“Nice Blighty!” The linguistic representation of the First World War soldier in The Trench

Trench talk, the slang used by British soldiers during World War One, has numerous complexities and nuances still unexplored. This article seeks to investigate the linguistic representation of this jargon in the film The Trench (1999). By analysing the linguistic features attributable to trench talk, the present study enquires into how these contribute to the fictional representation of the British soldier in this film. The use of trench talk in this case study fulfils different filmic functions such as “character revelation” and “adherence to the code of realism” (Kozloff, 2000).