Beatrice Cale
Two excellent films that I have enjoyed recently have expressly demonstrated sociolinguistic themes and theories we have touched in class. BlacKkKlansman and Arrival.
The first is the (mostly) true tale of a black police agent, who, in the 1970s, infiltrated the local branch of the KKK (the Ku Klux Klan, a violent, hate group which espouses white superiority), in Colorado, U.S.A.
The second film, is a thoughtful science-fiction fantasy, recounting the arrival of strange-looking extraterrestrial aliens to planet earth (directed by a Quebecer). In both films, the hero or heroine is the person who is most able to harness the power of language and communication to reach out to the other side for the betterment of humanity.
In BlacKkKlansman, our hero, the smooth-talking, college graduate policeman, is an African-American. His language skills, lexicon and diction are of a highly educated, sophisticated speech level. He has the ability to “speak white”. His conversations with the KKK are conducted solely over the telephone, so they have no inkling of his true colour, (double entendre). He is even able to fool them into extending an invitation for him to join them in their racist rampages! They reveal their secret, terrible plots of cross burnings and bombings to him over the phone, and, without my giving away too much of the plot, he is able to foil them with the help of another “outsider”.
The talented heroine of Arrival is a linguist! She is able to convince the world powers, (American, Chinese and Russian), not to blow up the aliens. She deduces a way to communicate with the aliens thanks to her linguistic training and discovers they have come in peace, (even though they really are weird-looking creatures).
This is the only film I have ever seen in my entire life where a sociolinguistics professor from Université de Montréal saves the world. I think I may have missed my calling. Imagine if we could have world peace thanks to Linguistics. Sigh.
She does not utilize spoken language, she interprets the aliens’ communicative signs and responds to them in like manner. In turn, she speaks her “human” languages, including Mandarin Chinese, to arrest any violence from the human side that would lead to certain annihilation.
How we experience the world affects how we use language (VanHerk 2012), and one could say that our linguist heroine has the knowledge and communicative repertoire of many worlds. Language allows the most esoteric, ancient epigraph on earth to reveal its meaning and touch us all across the eons with the truth of life.
At least in the movies!
Fun fact! Jessica Coon (McGill Linguistics prof) was the linguistics consultant for Arrival, and some scenes of the movie were filmed in one of her colleague’s offices in the Linguistics building, just down the hill from Education. Check this article out: https://medium.com/syncedreview/relearn-the-linguistic-world-in-arrival-an-interview-with-jessica-coon-9c18d43c7483 Maybe Linguistics can indeed save the world!
And let’s not forget Suzette Haden Elgin, the feminist linguist science fiction writer who created an alternative future in which WOMEN linguists save Earth from being destroyed by aliens! How? By creating a language to express the perceptions of women. No kidding. Deborah Cameron, another feminist linguist, wrote eloquently about this “conlang” (constructed language), Láadan, in her own blog. HIGHLY recommended.
Thank you both. It is fascinating indeed, “woman, feminism, language, linguistics, aliens, world peace”, all my favourites together!
I really liked your post Beatrice. It made me think of my early days as a newly arrived immigrant in Quebec thinking I could speak French! I really had a hard time understanding because of the accent and the many different expressions and particular uses of French here. I know of fellow immigrants who still go through a lot of stress because of this in their everyday lives. Certain people offer helpful bridges to make communication happen, but others simply continue flashing through their tracks as literally bullet trains speaking quebecois! In my own experiences and frustrations, it was not my background in language teaching what helped me out but my linguist wife! She provided thoughtful input at that time about the steps we needed to take in order to integrate better and to make our way amidst le parler québecois.
Thank you! My mother immigrated from France, speaking French, and even she couldn’t understand the way of speech here in Quebec, so you are in good company.
In addition, we should all be so lucky and have a smart linguist wife 😉
Bea
Thank you!