According to BBC, Shakespeare’s writings have given us about 2000 new words and phrases. “Being on a wild goose chase”, “being in a pickle” are examples of expressions from Shakespeare’s plays that have gained their place in modern language and is still being used to this day. This captures the idea of linguistic relativity.
His legacy endures not only in the way we express ourselves but how we process and experience the world around us. Had he not taught us the word “gloomy”, would it be a feeling we would be able to recognize?
The doctrine of linguistic relativity pertains to the principle that language is the filter through which any or all ideas must pass. The language forms a meme pool that shapes its speakers. As witnessed with the works of the playwright, other behemoths of the English language, such as Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice… serve as the basic DNA like building blocks of speech as well as how stories, ideas and interpretations are processed, viewed and passed on.
Now, let’s delve deeper into the context of Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain.\
The story is one about revenge. The revenge of Big Boss on Cipher who laid waste to his works: An eye for an eye, a limb for a limb and Skull for skull. However, we will not be looking into the protagonist’s view of the world, rather what interests me the most is the deranged plan and view of its antagonist, Skull Face- a ghost without a past.
Artistic worlds have long been crafted using language of all kinds. Words establish images, smells, feelings, and histories of people and places that may never have been seen by a user or audience. Spoken language is used to help construct the historical, political and philosophical world within the game. Speech works in this title to deepen the player’s experience as protagonist Punished “Venom” Snake, even as the spoken word becomes a weapon in the hands of Skull Face.
The game is primarily concerned with the subject of English and its heritage of colonization. It delves into the intertwined relationship of the components of language; political, cultural and psychological, as well as their connections with consciousness. It relates to the threats facing the multiplicity of interpretations and the continued coexistence of multiple point of views, the threat posed by the unipolar hegemonic dominance of a single language-culture over the world. It conveys the dangers of English as the “lingua franca”.
The idea of Linguistic Imperialism
“The origin of language itself was as a manifestation of the power of the rulers” -Friedrich Nietzsche
The use of a language as a lingua franca is not a modern weapon. Many empires of the past have utilized it to bring peace, to conquer and brutalize their enemies. For example, Alexander the Great: hellenisation refers to the gradual and consequential effect of Alexander spreading Greek culture and language across the conquered regions caused to the minds of the inhabitants and the subsequent alteration of their consciousness over the years. They all became part of his civilization. Even after the fall of his empire, these people remained Hellenic, permanently changed. Or even after the fall of the Roman empire, the Latin tongue lived on and evolved to branch off into many forms, like English or French.
“It is no nation we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our true fatherland.”
This statement by Romanian philosopher, Emil Cioran, reflects the backstory of Skull Face:
“I was born in a small village. I was still a child when we were raided by soldiers. Foreign soldiers. Torn from my elders, I was made to speak their language. With each new post, my masters changed, along with the words they made me speak. Words are... peculiar. With each change, I changed too. My thoughts, personality, how I saw right and wrong.”
His fatherland- his truth was stolen from him. And he blames the English language. The language that stole his freedom, that burrowed deep inside his head, that stole his identity. The young Skull Face was stripped of his Hungarian mother tongue and forced to speak other languages, including English. The experience filled him with a hatred of English and its growing role as a lingua franca, and his views and history rhetorically posit the language as a destructive and oppressive force wiping out other languages as it becomes increasingly ubiquitous, a force closely bound up with imperialism. His goal is thus to eradicate the English language.
“Sans lingua franca, the world will be torn asunder. And then, it shall be free. People will suffer, of course - a phantom pain. The world will need a new common tongue. No words will be needed. Every man will be forced to recognize his neighbor. People will swallow their pain. They will link lost hands. And the world will become one. This war is peace.”
“It is the bell with which a world - trodden upon by words - declares its independence.”
Skull Face mounts a rebellion against a generalization of the imperial powers that oppressed him as a child, seeking to become oppressor to the oppressors and to subvert a hegemony of spoken language. “I was invaded by language.” Having experienced firsthand the potency of language as an oppressive tool capable of altering identities and restricting conceptualization, Skull Face attempts an invasion of his own, using the parasites to weaponize speech.
With the disappearance of the lingua franca, the world and its people will be freed from the parasite that is language.
Countering the effects of a Lingua Franca
Within the real-world oppression of colonialism and the language-based imperialism that constructs its worlds, making lasting impacts on native languages or displacing them entirely, there are opportunities for speech-based rebellion. As in 1984, language and the act of speaking can take the form of revolt, and not only in a symbolic sense
Language, as visited by Paulo Freire emerges as a communal pedagogical tool, one that can be put to use to subvert the very forces that instituted it. Freire provides a way for the oppressed to use their spoken language to resist that oppression and rebuild their worlds through decolonization.
By crafting and sharing a narrative about their world, colonized peoples can also craft their lived world itself. While emphasizing the need for speech and communication while not ignoring potentially oppressive dangers, that Skull Face and The Phantom Pain’s procedural representation of spoken language as both a world-defining tool and a world-destroying weapon, opens up possibilities for language not as a weapon of destruction and oppression, but as a resource for positive communal change and the recovery of lived worlds.
Ashfaaq Gopee
Reference: Metal Gear Solid 5:TPP and the MGS5 essay by Hall Chris
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