In Chapter V of Portrait, Stephen converses with the dean of University College Dublin, who is English, and reflects on their different relationship to the language they speak:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

The passage speaks to Joyce’s relationship with English and with language in general (important for Finnegans Wake, of course), as well as the Celtic Revival movement that, in Joyce’s day, sought to restore the Irish language (a movement with which Joyce largely disagreed).

This post considers the idea that a language can “belong” to a person in this sense, and it tries to grapple with what Joyce is doing to this idea by writing Finnegans Wake. I even discuss the Bad Bunny Superbowl halftime show controversy — which makes this my most topical post yet!

First, let’s consider what Stephen says above. To our intuitive ways of thinking, in which we consider people as parts of groups that function almost like Platonic forms in our minds, it seems natural and satisfying to conclude that each language “belongs” to a different group, the one that developed it. It further seems natural to decide that forcing one group to speak a language that “belongs” to another group is more than the offense of imposing unwanted behavior: it somehow violates the natural “essence” of a “people” by robbing them of something that is “theirs.” Of course someone’s soul would “fret” in the “shadow” of a language not its “own.”

I ought to hasten to say that, obviously, the history of colonialism is particularly brutal and disgusting, and it is easy to see how the victims of such a system would value a language that they consider to be their “own.” Perhaps the best exponent of such a view is African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, whose book Decolonizing the Mind explores this idea at length. Thiong’o argues, basically, that the language spoken by a people is intimately linked to their culture and bonds to each other.

But even basic reflection on the evolution of language and of people calls into question the idea that there are easy divisions of people and language in which one could “belong” to the other. The world isn’t Platonic: it’s evolutionary. Languages, like people, slowly develop and transform through increments, and — like people — languages intermix, change, and mingle, to the point where it’s a fool’s errand to try to disentangle them.

It’s a useful exercise to try to visualize this by imagining the first Italian speaker. We all know that the Italian language descended from Latin. Very slowly over time, Latin transformed into Italian, or rather dialects of Italian, among certain populations. But who was the first speaker of one of these Italian dialects? Immediately, the mind rebels because the question doesn’t work: it implies that someone was a “first” speaker, which means he would have been raised by people who spoke a different language. Can you imagine a Latin-speaking family raising a child who somehow starts speaking Italian? The very idea is absurd.

This is analogous to asking when the “first human” arose, or the first of any species, because it implies that parents of one species gave birth to offspring of a different species. The question doesn’t make sense.

The problem we’re running into is that our minds often intuitively insist on seeing things in Platonic terms. To our minds, “Italian” and “Latin” are definite, stable things, just as a “species” is. In fact, however, languages and living species evolve and transform constantly, and are in a constant state of flux. Terms like “Italian” or “human” are convenient, though to some degree falsifying, labels for some part of this flux.

Think of it this way: every person grows up speaking the same language as their parents. But slowly, over hundreds and thousands of years, the language itself changes for all of its speakers. Maybe one group of speakers becomes geographically isolated from others, and their ways of speaking change more rapidly. At some point, the language spoken by this group is different enough from the original language that we can apply a different label to it, but there’s no firm moment where the change happens, no “first speaker” of the “new” language. It’s the same with species: everything is the same species as its parents, but species change over time, and eventually we can apply a new label. Languages and species aren’t stable “things” out there in the ether. There’s no “essence” of a language or “essence” of a species called human. They’re labels we apply to a reality that’s constantly changing.

So let’s return to the issue of language “belonging” to a people. Seen in these terms, nothing could be more ridiculous than the assertion that there’s some stable group that somehow owns a stable way of speaking.

But when young Stephen/Joyce regards the English language as alien, I don’t know if he’s necessarily advancing a well-thought-out theory of language or evolution. He’s just reacting to his knowledge of English colonialism, the fact that the way he speaks was forcibly and horrifically imposed on his most recent ancestors (“recent” in evolutionary terms — anything under a thousand years ago, like the history of English colonialism in Ireland, is the equivalent of “moments ago” in evolutionary terms). The word “master” creates different emotions when it comes from the mouth of an Englishman speaking to an Irishman, as those same phonemes were used in the very recent past by the English cruelly dominating the Irish.

It raises a question, though: if Stephen had been born thousands of years in the past and grown up speaking Irish (one of the many different styles of speaking from history that could be called some form of the Irish language), would that feel to him any more like “his” language? Or would he recognize that that Irish language, too, was imposed upon him by his society, its ruling class, and his family (a part of the entire society, which, like all societies, functions by repressing to some degree the desires of individuals in it)? Stephen in twentieth-century Dublin wants to “fly past the nets” of nationality, language, and religion — would he have been content speaking Irish thousands of years ago?

I think we have to admit that language is never our own, unless you’re JRR Tolkien or something and actually invent your own language from scratch (and even he, I understand, based his fantasy languages to some degree on existing tongues). The language we grow up speaking is always imposed on us by people outside of us, people who might be “our people” from one way of looking at it but who are “others” from a different way of looking at it. What about people who grow up in a small, insular community where more or less the same language has been spoken for centuries? Would they necessarily feel the freedom of speaking their “own language,” or would at least some of them chafe under the weight of tradition and familial repression, coming to see the language of the family as part of the tradition imposed on the individual, bringing limitation and restriction?

Two things can be true at once. Language can be a tool of colonial domination, used by one “people” against another “people,” and it can also be a tool of societal domination, used within a group of “people” to impose their values and traditions upon their “own people.”

Heavy scare quotes. There’s no such thing as a “people,” ultimately. Each individual is an individual. “People,” like “language” is a story we’ve made up. But we can’t navigate the world without these fictions. The best we can do is keep it at the forefront of our minds that these are convenient fictions, not absolute truths, not stable “things” floating in the ether.

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Stephen’s reflection that English is “so familiar and so foreign” is a description that would apply to all of our relationships with our native tongue. The language we grow up speaking is intimately familiar to us, and yet it is simultaneously something created by other people, something alien that has invaded our consciousness and has even constituted us, to the extent that we “construct” ourselves and our understanding of the world through language.

The phrase “so familiar and so foreign” makes me think of Freud’s idea of the uncanny. Basically, Freud’s argument was that we find things uncanny when they are strange things that nevertheless remind us of things deeply familiar: material we have repressed, including especially beliefs and wishes from childhood. The phrase also makes me think of Lacan’s idea that the unconscious is structured like a language: the unknown region of the mind is to some degree actually intimately familiar to us, as it works in a manner analogous to the language we use everyday and it contains the forces that drive our behavior, yet it is the great Other from which we derive our ideas of ourselves.

FInnegans Wake is, in a sense, defamiliarizing language itself. Primarily, it defamiliarizes English by presenting a “basically English” language, a “Wakese,” if you will, with words that at least resemble English words arranged in ways that more or less follow English syntax. But “Wakese” has refracted English through a mirror of the dreaming mind. Here, words aren’t stable things, pointing to definite meanings. In the same way that “languages” and “peoples” are an ever-changing flux, the words of the Wake mix and match and transform. The opening word of the novel, “riverrun,” announcing this flux, echoes the French reverons (“let us dream”), and transforms later in the novel into words such as “reverence” and “Reverend.” Never far behind is the ghost of the word “reverie.” Practically every word and phrase in the Wake works like this, weaving in between multiple words and phrases in multiple languages and transforming across the dreamscape of the text. Not just English, but language and communication itself is destabilized. These aren’t words with fixed meanings that we can look up in a dictionary. The annotations give us hints of the other words summoned by these words, and our own thoughts, readings, and experiences supply more contexts in which they can generate meaning. But there is no single “meaning” to any given word, and not even a stable set of meanings. Each reader, and each reading, brings more context, and more interpretation to bear on the context. To open the Wake, point to a word, and demand to know what it “means” is to misunderstand the Wake entirely.

In a way, the Wake forces all of us to regard language itself in its alien aspect. To our normal way of thinking, swimming in language, we don’t notice how uncanny this familiar-yet-strange part of ourselves is. It is us and not us. It is “ours” and never fully ours. The defamiliarizing effect of the Wake can help us break our waking daydreams in which we assume that “our” language lets us establish stable meanings, in a world populated by clear divisions of “us” and “ours” and “theirs.” Suddenly regarding language itself — any language, all language, the act of using language — as a foreign language, we are unable to maintain the daydreams that produce our suffering. We can glimpse, maybe just for a moment, the riverrun that we ride, the constant transformations that make everything impermanent.

In writing this post, I have paced back and forth, straining to allow language to pour out of my unconscious and through my conscious mind, which shapes and arranges these words, but is in no sense their ultimate source. This language emerges from me, but is it “me”? Is this post “mine,” or is it language itself — familiar yet alien — speaking through me?

The Wake examines possession — the idea that anything, let alone a language, could “belong” to someone else — through the brother battle of Shem and Shaun and the zero-sum fallen world, in which “I cannot now have or nothave a piece of cheeps in your pocket at the same time and with the same manners as you can now nothalf or half the cheek apiece I’ve in mind” (I.6). One way to take this passage is the idea that money and possessions cannot be shared in the same way that thoughts can be. As a representative of the world of space, Shaun believes in possessions, that individuals and groups can “own” things and be “owed” things. Again, to some extent we need the fictions of individuals, groups, and ownership to navigate life and have a society at all. But Shaun believes in these fictions as unwavering truth. He believes in essences, in stable identity. And we see where it gets him: he moralizes, he scolds, he tries to “cancel” Shem. He is the demagogue politician, the dogmatic priest, the capitalist, the sexist, the chauvinist nationalist, the inferior artist, the “AI Bro.”

As I write this, a few days after the Superbowl 2026, I’m reminded of the latest bizarre controversy over nothing: some people absolutely lost their minds over the fact that the Superbowl halftime show this year was performed entirely in Spanish, while other people celebrated the show as some kind of victory for something.

Having watched this performance, I’m baffled at the idea of having a strong reaction one way or the other. It was a pop music act featuring extremely popular songs, so it’s about what I’d expect for a Superbowl halftime show. The music was not really to my personal taste, but it was competently performed, and I’m sure the show generated a lot of money for certain wealthy people. That’s about the size of my take on it. If I had grown up speaking Spanish, would I see the show as some sort of triumph for “my group” (defined in some sort of way)? I don’t think so. Maybe, in a similar way to young Stephen understandably feeling emotions toward English, I would understandably think it’s cool that “my” (in some ways under-represented) language was showcased on such a large stage. I suppose some people might see the celebration of Spanish, a language spoken by many immigrants, to be a symbolic repudiation of white supremacist attitudes and/or the deplorable recent actions of ICE. I could understand being excited about that message, implicit though it is.

But I have a difficult time wrapping my head around people who saw the show as an affront to…something? An affront to their warped idea of America, I guess? Some of these people were so offended that they went off and made their own halftime show, with blackjack and hookers Kid Rock. Nothing says “we speak English in this country” like a show featuring a song whose lyrics include “Bawitdaba, da-bang, da-bang, diggy-diggy-diggy.” Couldn’t you just imagine the angry character “Justius” — who is a guise of Shaun at the end of Chapter I.7 — extending his speech to rave against, get worked up over, and treat as a serious threat…someone who calls himself “Bad Bunny”? It’s a kind of absurd joke that I think Joyce would also find funny.

Speaking of bunnies: The Shaunish narrator of I.7 reports, while noting that Shem has “nursed such a spoiled opinion of his monstrous marvellosity,” that Shem compares himself to a “bunnyboy rodger” who experiments with language in a way that threatens English speakers:

he was foxed fux to fux like a bunnyboy rodger with all the teashop lionses of Lumdrum hivanhoesed up gagainst him, being a lapsis linquo with a ruvidubb shortartempa, bad cad dad fad sad mad nad vanhaty bear, the consciquenchers of casuality prepestered crusswords in postposition, scruff, scruffer, scrufferumurraimost andallthatsortofthing, if reams stood to reason and his lankalivline lasted he would wipe alley english spooker, multaphoniaksically spuking, off the face of the erse.

With all those cursewords and crosswords (crusswords) in his foregn-language art that enemies cannot understand, Shem would wipe any English speaker, metaphorically speaking, off the face of the earth. So he’s not talking about murder: he’s talking about metaphor, about multiple phonemes, about his own status as a sham (“molto phony,” maybe?). “Erse” suggests earth, arse, and the Irish language. Shem insists that his performance of a foreign language — Wakese — will wipe away those who insist on English, those ghosts/spooks who haunt the earth with their belief in otherworldly Platonic forms, with their insistence on a single tongue (“spuken,” means “to haunt” in German).

This silly halftime show controversy is a fine example of how people can be misled into thinking that a language is a stable thing that “belongs” to some stable group. To some people, English isn’t a continuously evolving linguistic tradition with influences from Germanic tribes, the Romans, the Norse, the French, etc., with millions of speakers evolving different dialects and slang and manners of speaking. They think that English is some kind of stable, Platonic “thing,” that it’s “supposed to be spoken” in the USA, and that featuring a different language in a quintessentially American ritual like the Superbowl halftime show is some sort of offense.

But, of course, the balancing factor here is that if a huge group of people living in the same country is going to cooperate in a society, we need some kind of common means of communication and some kind of “standard rules” for communicating, as more or less arbitrary as they may be. An unofficially official language like Standard English may be one of those “useful fictions” I spoke of earlier. A language is not some Platonic Ideal floating in the ether, not some Absolute to which all people must adhere if they are to be part of the Proper Group; but it equally won’t do to chuck out all rules for communication entirely, to have each person speaking their own personal language, each making up their own Finnegans Wake as they go.

As ever, we need to learn how to make use of useful fictions while recognizing that they are not absolute, that they are not essences that define us or belong to us. But that’s hard for our minds to do.

At the end of Finnegans Wake, the Shaunish figure of St. Patrick — who is more or less a reconstituting HCE, preparing to rise from slumber — defeats the (Shemish) Druid or Cad part of himself and notes how, in the land of space and waking consciousness, people and objects are distinct, discrete things, and things can belong to people:

My tappropinquish to Me wipenmeselps gnosegates a handcaughtscheaf of synthetic shammyrag to hims hers

This sentence puzzled me on previous reads of the novel. My current interpretation is based on the fact that “t’appropinqui” is apparently archaic Italian for “you come near, you approach.” But it also sounds like “appropriate,” to take for oneself. Right now, I take it to mean that “My” (possessions, things that are mine) comes near to “Me” and are things that I can appropriate to me (perhaps by their proximity or propinquity), just as other objects (like the shammy towel or handkerchief or shamrock that Patrick catches up in his hand) belong to others (they are “hims” and “hers”), yet Patrick proceeds to appropriate that object for himself too by wiping himself (wipenmeselps) and specifically wiping “his arse” (hims hers).

The Shaunish perspective thinks in terms of ownership, rather than sharing, and he appropriates objects (which, from his perspective, would include language) to himself. Yet at the same time, “hims hers” can also be “his hurts,” noting that our concepts of ownership and being “owed” can and do result in pain for us. The reference to “his arse” might also mean that Shaun makes an ass out of himself.

It’s interesting to compare the two instances of “wiping” from the Wake that I have produced here. While Shaun wipes himself with what he appropriates — insulting others and asserting his superiority to them as he takes for himself what he wants — Shem seeks to wipe away the “english spookers,” those English speakers who believe in their ghostly Platonic realm of stable identity and property.