pagan Nun for token words at their translation foot-noted best.)

I shall lose my life for want of language, Parolles laments in All’s Well That Ends Well. I hope that doesn’t happen to me any time soon. Judging from the length of this blog post, I’ll probably lose my life for surfeit of it.