Have you ever wondered what the smurf those Smurfs are smurfing about the whole day long? Or how the Smurfs can possibly understand each other when they use the word smurf for nearly everything?
Linguistics Behind the Word ‘Smurf’
Though it’s difficult to refer to ‘Smurf language’ as an actual language (it’s more like a nonsense argot 1), its use and purpose align with other artificial languages such as Gromalot 2. Gromalot is the gibberish language used in Commedia dell’Arte, a mediæval form of comedy. Throughout the middle ages, comedy troops traveled all across Europe performing for audiences that spoke many different languages. Therefore, their comedic plays were performed in gromalot so that everyone (that is, no one) could understand them.
But in Smurf language, the word smurf serves as a linguistic construct known in the computer science community as a metasyntactic variable 3 whose meaning is inferred not trough semantics but through pragmatics 4. Through semantics, we understand meaning through grammar and definitions. But through pragmatics, we understand meaning based on the context beyond the literal words.
History of Peyo and ‘The Smurfs’
But where does the word smurf come from? Well, according to legend, in 1958 Belgian comic creator Pierre Culliford (known by the mononym Peyo) was dining with fellow comic artist André Franquin and momentarily forgot the word for salt. So instead, he asked Franquin to pass the “Schtroumpf”. Schtroumpf would be pronounced like the German word for stocking 5.
Excited by their newly coined nonce word, the two gigglepusses continued the day schtroumpfing about until someone had the brilliant idea to turn it into a comic book 6.
In the original French, The Smurfs is actually know as Les Schtroumpfs, but as the comic gained popularity and began translation into other languages, Les Schtroumpfs became The Smurfs in Dutch (and subsequently English). Apparently because the word smurf makes so much more sense…and probably because it contains fewer consonants.
So what does smurf mean? Well, it either means ‘salt’ or it means ‘stocking’ or it means whatever the smurf you want it to mean.
- “Argot” | Merriam-Webster
- National Theatre | “Commedia dell’Arte: Language” | YouTube | 2011
- “Metasyntactic variable” | Wikipedia
- Ladusaw, William | “Meaning (Semantics and Pragmatics)” | Linguistic Society of America
- “Stocking” | Google Translate
- “Pierre Culliford dit Peyo” | Franquin.com