Westworld Language Barriers

Published May 22, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey guys,

In this week’s Deep Dive, you suggested that the way it was supposed to work, as per Lee, is that once you spoke in English, the hosts should understand you, but they couldn’t speak back in English. That’s not quite true. What Lee said is that they should have switched over immediately to speaking English when he, as a human guest, spoke English at them. The hosts don’t consciously know these languages. Maeve does, because as Lee said, she’s a madam and that’s important for that role. He said she is “consciously fluent” in multiple languages. She can speak Japanese, because she’s a madam, and we saw her do that in Season 1 with some Japanese guests.

It has nothing to do with her awake-ness status or her god-mod abilities. All the hosts have those languages buried in their code, and could switch over if a guest needed it, but they have core languages for their character. Hector speaks English and Lakota, so that’s what he speaks. He doesn’t understand Japanese. Now that the hosts are free from their normal core programming, they stick to their languages, and don’t switch for humans anymore. To counter Big D’s complaint, the reason Stubbs said “freeze all motor functions” in English before he was captured is because he’s human. Because he reads as human, if he says commands in English, hosts switch over to English and obey during normal park operations. Maeve is a host, so when she said English commands to the Ghost Nation, they didn’t obey, because their core language is Lakota, and the new free from constraints hosts don’t even switch over for humans anymore, let alone other hosts. Now, if she sees them again, and she knows Lakota, she will be able to control them.

Love the show

-John G.

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