in the beginning there was the word
language, dialect, accent and register: a return to this week two years ago
Hi friends,
Today, a dip into the distant archive for free subscribers and Members not taking part in The Chain because a few things have served to remind me about the still-complicated relationship I have as a user of all three of Scotland's indigenous languages
Two years ago this week, when I first published this piece, I reflected on having wilfully drummed the Scots out of myself in later childhood and adolescence. Thought about what it says to feel shame about your first language, your home language, your mother tongue.
Two years on, and Scots has become a considerable part of my working life. This month, I’ll be judging another Scots literary prize and the research I’m doing is all Scots and Gaelic-related following the announcement of the Scottish Languages Bill which means more funding for us to elevate the status of both languages and support people to use them. As a Scots ambassador in my organisation, I’m popping up at book launches, taking a Scots language qualification and using my voice to speak up for it… But using mostly Standard English to do so. Am I, then, despite all this focus and celebration, guilty of paying yet more unhelpful, academic lip-service? I wonder if it’s because I still don’t really know who I am in these other tongues. Whether I feel authentically myself in them, or ever might again.
Hmm.
It’s got me wondering if you, too, reflect on the versions of self we inhabit when we use different languages, dialects, accents and registers. What unchallenged (and often unconscious) cultural biases and prejudices inform how we speak and to whom.
Here’s that post. Comments are open for all subscribers on this one.
See you over there in the comments, and I’ll be back with Sunday’s guest writer for Week Three of The Chain on Sunday.
Lindsay x
I'm a total hybrid/ mongrel being half Spanish (not a simple identity in itself) and a quarter Irish. I speak Castilian and English, but both have flavours of where I've been and who I've been speaking to. I'm an unconscious mimic, but I love that I have that multiplicity of identity, and that I can swap and change and 'code switch' if necessary, though I'm far more comfortable effing and jeffing (what one boss described as my industrial language 🙄🤣, it was a crap situation. I have purposefully adopted a regional accent as a way of mitigating a town / gown situation, and although I've been in the Midlands for the majority of my years I've never lost my northern vowels, yay! So yes language and accent are identity markers and camouflages and fascinating.
I am SO here for chatting about language and identity and belonging! I was born in England but grew up in Wales and learned Welsh in school from age 5 until 16. I can still understand spoken/written Welsh to a conversational level, but I'm not confident to speak it anymore (and don't get much opportunity living in NE England!). I also feel like a total imposter claiming any kind of Welsh identity because I'm Saes (English) by birth and family, but at the same time it's Wales rather than England that feels like home.