Iron Man Linguistics

I just saw Iron Man (no no, this is not another movie review ... but you can still read my Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Juno discussions). There is an interesting linguistic side-point to be made about language diaspora in Afghanistan. As the movie opens, our hero, Tony Stark, is kidnapped near Bagram Air Base in northwest Afghanistan's Parwan Province. He is held captive with one other prisoner, a local Afghani doctor named Yinsin (a name carried over from the original comic book I believe, so not particularly Afghani) who says he's from a small town named "Gulmira" (I couldn't find any real town by that name, though it seems to be a fairly common given name). Luckily for Stark, Yinsin speaks "many languages", so he's able to understand some of their captors' shouts and orders, but not all (an interesting aside, the actor who plays Yinsin, Shaun Toub, has a backstory worthy of its own screenplay).

You see, the group which has kidnapped the unfortunate pair goes undefined throughout the movie. We are largely left to draw our own conclusions about their origin, ideology, and motivation (though we get some minor clarification late in the movie). The one thing we learn about their diversity is that they speak a wide variety of languages, as Yinsin lists some of them for Stark. I don't remember the full list, but I believe they included "Arabic, Ashkun, Farsi, Pashto" amongst others. So, kudos to the screenwriters for, in the very least, scanning Ethnologue for an appropriate set of languages to list.

But there's one other language that Yinsin mentions, and it got my attention: Hungarian. A few scenes after Yinsin lists the various languages the group speaks (a list that does not include Hungarian), he and Stark are being yelled at by an unnamed thug. Stark asks Yinsin what he's saying and Yinsin says something like "I don't know. He's speaking Hungarian."

This was meant as a bit of comic relief, I believe. So the screenwriters may have chosen Hungarian at random. Perhaps any language that American audiences would perceive as unusual or unexpected would have done the trick. Perhaps it would have been even funnier if he said "I dunno, he's speaking Comanche (ba dum boom!)." I don't know, but my linguistics radar picked it up and I went searching for any connections Hungary might have with Afghanistan.

Alas, I have found few. I would have to make some serious leaps of logic to connect the dots, and I don't think the movie was going for that. The clarifying scenes late in the movie suggest that this groups' motivations are largely financial, not ideological or political, so we might assume this was some random Hungarian mercenary. As far as I can tell, this is the most logically consistent interpretation (unless I've misunderstood the movie's plot or dialogue, in which case ... never mind).