by Alden Rose

With words being a sort of white noise to the images that surround us, studying a television show with no explicit verbal context was interesting. Television shows have become soaked in visual imagery that gives the viewer layers of information to sort through, often hard to separate from basic elements like character relationship or narrative. Pingu is a Swiss claymation television show that first aired in 1986 and came out with some new episodes in 2004 (but definitely not as good). The show is about a community of penguins that’s pretty much it, but they do not speak a recognizable language.

They lack words in their communication, but what is retained? Levinson talks about deixis as “the ways in which language encodes or grammaticalizes features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance.” In other words, there are many different elements that contribute to the meaning of speech acts, context being one of the most important. He talks about the context specificity of pronouns, demonstratives and tense, but for Pingu where there aren’t any words, so we have to work with a partial deixis.

In this clip, Pingu and his friend start playing hopscotch. You actually see them playing the game, a cooperative event. Even without words their speech acts provide tone, inflection, and temper. You can see that they are successfully engaging in a conversation, even though the content remains unknown.

Next, an adult penguin rides in and interrupts their game, using a more aggressive and authoritative voice. As he cleans their game up, Pingu’s speech becomes rapid and agitated, implying annoyance and even defiance.

Many productions draw on preexisting social contexts to define a character’s roles, with a great deal based in a culture and language. The relationships between these anthropomorphized penguins emerge as we pick up visual and auditory clues, such as the adult yelling at Pingu. Like the hidden indexical components (Hanks 159) in Hanks’ Don Chabo exchange, all speech acts are extremely relational. Some viewers may find it offensive that Pingu has in a sense talked-back to the man (though we only know this because of his tone and gestural usage), while others may find it acceptable and even humorous.

The adult’s next few actions come off as odd, as he draws a red box ontop of their game, and puts up a sign with a “P” on it (parking maybe) and a sign with a penguin and a ball with an X on it. He has just designated this as his parking spot, but the viewer only comes to this conclusion after his actions are completed. Without words, other aspects of linguistic communication are amplified

It is interesting that someone has put captions in Swedish for the show.  The Swedish captions, though not understood by us, give more verbal encoding than is originally implied by the show’s ambiguous language. Youtube had been a goldmine of redefining the meaning of speech acts in another language by using captions. Such as .

This type of open-language is also used in many role-playing computer games, such as The Sims.

These types of undefined languages can draw from all aspects of language; specific accents or a certain cultural vocal pattern can be used. But without words, these languages really do become universal, allowing you to interpret deixis personally. As Pearson (the woman interviewed in the previous clip) finds, “I can make up whatever I want about it.”

Pingu and The Sims draw an international audience, aided by their peculiar languages, but appeal to the creativity provided by this open indexicality. The viewer is given much less information, so the majority of the context is left for them to decide. “It is the minute details of linguistic structure that coordinate this awareness and make it known with a delicacy unparalleled by any other mode of expression.” (Hanks 165) You can pick up on the relational meaning of these indexicals because of structure of language and how much our interpretation relies on the referential content provided outside of word meaning and usage.