Put This Fish In Your Ear

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy makes light
of universal translation, providing the protagonist
with a fish that lives in his ear and translates.
(Image via BBC)

In the fourth season of the British science fiction comedy Red Dwarf, starship captain Arnold Rimmer orders that greetings be broadcast in all known languages — “including Welsh.”

The joke highlights the sometimes ambivalent relationship that science fiction has with the reality of linguistic diversity. More than 3,000 languages on the planet have fewer than 1,000 living speakers and are at risk of disappearing forever. It’s worth speculating about the future of minority languages, and science fiction seems like as good a place as any to do that.

Linguistic diversity is important for a variety of reasons. Language is central to culture, and both shape our worldviews and influence our decisions and experiences. Because language encodes culturally specific knowledge systems, it stands to reason that having people who can think in different languages provides humanity different intellectual toolsets, the better with which to solve societal problems. In short, the whole of humanity is strengthened and enriched by linguistic diversity.

In space opera, matters of intercultural communication are often hand waved away through universal translators, the existence of a galactic standard language, or somesuch. As convenient as these plot devices are, their widespread use in genre fiction reveals assumptions about culture and minority rights that have often been unchallenged in science fiction.

For example, universal translators rely on the premise that there is a common meaning between words; that translation is nothing more than identifying a corresponding word in another language. Well known franchises portray a platonic ideal of unambiguous meaning behind words, something that can be losslessly conveyed from one sapient being to another. It’s obvious that the multivalent and chaotic nature of language belies such attempts. In extremely simplistic terms, how could a universal translator handle all the connotations of a word like “pontificate” without indicating that it is a reference to both religious leaders and bridges? Required context can only be built, not assumed. Signifiers evolve alongside cultural practices and are endowed with the meanings intended by their users.

Despite being born in Aberdeen, Montgomery
Scott does not seem to speak Scots (though
he’s fluent enough in Welsh to sing
Yr Hufen Melyn). It’s unclear if the Scots
language has survived into the 24th Century. 
(Image via Memory Beta)

Famously, The Next Generation attempted to grapple with this criticism in its fifth-season episode Darmok. In the episode, Captain Jean-Luc Picard struggles to communicate with the captain of an alien race — the Tamarians — who communicate only in metaphor and allegory. While it’s a superb hour of television about empathy and attempting to bridge communication gaps, it doesn’t tackle the loaded meanings of individual words. The universal translator is seamlessly able to translate metaphor in Tamarian sentences like “When his mind was fogged” or “Kimarnt, her head cloudy” despite the fact that weather patterns do not necessarily connote the addled perceptions or cognition for Tamarians that these sentences might imply for humans whose languages developed on Earth.

Within the universe of Star Trek, language and culture are mostly treated as separable concepts, and the latter seems to be predetermined by genetic destiny. Klingon society is shaped by inherent properties of the species biology rather than the weights of meaning embedded in their words. To be clear: language is continuously reshaped by evolving cultural practices and socially reproduced, bending most to those with cultural dominance.

While the goal of universal translators might be to bring people together, albeit with dubious technical premises, the idea of a ‘galactic standard’ implies an attempt at control that can be stifling at best (e.g., blind academic adherence to a style guide or your friendly neighbourhood “grammar cop”) and morally reprehensible at worst. The idea of a standard in its worst incarnation conveys that minority languages and consequently minority cultures have been — or are in the process of being — wiped out. Star Wars, which is one of the more famous examples of a fictional universe with a galactic standard language, depicts a setting where fascism has run rampant on several occasions (which may help explain the lack of linguistic diversity). The imposition of majoritarian language has often been used by an oppressor (the global dominance of English and Spanish is in large part the legacy of genocides).

Star Trek’s Vulcans provide another example. They are known for celebrating “Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations,” but the species seems to have only one language. Why is this? There are references to multiple ethnicities of Vulcan, which one must assume means that at one point there were disparate populations scattered across the desert planet’s surface, each of which likely had its own language. But by the time of first contact with humans, only the language Vuhlkansu remains as a common tongue (with Old High Vulcan used for some ceremonial purposes). By the textual evidence in Star Trek’s various incarnations, it seems clear that at some point in the past, many indigenous languages on Vulcan were eliminated. How many mass graves do the planet’s deserts hide?

Now, it should be noted that there have been sporadic attempts to broach the subject of language in SFF with a bit more nuance. In his Culture novels, Iain M. Banks describes a galactic standard language Marain, which he suggests is a “a means of expression which would be culturally inclusive and as encompassingly comprehensive in its technical and representational possibilities as practically achievable.” But even Banks’ descriptions of Marain betray a positivist approach to language based on ideas that some languages are ‘lesser’ than others. This is the sort of thinking (and expression) that leads to residential schools and the suppression of minority cultures.

Another interesting example of minority language representation in space opera is the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Deep Wheel Orcadia — a love story told in the form of an epic poem written in an Orkney dialect, with parallel text providing the English translation.

The horror movie Pontypool gets its name
from the Welsh town of Pont-y-pŵl. The movie
is more relevant today than it was
when it was first released.
(Image via IMDB)

And in 2009 Canadian director Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool provided one of the genre’s most incisive critiques of linguistic monoculture. The movie depicts a world in which the English language in Southern Ontario has become the vector for an infectious set of ideas, and only those who speak a minority language can survive. This could be read as a metaphor for the type of destructive rhetoric that has spread like wildfire through much of the English-speaking world over the past few years.

As of early 2023, there were 7,164 spoken languages on Earth, according to Ethnologue. Of these, just over 3,000 had fewer than 1,000 people who spoke them — that’s about 42 per cent of world languages that are on the verge of disappearing. This is a rapid movement towards the monoculturalization of our lignuistic landscape, but it's one that has gotten short shrift in genre work.

Science fiction often concerns itself with the ways in which the world and society are changing; particularly when it is changing rapidly. The rise of car-oriented culture led to individualist space opera. The rapid expansion of computing power led to cyberpunk. The rapidly changing climate led to cli-fi. But to date, the rapid destruction of language diversity does not have a corresponding movement in SFF.