Communication needs in the military

By their very nature, armies, navies, air forces, and other military formations have special communication needs and problems, and as a result, need to develop language policies. At first examination, this might be expected to be a strictly pragmatic domain, with practical considerations ruling efficient decision-making, but here too there turn out to be external and symbolic forces.

As a rule, language management in the military depends on a number of definable parameters. First, there is the question of the organizational level: a different kind of management is needed at the level of the smallest fighting unit and at the level of the large combinations that armies form. We might perhaps loosely characterize these levels by the rank of the commander. The sergeant in a multilingual military formation needs to be able to communicate with the soldiers in his section and also with the officer commanding his company or regiment (I use these ranks and unit terms very loosely, understanding that they will vary for different armies at different times). Non-commissioned officers in multilingual armies generally serve much the same kind of function as foremen in factories, passing on orders received from their superiors in the official dominant language and using the vernacular to communicate with the rank-and-file soldiers. The sergeant's problem, then, might be characterized as the need to have soldiers speaking a common language and to understand the language used by their immediate commanders.