One of the scariest films ever made is the 1984 production Threads, directed by Mick Jackson from a script by Barry Hines. It is possibly the most realistic depiction of nuclear war and its effects ever put on film. This article gives you an idea of the impact it has on viewers. Perhaps the most frightening thing about it is the picture it paints of a modern country regressing to a pre-industrial, primitive way of life, but with diseases, contaminations and piles of junk that ancient and medieval society never had to deal with. It’s not just wrecked, it’s poisoned. It’s a place where people who were once driving cars, working regular jobs, and shopping in supermarkets are reduced to scratching a Brueghelian landscape with a hoe until they drop dead from radiation-induced sickness.
The generation born into this ruined land is characterized by its crippled and distorted language. In one scene, a girl born shortly after the catastrophe is confronted by some tough boys, who are attempting to steal her rabbit. The dialogue looks like this in the script:
“Oi! What that be?” “Coney.” “Give us 'em. Give us 'em. Better, else us'll pry 'em.” “Best stand off, else tha'll get it.” “Give us 'em. Where you stopped at? Come with us?” “Where?” “Come on. Us place.”
This fractured dialect has supposedly taken hold only 13 years after the disaster. As a way of showing the destruction of education, family ties, and culture, it’s effective. As a realistic linguistic representation, it’s dubious. Language simply doesn’t change that quickly. Even if these kids never went to school, their language would not break down into these rough fragments. It is more likely that they would speak fluently, but without observing the rules of standard grammar. The same girl – pregnant – appears in the last scene, unable to say anything more articulate than “babby – coming.” The overall impression is that the young generation is suffering from mental retardation, which indeed may be the effect the filmmakers wanted to create.
Ray Bradbury’s classic yet flawed time-travel story, “A Sound of Thunder,” does something similar, this time using orthography. When the story starts, the thrill-seeker Eckels reads the safari company’s sign (“You name the animal. We take you there. You shoot it”) before he enters the time machine. Back in the prehistoric past, he panics at the sight of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, wanders off the path, and crushes a butterfly. Arriving back in the year 2055, he notices that everything has become subtly different. The sign at the beginning of the story now reads: “Yu naim the animal. Wee taek yu their. Yu shoot itt.”
Bradbury’s approach is also effective in terms of shock value, but on closer inspection, it doesn’t hold up very well. The only thing that has changed about the English language is the spelling. In other respects, it remains the same. This is made clear by the brief bit of dialogue at the end, where we are told that Eckels’ prehistoric panic attack changed the outcome of a presidential election.
It's possible that Bradbury was trying to shock us not with changes in language, but with orthographic reform. However, the point of such reform is to make the written language easier to write, and more in line with the spoken language. The re-spelling of English in “A Sound of Thunder” does not accomplish this; it looks like the scribblings of a semi-literate grade schooler.
Finally, we have a dystopia that gets the language right, in the shape of Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel Riddley Walker. As with Threads, it deals with life in England following a nuclear catastrophe, but unlike the film, the novel’s action takes place many centuries into the future. The entire story is told from the title character’s point of view, using a form of English that is shattered and distorted but, in contrast to the dialect in Threads, forms a complete and convincing language in itself. Here’s the opening sentence:
“On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt been none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.”
One could well imagine this kind of speech forming the basis for a new standard language to emerge as civilization makes a comeback, just as the Romance languages of today evolved out of Vulgar Latin dialects spoken mostly by illiterates. Indeed, this whole post-apocalyptic society has suffered a dark age-style crash in literacy, and is left to try to make sense of the remnants of civilization in whatever way it can. As one character says, “bint no writing for 100s and 100s of years til it begun agen nor you wunt never get a strait story past down by mouf over that long … theyre all bits and blips and all mixt up.”
It comes as no surprise to discover that one of the earliest reviewers of Threads was Russell Hoban, who reviewed it in the BBC magazine The Listener, four years after Riddley Walker was published.
If you’re feeling brave, you can watch Threads in its entirety here. The bit with the fractured language starts shortly after the 1:45 mark.