We are at one of the more exciting stages of editing the two
volumes of essays for Languages and the First World War : with some of the essays in, patterns and links
appear more strongly, and as more arrive the body of work becomes more robust
and intriguing.
A quote in Krista Cowman’s essay which mentioned ‘a French
Tommy’ set off a few links with other possibilities for the use of the word
‘Tommy’, for last week’s blog (which had a gratifyingly wide readership), and
we have just been looking at Julie Wheelwright’s paper on Mata Hari, and the
influence of spy fiction, in relation to Robert Hampson’s paper on the role of
class and its relation to the use of foreign languages in postwar fiction. One
of Mata Hari’s threats to society was that she could not be pinned down –
geographically, sexually, in terms of her social status, or even in terms of
her name, which had its own geographically roving and worrying nature. Robert Hampson’s
observations of the use of foreign languages in Parade’s End and Her Privates We show that Ford Madox Ford used European foreign
languages as markers of higher social status, and the traces of Hindi in army
slang as a marker of lower social status, while Frederick Manning’s rank and
file-located narrative involves passages of French being used as part of the
everyday life of the soldier. Clear demarcations break down, requiring closer
investigation.
In a number of zones we see the power of children in pushing
forward linguistic change. Milos Damjanovic’s paper on the complex changes in
language in the Jewish community in Kosovo-Metohija examines an ethnic group
whose normal linguistic situation was one of vulnerability and accommodation;
in this community, having to adapt to changes of state and empowered religions,
postwar dispensations put the younger generation in a position of having to and
being able to adapt quickly to learn Serbian, French and English. Similarly
Gavin Bowd’s essay shows how in German-occupied Belgium children were
fascinated with the language of the soldiers, and created their own hybrid
texts. Dominiek Dendooven’s paper on the diary of the Flemish priest Achille
Van Walleghem has an anecdote about a local boy finding, from experience, the
value of understanding body language when verbal communication is impossible,
in this case between himself and a Chinese Labour Corps worker.
The two volumes of Languages and the First World War, Communicating in a Transnational War and Representation and Memory
comprise 30 essays by international researchers, experts and academics,
and will be published in early 2016, by Palgrave-Macmillan.
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