Introduction: Languages and the Military: Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building

Abstract

For those who participate in military campaigns, report on wars, or study the conduct and cultures of conflict, war is largely a foreign-language-free zone. The tacit assumption has been that international wars are generally fought with allies and against enemies who obligingly speak our own language. However, a recent Arts and Humanities Research Council project, Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict, ¹ took as its starting-point the centrality of foreign languages in war and proposed that languages should be seen as key to an understanding of armed conflict — for the military who are fighting, for the civilians who meet the armies ‘on the ground’ of war and for those academics from a range of disciplines who engage with the multiple meanings of war and conflict. This book, Languages and the Military: Alliances, Occupation and Peace Building, brings together these various constituencies to discuss the role of languages in military operations, a dialogue which began in the project’ international conference at the Imperial War Museum, London, in April 2011. The conference provided a forum in which war studies specialists, historians, cultural studies analysts, linguists and translation scholars could focus together on one key theme — the role of languages in war. An integral part of this multi- disciplinary perspective was the contribution of practitioners — the military who deploy soldiers in war, the professional interpreters who seek to protect language intermediaries in conflict zones, the agencies which develop languages as peacekeeping tools and the war museum curators who tell the story of war to the general public.