Language and Communication Quotes in Speaker for the Dead

It's hard to communicate when you don't want to reveal anything about yourself. Think about it next time you're talking to a stranger—What do you tell them about yourself? What could you ask them without letting them know anything about you (even without letting them know what you don't know)? This is why spies have to be so sneaky.

This is a joke—Ender's saying he gets to speak for everyone who's dead. It's not entirely a joke though, since Ender really does get to be the one to tell you about folks who can't speak for themselves. Communication (the Hive Queen, Jane, info about the piggies) goes through him or his consciousness, which does shut down conversation, just as Ender's joke is meant to end the debate with his student. Since Ender is the one who gets to speak, it can be hard to get a word, or a thought, in edgewise.

Pipo is expressing astonishment that the male piggies refer to the female piggies as animals. But of course human males have a long history of talking about and treating human females as less than human. Since the book has so much to say about spouse abuse, you'd think it might mention this.

Ender's fluency in Spanish marks him as a sort of half and half outsider to Lusitania—not entirely a local, but able to make himself understood. It's interesting too that Ender can talk but not listen and understand. He does an awful lot of talking in this book.

Quara's silence outside the family indicates the extent to which the family is cut off from the rest of the community. Ender makes her open up and replaces her father; when the family is healed or whole, then they can talk to others.

Her lies have poisoned Novinha's ability to use language. She can't apologize, and she can't tell truth when she hears it (since Ender always speaks truth.) Though, on the other hand, Novinha's life is a lie—it's in a book of fiction.

Why can't it be clear and slick? Ender is slick, after all; he's very good at manipulating people, and gets cranky when Jane calls him on it. If he'd been in marketing, he could have sold a lot of Diet Coke.

Later we learn that the males do have names for the females, and a wife even gives her name. Maybe this is a sign that the piggies initially seem strange, but eventually become familiar. Or it could just be the book trying to make the piggies seem distant and inhuman and then failing to follow through. You decide.

Piggies have much greater difference between the sexes than men do (men turn into trees, for example), and the different languages emphasize that. Language also emphasizes hierarchy; the way you use words and the way you think says who is in charge. Which suggests that the Speaker for the Dead has a lot of power.

Miro went over the fence to try to escape his community, which had become intolerable. He wanted to be a stranger, and his loss of language makes that happen. Quara starts to speak, and Miro stops. Everyone else is now a productive citizen of Lusitania; Miro has become, like Novinha, an exile in his home.