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| Sam and Teal'c above, Daniel and Jack below |
From the main characters' perspectives:
Dr. Daniel Jackson: Languages are most assuredly necessary to our interaction with various cultures around the world and around the universe. We simply could not get by without learning many languages personally. It's already so important to be multilingual on our planet, but add in other planets and other galaxies, and it's a whole other story! (And if we're counting, I spoke 24 languages before the discovery of the stargate and now speak several more.)
Samantha Carter: Languages are definitely a vital part of our society, particularly with our recent discovery of interstellar travel. I would definitely love to study languages as Daniel does, but unfortunately, my research in astrophysics doesn't leave much free time!
Teal'c: I already speak a sufficient number of languages.
Jack O'Neill: That stuff's for nerds. Well, there was that one time I spoke Ancient and it was pretty cool, but it ended up backfiring on me, so I'm not interested in trying that again.
From a linguistics perspective, it's unfortunate that every planet the team travels to has the "aliens" speaking modern English, which is impossible in a true reality. There are only a few exceptions, like the Goa'uld language present throughout the entire series, the Nox needing "time" (really only about 5 minutes) to learn English intuitively, and the Unas speaking their primal language and only learning a primal form of English. Daniel Jackson speaks several languages a few times while on Earth, but his linguistic representation is still very low. The team does encounter races with other languages, like the Ancients and the Asgard, but they also speak English.
It seems fairly obvious that the reasoning for so little language representation is because of the effort it would take to invent languages for every planet and have Daniel figure out how to communicate with them for the first five or ten minutes, etc. It just doesn't make sense for a TV series. However, that wasn't the case for the movie that inspired the series. In the movie, the people on Abydos speak a language similar to Ancient Egyptian, and the Goa'uld speak their own language. Daniel had to learn the Abydos dialect in order to communicate, and although it was relatively fast, it made sense that he needed to do so. And then when the characters return to Abydos for the TV show, Daniel (who had stayed there for one year), had conveniently taught everyone English, and they almost never again encountered a planet where no one spoke English.
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| From my mom's fav episode where they travel back to 1969:) |
Therefore, it ironically appears more necessary to speak multiple languages on Earth rather than for the purposes of traveling to other planets. Basically, English is the lingua franca everywhere. Everywhere. Isn't that magical?
However, there are several episodes which highlight the importance of knowing and learning foreign languages, as Daniel is often showed spending entire episodes "cracking the code" of some language, etc., and it saved their lives in all of those cases. Even during times on Earth, Daniel speaking other languages helped the team avoid a lot of trouble.
In the end, Stargate SG-1 basically teaches us that while learning multiple foreign languages isn't necessary for every person, it is very important as a whole, and the practice of linguistics and multilingualism is extremely important.
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| Haha! |
Right from the beginning while watching Stargate SG-1, I decided that when I grew up, I wanted to be Daniel Jackson. Not an archaeologist, because it doesn't sound fun to bend over digging in the dirt all day, but Daniel Jackson. Linguist, polyglot, historian, smart alack. I would throw in "traveler of worlds," but I at least try to sound a little realistic. I definitely don't think I'll achieve Daniel Jackson status because I'm much too lazy to learn 24 languages and then some, but if I can get a handful in, that's good enough for me:)
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