I watched Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in theaters a few weeks ago. It was a real treat to see on the big screen with all my friends, a true blockbuster experience. Having read dozens of reviews of it since, it appears a critical consensus is forming that Wakanda Forever wasn’t quite as groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting, and awe-inspiring as its predecessor, due to many factors, including those outside anyone’s control. But I liked it a lot. And I’m not here to talk more about plot (or plot holes), narrative structure, casting, or performance; that’s all been covered by everyone else. I’m just here to talk about language.
What struck me more than anything else about the movie during my initial viewing experience was the prominent use of Yucatec Mayan throughout the film. (Okay, that’s a bit of a fib: what actually struck me more than anything else was the image of Namor descending onto his throne in his serpent-god headdress, as well as every other scene with Namor in it, because he is simply mesmerizing. Anyway.)
From a linguist’s point of view, I thought that the creative choice to highlight an indigenous language was both fantastic and a bit discombobulating if you think about it too hard. Naturally, I thought about it too hard.
Mayan is one of the hundred or so language families of the world (on the same phylogenetic level as Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and Sino-Tibetan), and within this family, Yucatec Maya is spoken by over seven hundred thousand people in the Yucatán Peninsula geographic region, on the southeastern tip of modern-day Mexico and northern Belize. Some cool linguistic facts about Yucatec Maya is that it is a tonal language (rare for its language family) and its consonant inventory includes implosives and ejectives (common for its language family). Before Spanish colonization and genocide in Mesoamerica during the 16th century and onward, Mayan languages were written in glyphs (which I had to learn how to translate in one of my college linguistics courses many years ago…), though today they are written using the Latin alphabet.
Earlier this year, I traveled to Playa del Carmen, Tulum, and Cozumel, which are all in the Yucatán, and I remember a tour guide remarking to my friend and me that one of the visible influences of Maya in local Spanish was prodigious use of the letter X. This letter represents the palatal fricative (similar to the “sh” sound in English) and is found in some place names such as Xcaret and Yaxcopoil. (Even though “Mexico” has an X in it, the country’s name is derived from Nahuatl, not Maya.) But our guide had a bone to pick with the letter X, because, as he explained, local tourism companies have caught on to the fact that visitors are enticed by the “exotic-sounding/looking” names with X’s in them and have capitalized on this by bestowing some very awkward names onto some very un-traditional attractions, including the very dubious “Xightseeing Xcursions” company.
Even Mexicans think of the Yucatán as a fairly “exotic” part of their country, resplendent with palm trees and never-ending nightlife. In the same way that many Americans overlook the indigenous history of basically everywhere in our country, the colonial history of Mexico–though very different from that of the United States–has caused its indigenous population to be misunderstood and invisibilized. The Mayan languages have largely been erased under the influence of Spanish.
So here is what Wakanda Forever does quite beautifully and subversively: it dedicates several very moving and compelling scenes to tell the backstory of the villain Namor’s underwater kingdom, Talokan, and it has all of the denizens of the hidden city, except for Namor himself, speak Yucatec Maya for all of their dialogue. Every single line from the (mostly aqua-masked) Talokanil was subtitled for viewers to read in an elegant blue script.
This is very cool for representation. The film took a longstanding Marvel character, who up until now has always been associated with the fictional Atlantis, and retconned his story to place it in a real-world context that will be immediately familiar to some viewers and intriguingly mysterious to others, but is nevertheless almost completely absent in Hollywood vernacular. It’s still fantasy, but it’s a kind of fantasy that is deeply rooted in an utterly non-fictional history and culture.
It is especially important for the Black Panther franchise to have done this, because the fictional kingdom of Wakanda, portrayed in the first film with the same focus on a realistic fantasy, needed Talokan to be its foil. Namor’s motivations in the film stem from his understanding that the Western world’s pillaging of both Africa and Mesoamerica should make Wakanda and Talokan natural allies. But Namor’s (somewhat uncharacteristic) single-mindedness regarding revenge means that Talokan and Wakanda clash, and I won’t get too into the weeds about why this kind of narrative conflict is both necessary and deeply dissatisfying… but the point here is that the film’s portrayals of Talokan and Wakanda can and should be held up to the same mirror.
So here’s where I begin to overthink things. The in-universe explanation for the way language works in Wakanda Forever has to be something like this: The Talokanil are a perfectly-hidden underwater people who descended from Mesoamerican Mayans who escaped colonization and genocide in the 16th century by drinking a magical potion and slipping beneath the waves. Thus, it makes narrative sense that they speak Yucatec Maya and not English. But then what about the Wakandans? In the same universe, Wakanda is a perfectly-hidden African nation who escaped Europe’s carving-up of Africa during the same historical time period. Wakanda used its secret technology to hide away from the world and pose as a visible but extremely poor nation, possibly located somewhere between Kenya, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. And yet, all of the Wakandan characters speak to each other in English.
Yes, admittedly, it is English with a distinctly African accent, one that the actors specifically worked on with dialect coaches to get it to be a blend of some types of Western or Southern African English accents. But why was English used at all? English is the language of the colonizer, as Shuri would joke, and everything about Wakanda is fervently anti-colonial. There is even a Wakandan language used all throughout both Black Panther films, based on Xhosa (a Niger-Congo language spoken in South Africa that, incidentally, is also tonal and has implosives and ejective consonants, just like Yucatec Maya, as well as tons of click consonants). But as linguists from the University of Cape Town noted in a recent article, the use of Xhosa as Wakandan in the first Black Panther film was occasional, sometimes haphazard, and not given much narrative importance.
The cynical (and more realistic) take on this is that the directors and producers needed the actors to use English because this is a Marvel movie, set in a cinematic universe where everyone speaks English, even aliens from distant galaxies, and because this is a Hollywood film, created by an industry where English has always been a dominant language no matter where or when in the world a film takes place. There’s an interview with Chadwick Boseman (Rest In Power) where he explains how he had to insist that his character speak with an African-style accent rather than an American or British one, as part of a nod to the importance of representing dialect diversity. Take that just a few steps further and we could have had superpowered representation of indigenous language diversity, too!
Instead, some curious audience members are left to wonder what constellation of cultural, educational, psychological, and emotional circumstances conspired to give us strong, proudly African characters who historically rejected (linguistic) colonization but still ended up speaking the colonizers’ language by choice… especially when we now have strong, proudly Mayan characters who also rejected colonization but only speak their indigenous language.
Is it because Talokan is… underwater? And nobody knew of its existence? While Wakanda was still a part of the modern international community, only with a secret facade of poverty? Limited interactions with the broader world might possibly explain why Namor understands Spanish and speaks English with a Mexican Spanish accent, and there’s no question about why T’Challa, Ramonda, and Shuri use English when conversing with any Westerners. But when it comes to the film’s emotional climaxes and most intimate scenes, between mother and daughter, father and son, or even elder tribal leader and regal queen… it’s hard to justify the lack of Xhosa in such scenes, and easier to understand that the language is simply being used as “cultural window dressing” rather than as an integral structural part of the worldbuilding.
The monolingual use of Yucatec Maya for the Talokanil, on the other hand, may unintentionally signal more than just a tether to a real-world culture. Because most audiences will never understand what the Talokanil are saying, and there are never any scenes that give them any more linguistic familiarity (i.e., by having them speak even an accented English), they come across as being more foreign to American or Western audiences. Well, since Wakandans are also technically “foreign”, perhaps the better word is alien–even in a cinematic universe with real aliens. Also, their skin is blue. This is just my own take, but I think that there’s a link between antagonist roles and overt use of a foreign language here that lots of viewers didn’t catch.
Again, I’m very aware that I’m reading a lot more into this language thing than the film’s art and cultural team likely intended! For most audiences, it’s just, “Talokanil speak Maya and Wakandans speak Xhosa, and that’s awesome,” and I fully agree. The care and attention to linguistic and cultural details, not to mention beautiful and positive portrayals of everyday life for both fictional nations, is laudable.
I’m a fan of subtitles for many reasons, including accessibility, realism, and linguistic diversity. I hope the little we could see here was a small step towards even more diversity and representation in Hollywood.
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Some miscellaneous thoughts:
- I actually do not know what language(s) real-world modern-day African royalty use to talk to one another. I’d imagine that since most of them are educated in English and/or French, they would have no problem using these colonizer languages in both public and private settings. And of course, English is indeed listed as an official language of many post-colonial nations, including Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and others in the same general geographic area that Wakanda is supposed to be in. But Swahili and Arabic are also official or widely-spoken languages of these countries. Will we ever hear these languages spoken by royalty on screen?
- Mayan-inspired pictograms were showed in a few scenes, including one that portrayed Namor as an artist. (Be still, my heart.) As for the Wakandan script, it was made up for the film but based off of a real pictographic system of Nigeria called Nsibidi.
- When the first Black Panther was released, some critics were irked that Wakanda was a blend of different African cultures in terms of its costuming, architecture, and other cultural influences. Its geography doesn’t make sense when there are establishing shots that clearly reference places on the continent that are thousands of kilometers apart from one another. Lots of details scream, “Look, this is pan-African” without as clear of an explanation for “Why is this pan-African?” It makes me wonder whether in order to have anything resembling representation in a science fictional universe, this kind of blending and homogenization is necessary. Would it have been better to base Wakanda solely off of one existing culture’s visual language? In the same vein, Talokan was actually a blend of Aztec and Mayan influences. The name of the city itself comes from Tlālōcān, a kind of realm of the afterlife in traditional Aztec sacred culture, and Namor’s kickass headdress is Aztec, not Mayan. (Folks on Reddit had a fun time arguing about whether he was Aztec or Mayan when the teaser trailer first dropped earlier this year, and turns out… he’s kind of both?) Disney, which owns the MCU, actually does this all the time, most notably in Moana (pan-Polynesia), Raya and the Last Dragon (pan-Southeast Asia), and Frozen (pan-Scandinavia… Pandinavia?). But on the other hand, it can do just as good a job imbuing fantasy into individual cultures as well: think Coco, Encanto, and Brave. There is admittedly a very blurry line between appropriation, appreciation, homogenization, and authentic representation when it comes to fantasy, and… I don’t really want to wade into this mess, but my two cents are that there is no single set of rules that will work for every story or every culture, so as audiences we can afford to be both critical (as in using critical thinking, not just being negative) and forgiving.
- Another place for indigenous language representation was, of course, in the movie soundtrack. It was understandably awkward when Namor finished a story about the trauma of Spanish-speaking colonizers destroying his home, only to have a song sung in Spanish grace the next scene. But the song was gorgeous (“Con La Brisa” by Foudeqush, a Mexican singer, and Ludwig Göransson), and at the very least, there were other tracks that featured indigenous Mayan artists or instruments, such as “Laayli’ Kuxa’ano’one“, by ADN Maya Colectivo.
- And finally, indigenous representation is important because it is about people, not just culture in the abstract sense. At least one of the actors playing the Talokanil is of Mayan descent, in particular María Mercedes Coroy, who plays Namor’s mother. Namor’s actor, Tenoch Huerta, does not identify as indigenous but has spoken out about racism, colorism, and indigenous rights and representation in Mexican media. I’d love to see more American actors do the same.
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Word of the Day: a cenote is a sinkhole commonly found in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Cenotes can range from small water-filled pits to extensive underwater cave systems. The word was borrowed into Spanish from the Maya tz’onot. Other Maya words in common use in Mexico include chichi (grandma), báalam (jaguar), and words for various body parts and foods.
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