Language - communication or excommunication?

This morning I'm writing this blog post from Helsinki, Finland.  I'm at the World Science Fiction Convention, and I'm surrounded by people from all over the world.  And that's got me thinking about the role of language in our lives and stories.  

I'm currently in a country where I can't read a word of the native language. Even the map of Helsinki I have doesn't label places in English.  This is an ususual situation for me.  The countries I've travelled to before all used English as their native language, albeit in their own particular ways.  But it isn't too difficult to substitute 'restroom' for 'toilets', or 'elevator' for 'lift' and still understand what's required of you.  But Finland is different.  All the names are so long, and my eyes have to break them down into chunks to make any sense of them.

Fortunately, the Finns speak English too, most of them well, so this isiolation isn't complete.  But what must it feel like to be a refugee in a country where you don't understand a word of the language?  We usually use language to communicate, but we can also speak another language to exclude people from our conversation, to excommunicate them.

This language issue is one SF writers have to grapple with all the time when writing about alien species.  If our story requires our Human characters to communicate with the aliens then they either have to know, and be capable of, speaking each other's language, or use some form of Universal Translator.

I've used a version of that device for my Sseppaa, the high-intelligence big cats who pad the hallways of Darius Orbital Station in my novel Combined Cognition.  I've given them voiceboxes carried on decorative collars that show the individual cat's personality.

But what about talking to spiders?  The only way my Humans can talk to the Krunnu is by handspeech.  They communicate using sign language.

This afternoon I'm on a panel at Worldcon, talking about, in essence, getting published. Two of the panellists are white, English speaking editors, and I and the other author panellist are both English speaking writers.  So today we'll all be speaking English.  Hopefully, the Finns will be able to understand us.