Don't shout at the Danes...

... was a tip dished out to Allied troops in Europe during the Second World War. Hilary Footitt explores the loaded issue of adding foreign-language skills to the foot soldier's armoury.

It is easy to forget that most wars - World, Cold or on Terror - are fought between people who speak different languages. The ways in which foreign languages are represented to soldiers, and coped with in these traumatic situations, can tell us a lot about the sort of war we are fighting.

Take the liberation of Europe in 1944. Allied Command was faced with the fact that soldiers would be entering several European states that were or were to become allies. The nightmare scenario was that they might behave badly due to cultural misunderstanding. The subtext of some of the planning for the liberation of Europe was an implicit fear that British and American soldiers might end up behaving a great deal worse than the Germans.

In this situation, foreign languages were an important part of creating a good ambassador image. Clear efforts were made before the landings in Europe to prepare soldiers linguistically. Before D-Day, the American Forces Network in Britain ran a series of French lessons on radio, repeating the same phrases over six weeks, and reprinting them in the troop magazine Yank . The first three weeks covered expected ground: "Good day", "I don't understand", "Speak slowly, please". Weeks four and five included more military phrases: "Where is the nearest aircraft landing area?" The final week, headed "Here are the ones you've been waiting for", featured:

"Do you want a cigarette?", "I am/am not married", and "My wife doesn't understand me".

In addition to using the radio, Allied Command included a foreign-language section in the soldiers' Pocket Guides, produced for each country to be entered.

What was particularly interesting about these linguistic preparations was how foreign languages were represented as part of the natural fighting experience of the Allies. The Americans reminded their soldiers that Allied fighting forces were polyglot. At Eastern Command, GIs in Russia were depicted as communicating happily with Russian colleagues. One report spoke of how "the GIs have picked up some Russian in exchange for their American slang, and have given the words their own jive twist". Many American troops, of course, came from immigrant backgrounds where the languages in question were spoken, and this natural advantage was generally treated positively. One guide, for example, said: "If you are an American of Italian origin, you will be sure of a warm welcome anywhere."

Acquiring foreign languages was represented to the soldier as an attainable skill. Danish, for example, was described in the guides as "quite easy to learn to read, but much more difficult to pronounce... however, if you use the word and phrase list below, by speaking extremely slowly, you should be able to make yourself understood".

Alongside this positive positioning of foreign languages, soldiers were encouraged to become attentive language learners who capitalised on what they saw in the foreign country. In Romania, US soldiers were advised: "Use your eyes and ears. You will pick up a lot by reading notices in the streets and shops, and headlines in newspapers."

In short, the representation of the expected troop-foreigner relationship was one of linguistic co-operation and courtesy. In Romania, soldiers were advised to ask questions likely to aid, rather than hinder, communication:

"Never ask a question which requires a long answer." Several guides warned the men against shouting loudly in English: "Don't shout when you're talking to a Dane. This won't help him to understand!"

This was all very different, of course, from the invasion of Germany. Whereas preparing troops for the liberation of Europe had been dogged by the fear that they might end up behaving worse than the Germans, the subtext of preparations for troops entering Germany was that soldiers could find themselves moved to dangerous compassion by the sorry state of the country and its civilians. The initial policy had been to keep a clear physical distance between the German people and the Allied troops; it was called "non-fraternisation". This had some important implications for languages. Linguistically, the policy manifested itself in an English first and English above all approach. By ordinance, the official language of the military government was to be English. But there was some uncertainty as to how this dominance of English would operate in practice. Did the policy mean that English had to be used in every situation? As one senior officer pointed out, "theoretically, it may be extremely desirable to speak one's own language to inhabitants and put the onus of understanding... on them. Practically, though, the results of such a course would be delays and confusion."

In any case, German was positioned as the language of last resort. Soldiers were explicitly told: "English is taught in all German secondary schools so that many Germans have at least a smattering of English. In the depths of the country or in working-class districts, you may have to speak German if you cannot get through with the language of signs."

Unlike the languages of the rest of Europe, the linguistic preparation given to troops before they reached Germany was perfunctory. In comparison to the sustained Allied attempts to teach soldiers French, there was only one radio week for German that Yank magazine trailed as "Combat German".

Rather than the personal-relationships vocabulary covered in the French lessons, the German taught on the radio consisted largely of orders: "Stand up!", "Come here", "Shut up", "Surrender". Instead of linguistic co-operation, soldiers were told that the important thing was to maintain a power relationship with German civilians: "It won't make much difference how we spricht the Deutsch - our accent may be lousy. Our words may be wrong. Our grammar may stink. But the Germans will understand," one guide said.

Languages are still very much a part of conflicts today. Take the first two months of the Iraq invasion, March and April 2003, where foreign language issues were treated as technology-soluble. The Coalition used mobile phones to send text messages to Iraqi commanders exhorting them not to fight. More than 40 million leaflets in Arabic were dropped over Iraq. In the event of civilians being encountered, technology was on hand to provide a push-button solution: "phraselators", or Rapid Multilingual Support Units, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could translate phrases that could then be projected through loudspeakers to foreign civilians.

Fairly soon, of course, it became clear that technology alone could not do the linguistic trick. Events moved fast, pushing troops into close contact with Iraqi civilians almost immediately, and they were clearly linguistically exposed. Fergal Keane, the BBC's special correspondent, pointed out that just 24 hours after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad "people watched American troops at checkpoints looking very frightened a great deal of the time, unable in most cases that I came across to speak the local language because they did not have interpreters with them".

Thinking that wars are conducted only in English is as short-sighted as expecting trade relations to be English-only zones. Learning foreign languages is, in a real sense, a matter of survival.

Hilary Footitt is chair of University Council of Modern Languages and author of War and Liberation in France: Living with the Liberators , Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. This article is based on a paper she gave at the annual conference of the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies.