Recently, I’ve been watching the Disney+ show Shōgun, a historical fiction drama about the political entanglements between a daimyo (feudal lord) outmaneuvering political rivals, and an English sea navigator shipwrecked in 1600s Japan.
![](https://i0.wp.com/bild-lida.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Toranaga.jpeg?resize=656%2C438&ssl=1)
The show is visually stunning, emotionally captivating, and, of importance for this blog post, linguistically inspiring. That is, the show is almost entirely in Japanese, interspersed with English dialogues here and there (which is supposed to stand in for Portuguese). Further, aside from wading through my plurilingual repertoire to navigate the intricacies of the English subtitles, the Japanese on-screen speech, and the occasional translanguaged phrases (e.g., padre-sama, meaning Father, and sama being an honorific for, in this case, a religious authority)[1], I am also immersed in the natural world depicted in the series, a world that is both alive and dynamic (one episode I saw included scenes of a landslide-causing earthquake). And it’s in this intersection of dynamic, ever-shifting language acts and natural phenomena that I find myself writing this blog post.
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