The power of Friulian

Being Human: a 1994 movie starring the late Robin Williams. On the whole the movie is pretty forgettable—except for the one episode in the movie where Hector (Williams) meets a widow (Anna Galiena) with whom he falls in love and she with him. Not much really remarkable in this. Happens a lot. Except for this: that she speaks a language he does not understand, nor does she understand a word of the language he speaks. But both understand one language—the language of love, which presumably (at least according to what we are led to believe in the movie) transcends any merely spoken language. Good point, really. But to make this point it was important for the movie to enable this decidedly alluring widow to speak a language that is not just foreign to Hector, but to the moviegoers as well. In other words, the language, although pleasing to hear, had to be total gibberish for both the protagonists and the audience. So the movie’s director was faced with an intriguing problem: what language was he going to use that would be sure not to be understood by any member of the audience? He had quite a choice to make. He could have met his objective by selecting any one of these European languages: Pite Saami, Karaim, Faroese, or even Basque; or if he was really bent on minimizing the chances that anyone on the audience would understand the language spoken by the widow, he could have chosen from a near endless number of world languages, like Chamicuro, Dumi, Ongota, Liki, Chemehueri, Tamarak, Bakuli, Sanema, Lemerir or—why not?—even Pirahá. Instead he chose Friulian as the language least likely to be understood. (So much for my native language!) On one count, though, he was wrong: if he had really wanted to chose the language least likely to be understood he should have opted for western Friulian (my own brand of the language) rather than the more widely spoken Friulian di là da l’aga (that is, the variant spoken east of the Tagliamento River. All the same, anyone watching the movie outside of Friuli is not likely to have known the difference. What really mattered, though, was that as incomprehensible as it was, the speech of Galiena did at least sound (or was meant to sound) as sweet as the cooing of love should be.