Putting a second language into your TV show has its challenges: suddenly, you need writers and actors who are either bilingual or fast learners. However, it’s also incredibly effective. Here’s how five shows enriched their themes and made a more complex world with the addition of a foreign language.
The Sopranos
NOW
Amongst (several) other things, the mobster classic looks at how immigrants can lose connection to their native country down the generations.
One episode makes this point particularly poignantly by having an older character, Corrado Soprano (Dominic Chianese), sing in Italian. The friends and family one generation younger lack his fluency, but still understand the lyrics of ‘Core 'ngrato’ well enough to be moved to tears. Their children, however, don’t speak a word of the language of the ‘old country’, and openly mock Corrado.
The use of a foreign language means the viewer is shown, rather than told, just how little connection the younger characters have to their cultural history. This leaves them all the more vulnerable to the foibles of modern, American living the show spends its six series exploring. As an audience, we don’t just know it: we feel it.
Better Call Saul
Netflix
The use of Spanish stops the many South American cartel operatives in the Breaking Bad prequel (and eventual sequel) from turning into one-dimensional stereotypes.
In one scene, cartel apparatchik Don Juan Bolsa (Javier Grajeda) admits to Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) that their colleague, Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), will “never be one of us”. Salamanca makes jokes about Fring’s sexuality, but for talking in Spanish, viewers are reminded of a more region-specific jibe. Fring’s (Mexican) partners-in-crime sometimes dismissively refer to him as the Chilean.
The exchange reminds us that South America is not a single, homogenous identity. Intraregional prejudice is alive and well, bolstering one of the show’s central sources of drama: a shortage of loyalty, making anyone willing to betray anyone.
Shōgun
Disney+
In this adaptation of James Clavell’s novel, communication between Japanese warlords, Portuguese traders and English protagonist John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis, Lady Macbeth) is patchy, at best. Anyone with even the slightest gift for translation wields an extraordinary amount of power.
Most notably, Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai, Pachinko) uses her language skills to subtly control the tenor of Blackthorne and Lord Yoshii Toranaga’s (Hiroyuki Sanada, The Wolverine) conversations. When she translates Japanese to Portuguese and vice versa, she makes small tweaks to keep things running smoothly. In subtitling the Japanese (something the 1980s TV adaptation never did), the 2024 show lets the viewer see just how delicately she pulls the strings. As such, language barriers, and the ability of a select few to capitalise on them, are made central themes.
Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon
NOW
Foreign languages don't even need to be real to have an impact. Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon both feature Valyrian tongues, a family of constructed languages (‘conlangs’, for those in the know) devised by David J. Peterson.
In House of the Dragon, the Targaryens sit on the Iron Throne, making their ancestral tongue of ‘High Valyrian’ the language of royalty, and a sign of status. Fast forward to the events of Game of Thrones, and the Targaryens have been ousted from power, extinguishing the tongue’s popularity in Westeros.
When political developments trickle down into cultural change like this, those developments are made to feel that much more real. The use of foreign languages, then, is an important part of the worldbuilding that makes both Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon so memorable.
