On Thu, 22 Oct 1998 [log in to unmask] wrote:
> We seem a western civilisation obliged to live with deep changes in language
> that reflect the scale of world economic and social movements; and it's no
> longer possible to hive off an area of English and say it's ours.
- picking up one point in Doug's good post, from current preoccupations,
and with no intention of ignoring the rest. I'm still re-adjusting from
being amongst people for whom the "hiving off" of an area of language has
been a deeply political fact in most of their lives. Time and again I
heard of the "split mind" required to talk Russian in the streets and in
public life, and home-language (Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian) in the
personal and domestic world. And of the effects of removing this
restriction: relief, surely, at one level, but also real fear and
unsettlement - one person described how immodest she felt as she began to
use Lithuanian in a public setting. Of course, it's worth remembering that
nothing stimulates your ability to learn a language like having an
occupying army in your town, and most of the people I spoke to were true
multilinguals.
At a different level, people with regional accents live with this as daily
fact: my daughter (who has a Northeast accent) is having to learn the
bitter truth that in order to get her message across in official settings
(gas board, phone company, banks - most of whose employees also have
northeast regional accents) RP carries her further, gets taken more
seriously. Again, in her way, she's developing public and private speech
patterns, and finds that her fellow students (from northern Ireland, from
Birmingham etc) have similar experiences. Not that anyone's going to
deport her for getting it wrong.
Happily, language changes direction with nary a one of us touching the
tiller, and half the fun of using the stuff as raw materials is, for me,
snuffing around for bits I haven't come across before - it does genuinely
seem inexhaustible. If we take the issues of "local vs global" which are
often posited as opposites, we might find that actually, both are "under
threat" in as much as they are open-ended, and no amount of linguistic
conservation can prevent development taking place. This obviously opens up
possibilities of the kind described in Doug's novel project, and some of
the african novelists who describe their language base as "rotten
english". There isn't just one way to do it, of course, but I do see the
ability to blurt or fumble in speeches other than one's own as something
worth trying, unless we're to sink back into the horrid stage of
englishness which thought it ok to just talk RP louder. It's not a
question of possession ("saying it's ours"), which is static,
closed-system, but of useage, borrowing, occupation, adaptation etc, which
is dynamic, on-going, open-system.
By the way, I'm an apalling linguist and was offered a sausage at one
point when I asked for a beer on my recent trip. Like Dylan Thomas - I
speak no languages except BBC and saloon bar.
RC
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