A lost dialect.

Anyone old enough to remember nickel candy bars will certainly remember the B movies of those days. One of the most popular genres of the period, and one of my own boyhood favorites, was the jungle adventure, in which an intrepid white man deals summarily with treacherous, dark-skinned locals, often acquiring the devotion of a dusky maiden in the process. Ah, those were simpler, if less equitable, times. They are irretrievably gone by now from all but a few late-night television screens, and I suppose none too soon.

The loss of the jungle adventure, however, has meant the collateral loss of the special dialect of English--let's call it for simplicity "Cinema Primitive'--developed by the screenwriters and consistently spoken by certain natives. Mainly it is the chief who uses Cinema Primitive when he converses with the hero, his evil white antagonists, or his own native advisors (by which we can infer that the dialect derives from the grammar of the indigenous language). The common tribesmen speak that language to one another, mostly at times of stress and in the imperative mood. The chief, too, uses it when issuing orders, and even the hero is capable of it in short bursts. A curious exception, however, is the dusky maiden, who somehow speaks a meticulous Standard English, often with a British accent.

The controlling idea behind the screenwriters' creation of this dialect seems to be the erroneous notion that tribes of hunter-gatherers, along with their crude technologies, must use a language that is somehow also undeveloped, rudimentary, and, in a word, primitive, like them. Yet even though the screenwriters must have conceived this dialect out of linguistic naivete, their creation displays a consistent syntax, as all human languages must. In short, there is correct Cinema Primitive. Interestingly, the dialect in its simplicity conforms not to the realities of the speech of peoples like the Xhosa or the Aleuts, whose syntax is very highly inflected, but projects forward the eight-hundred-year trend of English itself toward the dropping of forms.

All the illustrations in the following descriptive material, by the way, come from nay own embedded knowledge of the dialect. I have seen enough movies of this type, I believe, to qualify as at least a virtual native speaker. The examples themselves will outline a generic plot line of the familiar type.

Most notably different from Standard English are the personal pronouns. The first-person singular is always me, even in the nominative: "Me want you meet my dusky daughter." Similarly, the third-person singular masculine pronoun is uniformly him: "Him come to island on big bird that crash, my daughter. Him hurt. Take care of him."

Strangely, however, she is used nominatively for the feminine form for the feminine pronoun: "I think she like you, Bwana." (By the way, does anyone know the origin of this universal native term for masterful white people?) The other forms inflected in Standard English, we and they, are fully inflected in Cinema Primitive: "We meet with evil trader now"; "Him make many promises to you"; "They not our friends"; and "We tell them come back tomorrow."

The possessives are the same as in Standard English, though sometimes they are omitted: "Evil white trader want marry my daughter, but my daughter not like him," or "Daughter not like him."

Primitives, finally, do not use whom, but then neither does anyone else, mostly. Verbs, too, are less inflected than ours, mainly existing in the basic, or infinitive, form, without regard to person, number, or even tense: "Yesterday we go to camp, find much trouble there." "Tomorrow we go up river." "Him go up river, come back today." The copulative is missing: "Him white trader. Him very treacherous."

Primitive chiefs, as the illustration above shows, do sometimes display a rather sophisticated vocabulary. Usually, however, they don't follow the practice, nearly universal elsewhere, of borrowing technical terms from their visitors, preferring their own labored metaphors. So airplane remains bird throughout the duration of most jungle adventures, rifle remains fire stick, and so forth.

The only regular exception to the infinitive form rule is in the use of the past participle. In the passive, for example, though the copulative verb is gone, the past participial form appears in perfect usage, proving that the natives are capable of inflecting verbs after all: "Our people saved by you, Bwana. We never forget you." "Daughter thrown into volcano to appease gods. She say tell you goodbye."

Articles as well as the conjunctive and are often omitted, though all the prepositions and subordinating conjunctions are present, maybe with the exception of although, a construction calling for rather advanced industrialized thinking, I suppose.

So here is a bare outline. It is hoped that this work will spur others to continue, ferreting out the subtleties, possibly even writing the definitive grammar of the dialect before, like the language of the Easter Islanders, it is forever lost.

Other fascinating cinematic language realms remain to be explored. For example, there is the elaborate, ominously accented English of treacherous viziers who advise cruel caliphs. The main feature of their speech is formality and a lack of contractions ("I do not know the infidel's whereabouts, Sire, but he must die!"). It survives today in the speech of villains in the Saturday morning cartoons ("Seize them! They must not be allowed to escape!") and some sci-fi aliens--but not in the Star Wars series, where aliens except for Yoda speak idiomatic American English.

Another possible area of study is the dialect of film gangsters, slightly punch-drunk in pronunciation and full of pleonasms ("The boss, he wants to see you!").

I leave that work to other scholars.

[Conrad Geller writes film reviews" for Cineaste magazine. He is formerly chairperson of the Committee on Public Doublespeak of the National Council of Teachers of English.]

Conrad Geller

Mount Kisko, New York