Since I’m all wondering on linguistics and language in animated shows rn, actively curious if in Tron Uprising the programs would be able to understand a language that isn’t english.
Obvi, yeah, dubs exist. But i mean in context in the show’s universe. Flynn built the Grid pretty much for himself, and as far as I know he only speaks english. Would he have bothered to program in a universal translator type of thing? Would programs just understand any User language automatically? Do programs themselves have dialects and accents?? Would Tron, coming from a different Grid, sound different to programs from Flynn’s Grid? Do ISOs have an accent? This is inching ever closer to the tippy top of my “Unnecessary questions about the Grid that I absolutely need answers to, please” list.
I asked The Programming Person in the house at the moment for which programming languages were about at the time and what they might sound like if they were spoken languages.
There would be 3 main Programming languages in use through the early eighties, when Tron was written - Fortran, Assembler, and Cobol.
Fortran is maths based, and we can probably assume it’s what Tron is written in - calculating variables, analysing probabilities, working through immense logic chains, all things Fortran is good for. Chances are that’s why he’s abrupt and wields words like a scalpel - the language is short and to the point, but flexible enough to not get caught in too much of a loop if you know what you’re doing.
Cobol is the “business” programming language, and as someone who has to write business-speak emails a lot? Flowy, vaguely elegant, and far too many words in a sentence. Clu’s probably written in this one - it would be excellent for structuring those grandiose speeches - and it’s probably the one Flynn’s most comfortable using a derivative of, so assuming he coded the Grid and everything on it (which the ISOs evolved from…) the ISOs are probably Cobol-based but with a few extra fancy flourishes.
And finally… Assembler language. This one’s the weird one - probably because its primary use was military and they tend to like simple. Hesitant to break out the stereotypes here, but you know how in some military-setting films you can Tell who the Drill Sargeant is because they have a very distinct (and usually loud) way of talking - short and sharp and as few words as possible to get the meaning across? That’s how I’d expect Assembler language to sound. ((Well. Either that or just outright unintelligible gibberish.))
You need translators to get all 3 to communicate, so we can assume there’s probably some kind of translator element around built into the Grid itself, but how far that stretches into Analogue languages? Unknown, and probably not very.
Accents, however… I want to say Program mirrors the User, but there’s a strange and distinctly artificial undercurrent which varies slightly across systems (so yes, Tron sounds different to Programs on Flynn’s Grid, and for no particular reason I want to say it’s a kind of additional rumble to his words - hence Rinzler’s purr. All he has left is that rumble, as glitched and distorted as it is, and he finds it soothing even if he’s not sure why).