Languages and the First World War: Communicating in a Transnational War

Julian Walker is an educator at the British Library, an artist and writer. His books on language include Discovering Words, Team Talk: Sporting Words and their Origins and Trench Talk: Words of the First World War.Christophe Declercq is a lecturer in translation (University College London, UK and University of Antwerp, Belgium) who has been working on Belgian refugees in Britain for well over a decade. On the subject, he has spoken widely at conferences in both Britain and Belgium, has worked with the BBC and VRT (Belgian television) and manages several social media outlets.

• PART I: LANGUAGE AT THE FRONT.- Chapter 1:‘The….“parlez” is not going on very well “avec moi.”  Learning and using “trench French” on the Western Front’.- Chapter 2: “We did not speak a common language”: African soldiers and communication in the French Army, 1914-18.- Chapter 3: Habsburg Languages at War: “The linguistic confusion at the tower of Babel couldn't have been much worse”.- Chapter 4: Fritz and Tommy: Across the Barbed Wire.- Chapter 5: Caught in the crossfire; interpreters during the First World War.- PART II: WRITING HOME.- Chapter 6: Poetry, parables and codes: translating the letters of Indian soldiers.- Chapter 7: “Dear Mother, I am very sorry I cannot write to you in Welsh...” - Censorship and the Welsh language in the First World War.- Chapter 8: Sociolinguistic aspects of Italian war propaganda: Literacy, dialects and popular speech in the Italian trench journal L’Astico.- Chapter 9: Belgium and the semantic flux of Flemish, French and Flemings.- PART III:THE HOME FRONT.- Chapter 10: Malta in the First World War: Demon Kaiser or Colonizer?.- Chapter 11: From Hatred to Hybridisation: the German Language in Occupied France, 1914-1918.- Chapter 12: Persuasion vs. Deception: The Connotative Shifts of “Propaganda” and Their Critical Implications.- Chapter 13: Linguistic syncretism as a marker of ethnic purity? Jeroom Leuridan on language developments among Flemish soldiers during the First World War.- PART IV: COLLECTING CONFLICT WORDS.- Chapter 14: English Words in War-Time: Andrew Clark and living language history 1914-18.- Chapter 15: ‘Extraordinary Cheeriness and Good Will’: The Uses and Documentation of First World War Slang.

“Scholars and doctoral students in areas such as First World War Studies, transcultural studies, sociolinguistics, and the cultural history of war will find much of interest here.” (Heather Merle Benbow, First World War Studies, Vol. 9 (2), March, 2019)