Languages and the First World War: Representation and Memory

With several terms from the First World War still present in modern speech, Languages and the First World War presents over 30 essays by international academics investigating the linguistic aspects of the 1914-18 conflict.
The first of the two volumes covers language change and documentation during the period of the war, while the second examines the representation and the memory of the war.

Communicating in a Transnational War examines languages at the front, including the subject of interpretation, translation and parallels between languages; communication with the home front; propaganda and language manipulation; and recording language during the war.

Representation and Memory examines historiographical issues; the nature of representing the war in letters and diaries; the documentation of language change; the language of representing the war in reportage and literature; and the language of remembering the war.

Covered in the process are slang, censorship, soldiers' phrasebooks, code-switching, borrowing terms, the problems facing multilingual armies, and gendered language.

Julian Walker is a British Library educator, an artist and writer. His books on language include Discovering Words, Team Talk: Sporting Words and their Origins and Trench Talk.

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.