The Importance of Language During The WW2

Between 1939 and 1945, the world witnessed the deadliest war in Human History. Seventy to eighty-five million people died during this war that opposed the Allies (the United States of America, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and China) to the Axis (the Nazi Germany, the Kingdom of Italy and the Empire of Japan).

The human language was of a great importance at that period of time. Indeed, language is the unique ability of a human being to produce sounds and syllables that form meaningful words and expressions in order to convey thoughts and emotions. There was a mutual influence between language and the major events that occurred during this second worldwide conflict.

In particular, in the United States of America, the Second World War (WW2) introduced some new words and expressions to define, describe or even alleviate the darkest episodes of the Human History. Also, the language played a major role in the victory of the United States and its Allies over the forces of the Axis.

Language, much like the world human beings live in, is in a constant state of flux. The way that the World War II altered the world also largely modified the way Americans speak and redefined the way they think. In fact, WW2 was, among other things, a period of devastation but also of technological achievements and globalization. These incredible technological advances combined with the unprecedented brutality of the war have profoundly impacted the American language.

Indeed, historians and civilians had to come up with new words to describe each horrific event or each new technological feat. A study led by the American author Wilfred Funk estimated that “for each year the United States was involved in WWII, we added more than 6,000 words to the American vocabulary”. Many of these newly created words refer to serious slaughters, such as the word “genocide” which is certainly one of the gravest of neologisms that show the enormity of the wartime atrocities. This word was first used by the British newspaper the Sunday Times, when it reported that “the United Nations’ indictment of 24 Nazi leaders has brought a new word into the language – genocide” (1944). Also, dehumanizing and disgusting euphemisms have been largely used by the criminals of war to justify the massive killings they’ve ordered. For example, the expression “collateral damage” describes all the casualties that are unintended results of military operations, while the expression “Zone of Interest” refers to the extermination camp of Auschwitz.

Meanwhile, the prefix “mega” comes from the measurement of bombs (one megaton is equivalent to one million tons of TNT) and reflects the larger scale of destruction that the nuclear weapons had reached. On a lighter note, there’s the word borrowed by a car manufacturer for its brand: Jeep derives from the initialism GP (general purpose) – used to describe the unrestricted function of a war vehicle, reduced to a single-syllable word. Other acronyms have also endured: radar is a US coinage from 1940, taken from the initial letters of “radio detection and ranging”. RDF – the British equivalent initialism – was quickly replaced by the catchier acronym.

The atrocities of war have and will continue to spawn thousands of words, expressions and euphemisms that we still use in everyday speech. In fact, WW2 has impacted American speech so profoundly, that it has inspired a series of dictionaries and anthologies to serve as record of the terms and phrases coined during this period of extreme brutality.

The Second War didn’t just have an influence on the American language. It was also affected by the language itself. Indeed, language largely contributed to the final victory of the United States of America over the Empire of Japan and Hitler’s Nazi Germany.

Indeed, since the USA entered the worldwide conflict in 1941, a race was on to find a language that the enemy wouldn’t not understand, which would make it easier to coordinate attacks and make plans on the telephone or radio. This search for an unbreakable code of sounds and syllables was therefore intense. Discovering a code that the enemy couldn’t crack would allow to securely transfer information at very high speeds. It would mean a guaranteed victory to the winner of this race. Hence, language, as basic as it may seem, was crucial during this deadly conflict. In the United States, the Marines thought of devising a code rooted in a Native American language: the Navajo language. 29 Navajo Native Americans were then recruited to develop and use this code that was nearly impossible to decipher. These men were called the “Code Talkers”.

What made the Navajo language so different from other languages is that it was not a written language. Only some words had been written down, but they were not enough to help the enemy to decipher vocabulary. However, 20 years after the war ended, the Code Talkers revealed the secret of their language. Chester Nez, a Navajo Code Talker states that “they started talking about different things, animals, sea creatures, birds, eagles, hawks, and all those domestic animals. They used those names of different animals — from A to Z. So for A, they took a red ant that they live with all the time. B they took a bear, Yogi the Bear, C a Cat, D a Dog, E an Elk, F, Fox, G, a goat and so on down the line”. So, these Native American soldiers used a Navajo word to represent each letter of the English alphabet.

This is the English translation: C-O-D-E R-E-C-E-I-V-E-D

Here’s how the message is decoded:

MOASI (C-Cat), NE-AHS-JAH (O-Owl), LHA-CHA-EH (D-Dog), DZEH (E-Elk), GAH (R-Rabbit), DZEH (E-Elk), MOASI (C-Cat), DZEH (E-Elk), TKIN (I-Ice), A-KEH-DI-GLINI (V-Victor), DZEH (E Elk), LHA-CHA-EH (D-Dog)

This ingenious form of language served its purpose later on in the war by letting the Americans take control back of the islands that were occupied by the Japanese forces in the Pacific Ocean. It also permitted the famous D-Day landing in Normandy (in 1944) that led to the retreat of the Nazi forces in France and to the fall of Hitler’s Empire afterwards in 1945. Thousands of the Allies’ lives were hence saved thanks to the Code Talkers and their secret language.

To conclude the essay, Philip Gooden and Peter Lewis said it best when they argued that “war is the mother of invention”. The sentence, which is a tweak of the proverb “necessity is the mother of invention”) refers to language. The Second World War reached such high levels of brutality and atrocity that new words and expressions had to be created to designate incidents that were unknown to the American public before. These unprecedented events also led to the use of euphemisms in the English language, especially by the Nazi criminals of war who employed dehumanizing and sickening euphemisms to lighten their crimes against humankind. Moreover, WW2’s destiny was in the hands of language itself. Indeed, a group of Native American soldier called the Code Talkers developed and memorized a special code that proved critical in several important campaigns. Their actions helped saving thousands of American and allies’ lives. Therefore, they served the USA proudly, with honor and distinction, thanks to their language.

References

1. Funk, Wilfred. (1950). Word Origins and Their Romantic Stories. Goyal Publishers.
2. Gooden, Philip and Lewis, Peter. (2014, September 25). The Word at War: World War Two in 100 Phrases. Bloomsbery.
3. Gorman Zonnie. (n.d.). WW2: What's the secret language that helped win the war? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z9mf34j
4. Nunn, Gary. (2014, September 26). War of the words: the global conflict that helped shape our language. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/sep/26/mind-your-language-war-words
5. Sicard, Sarah. (2015, October 15). How America’s Wars Have Changed The English Language. Retrieved from https://taskandpurpose.com/how-americas-wars-have-changed-the-english-language
6. Code Talking. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://americanindian.si.edu/education/codetalkers/html/chapter4.html
7. The History of English (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/history_late_modern.html