Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) - Language in Title and Lyrics

Language in Title and Lyrics

The song became so popular throughout the world that speakers of many languages adopted its title phrase, "Que será, será", into their speech, or at least came to recognize it and understand its meaning separate from the music. In spite of the fact that the phrase is not grammatical in any language, the song inspired a sense of ownership in many speakers of different Romance languages, such that they came to feel that the phrase was an altered form of their own respective native languages.

The popularity of the song has led to curiosity about the origins of the saying and the identity of its language. The answer is not simple. It is a centuries-old saying used mainly by English-speaking people. In linguistic terms, "Que será, será" – in the form in which Livingston and Evans adopted it – is a hybrid expression made by superimposing Spanish words on English syntax (somewhat in the way that "Long time no see" consists of English words superimposed on Chinese syntax). Evans and Livingston had some knowledge of Spanish, and early in their career they worked together as musicians on cruise ships to the Caribbean and South America. Composer Jay Livingston had seen the 1954 Hollywood film The Barefoot Contessa, in which a fictional Italian family has the motto "Che sarà sarà" (Italian words superimposed on English syntax) carved in stone at their ancestral castle. He immediately wrote it down as a possible song title, and he and lyricist Ray Evans later gave it a Spanish spelling "because there are so many Spanish-speaking people in the world".

The Romance languages are like English in using a single word for the interrogative what (as in the question "What will it be?"): Spanish qué, Italian che, etc. But, for the "free relative" (non-interrogative) what (as in the assertion "What will be, will be"), unlike English, the Romance languages generally call for a two-word expression: Spanish lo que, Italian quello che, etc. (literally, "that which").

The saying was originally coined, in Italian-as-a-foreign-language, by an English aristocrat of the 16th century (the 1st Earl of Bedford), as his family's heraldic motto. He merged the free relative what with the interrogative what. Soon after that, it appeared in Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus (written ca. 1590; published 1604), whose text (Act 1, Scene 1) contains a line with the archaic Italian spelling "Che sera, sera / What will be, shall be"). From then until the 1950s, the saying appeared in print repeatedly, though not frequently, with both spellings ("Che" and "Que"), first as a motto and later as a spontaneous expression of fatalistic attitude, always in an English-speaking context. The saying has virtually no history in Spain or Italy prior to Doris Day's recording of the song.