#hard-launching my beef with william “elgin” weasley

[saintsenara]

I really want to hear your thoughts on the wizarding world. So I have a question about British wizards' language skills. Canon tells us very little about British wizards and their relationship to languages. We know that Fleur, Victor and Madame Maxime can speak more than one language. (They are not British). However, we do know that there is at least one British wizard who speaks several languages. Percy and Ludo say that Barty senior speaks over a hundred languages. So, do you think British wizarding society has a general opinion about learning languages or is it more about what class a wizard is born into or what their future career plans are? After all, Hogwarts doesn't teach languages to students. I'd also like to hear your thoughts on these characters and their language skills. Do you think they can speak more than one language? Voldemort (parseltongue doesn't count), Dumbledore, Barty jr and Bill Weasley.

thank you very much for the ask, anon! and what an interesting question!

in harry potter, language-learning is one of those things which - since it's not a key aspect of the story - ends up not having any specific worldbuilding. and so it's one of those parts of the books in which the wizarding attitude towards foreign languages just seems to be exactly the same as the real-world british one.

which is - like everything in britain - enormously rooted in social class, and in things [like race and ethnicity] which intersect with this.

you will often hear, for example, that the working-classes don't bother learning foreign languages - but what is meant by this is that working-class people don't choose in large numbers to become proficient in the specific western european languages [french, german, italian, and spanish] which signify that someone is well-educated, culturally-sophisticated, and mentally non-parochial to the british cultural and intellectual elite. working-class people may very well speak one of these four languages - especially african and caribbean dialects of french - as native or heritage languages, and they may very well speak urdu, yoruba, albanian, polish, turkish, and so on for the same reasons... it's just that this isn't recognised as something impressive.

but it is certainly true that language-learning for reasons other than heritage generally isn't considered to be particularly important in class-brackets below a certain threshold in the middle-middle- to upper middle-classes.

partially this is for boorish, parochial reasons which align with certain strains of political and social conservatism. uncle vernon, for example, would regard language-learning as woke nonsense and be horrified if dudley came home from school and asked to be given loads of italian novels for his birthday... he would have a similar reaction if his son announced his intention to start playing the violin, take ballet, write poetry, become interested in impressionist painting, or eat the local food while on holiday.

[the grangers, in contrast, appear to come from the europhile wing of the upper-middle-classes - and would, therefore, regard it as horribly parochial to only speak english. we know they go on holiday to france in prisoner of azkaban - and i think we can imagine that this isn't the first time they do so, and that hermione and her parents can all speak conversational french. indeed, if hermione was privately educated prior to starting hogwarts - and all signs point to yes - she would have studied french at prep school.]

but british monolingualism is also partially because the global hegemony of english means that being able to speak anything else isn't crucial for travel, employment, or - indeed - emigration, since brits who aspire to move abroad often want to go to places like australia and new zealand.

and so language-learning has become - like music - an academic subject which seems to be thought of by many brits as "not a key skill" - unlike, for example, something like maths. nice to have if you've got a grip on everything else, but not a necessity... and so, for british children who are educated in state schools [public schools in the us], foreign languages are only compulsory for three school years [years 7-9, the equivalents of years 1-3 at hogwarts]. some schools insist on a language being taken at gcse [exams taken at the end of year 11 - hogwarts year 5, what owls are a pastiche of], but this is not mandatory.

[although it was at my school. slay.]

so it makes sense within this cultural context that there are no languages on the compulsory hogwarts curriculum - the intended audience isn't expecting there to be.

[although it's worth saying that ancient runes - while i know it has a whole fanon surrounding it which makes it a sort of spellcasting system - is a pastiche of latin/classical greek as school subjects, so there is at least one elective language students can study].

of course, it makes less sense that this is the case when we remember that jkr did french at university... and it also makes less sense that this is the case because hogwarts is based on real-world institutions - britain's elite boarding schools - which do prioritise language-learning, since the students come from class-backgrounds which value multilingualism as a signal of cultural status.

[seriously - while i accept that this is anecdotal - it was so striking to me when i was at university that all but three of the thirty-or-so people i ever met doing a degree in a foreign language, whether a european language or not, was privately educated. add in classical languages and that ratio gets worse.]

but i think we can get around this by noting that hogwarts is set up in a way which presumes that its entire student body has had a wizarding primary education - and not only that, but an elite one [since hogwarts does, even if this isn't the doylist text's intention, seem to apply some sort of selection process which means that students who aren't from well-heeled backgrounds stand out enormously]. and then by presuming that the primary curriculum which someone like draco malfoy would have studied [at home, probably with a governess] would have included some sort of language tuition.

i imagine that this tuition would be in a muggle language - non-human languages [like mermish or gobbledegook] seem to be regarded as sufficiently "niche" in the eyes of the population that they wouldn't be taught as a general skill, but either learned in one's own time or as part of the training for specific careers, such as goblin liaison; the fact that barty crouch sr. speaks so many just for fun is a way canon hints at him being a bit... weird - and i imagine that this muggle language would be french.

this is not, however, because i go in for the fanon that all purebloods are of recent french heritage and retain close family connections in france [names like malfoy and lestrange are anglo-norman - which means they arrived in britain a thousand years ago with william the conqueror, and are as meaningfully english as the word "beef" or "monarchy...], but because french is generally considered the most "useful" language to learn in britain because france is literally next door.

[irish is sobbing.]

when it comes to the characters you specifically asked about...

lord voldemort's pre-hogwarts education is a bit of a mystery - in that the fact that the text isn't concerned about fleshing it out means that he ends up being far better educated than would normally have been the case for a child of his background [simply by virtue of not being functionally illiterate...].

even if he went to a moderately well-resourced school by random chance, though, he's extremely unlikely to have formally learned any foreign languages. but the fact that the most common fanon locations for the orphanage are parts of east london which had historically large jewish communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries means that he'd have had a fair chance of picking up snippets of yiddish while he was wheeling and dealing around each day. east london also had a large irish community, and if the orphanage is a catholic one [which doesn't really work canonically but which is a headcanon i'm nonetheless wedded to], then he'd probably also have a bit of latin.

once he's at hogwarts, i presume he must take runes [since he's heavily implied, like all male characters the series considers to be intellectually brilliant, to have taken twelve owls]. nonetheless, while he's clearly a nerd - and while he loves a language puzzle, since he spends his teenage years coming up with an anagram of his own name [...] - he has a slightly harry-ish preference in canon for only enjoying lots of flicking-through-books research if it's for a tangible goal [i.e. opening the chamber of secrets]. i can't see him scouring textbooks in an effort to teach himself the european languages his posh friends would have learned at home unless he thought doing so would be unequivocally beneficial to him.

indeed, we canonically know that voldemort can't speak german, since when he's on his hunt for gregorovitch in deathly hallows a woman speaks to him in that language and he just defaults to the british standard of speaking louder in english... and i think we can reasonably assume on these grounds that he can't speak french either.

but he must be able to speak albanian fluently - simply out of necessity, since he spends so much time in the country.

and it's also interesting to me that during his ten years in europe after murdering hepzibah smith [so c.1955-1965], he is implied to spend a lot of time in communist europe, even if not in countries which were fully behind the iron curtain [he must, for example, meet karkaroff - and potentially dolohov - in some part of the eastern bloc, and the bulgarian delegation at the quidditch world cup know who he is]. i think it's entirely reasonable to suppose, then, that he must also be able to speak some level of russian.

dumbledore - on the other hand - can probably speak french, german, and italian, which would have been expected of the sort of late victorian young man who was preparing to embark on a grand tour, and which he undoubtedly taught himself in order to keep up his correspondence with the "most noted magical names of the day" [including grindelwald, to whom he probably spoke german].

i also quite like the idea of him as the sort of late victorian orientalist who crops up again and again in british history, who speaks a language like hindi, arabic, or ottoman turkish with a cut-glass english accent.

the various non-human language he speaks in canon - such as mermish - are presumably also self-taught, and the question which preoccupies me the most in relation to these is whether dumbledore can speak parseltongue?

after all, we know it's a language which can be learned by non-parselmouths - since ron manages to speak it in deathly hallows - and so it must have an actual structure rather than just be vibes. and if dumbledore can't understand it, then what the hell did he think was going on in the memory of the gaunts he shows harry?

barty crouch jr. was definitely forced to have endless lessons with tutors hired by his father, who wanted him to match his two hundred languages, but then forgot everything he knew about mermish the second he started school.

i am sure that - even if he doesn't seem to be able to during the canon timeline - bill weasley learns how to speak french fluently the second the war's out of the way. since this is a basic courtesy if your partner and her family is from france.

i am also sure that the three delacour-weasley children are raised to be bilingual, and that they take great pleasure in bitching about the three potter-weasley children to their faces.

the more interesting question, though, is whether bill can speak any gobbledegook.

it's implied that he might through his job - and he's asked in order of the phoenix about whether there's any pro-voldemort talk among the goblins at gringotts, which suggests that he's known to be able to understand any gobbledegook chit-chat he overhears. but it still always strikes me in deathly hallows that the imperialism really jumps out when bill's speaking to harry about griphook:

“I know goblins,” said Bill. “I’ve worked for Gringotts ever since I left Hogwarts. As far as there can be friendship between wizards and goblins, I have goblin friends - or, at least, goblins I know well, and like.”

this really doesn't sound like a man who takes the time to speak to his "friends" in their own language...

the fact that even the good guys treat non-human magical communities with - at best - paternalistic contempt is a really noticeable theme in the series [and, crucially, something which the series doesn't seem to think is a particularly bad thing]. and so i quite like the idea that someone like bill would have a lack of ability to communicate in gobbledegook, and that this would never be something he interrogated.