However indifferent we might have been to our school days, most of us will remember at least one moment of significant connection to a teacher, or a lesson, or a book. I recall my high school teachers as a mixed bunch who nonetheless possessed a few things in common: volcanic tempers, crumpled clothes, an unconcealable world-weariness. They drilled the curriculum into us, and several of us even passed our exams, but many had, understandably, lost the ability to make any kind of connection with their students years before.
In the Eighties, central Scotland was hit with the kind of mass unemployment, addiction and poverty that often weakens school performance. By the time I started high school in the Nineties the classroom was, for many, nothing more than a box you were confined to while the clock ticked and the clouds moved past the window. Lessons regularly slipped towards chaos, and for the teachers who struggled to impose themselves, impenetrability became a survival instinct.
In the midst of this I remember an English class where the teacher made small and regular efforts to impart something personal to her pupils. “I’ve read a brilliant book,” she announced one afternoon, just as the bell rang. “By a new, young Scottish author, if anyone’s interested?” The classroom emptied in record time, but I was intrigued. At 15, culturally isolated in a small town, I had no idea that young Scottish people were writing novels. It would have been fatal to my credibility to be seen to be interested, but I memorised the title and walked to the local library after school that day.
Morvern Callar, by Alan Warner, tells the story of a 21-year-old supermarket employee living in a nameless Scottish port town. When she finds her self-serious boyfriend dead on the kitchen floor by his own hand, she steals the unpublished novel he has written and sells it, using the advance to go clubbing in Spain. It was first published in 1995; my teacher must have read it upon release, and I shortly after that.
Trainspotting didn’t enter my teenage consciousness until it’s adaptation for the cinema in 1996, so until Morvern Callar arrived my experience of literature had been strictly dustbowls and waistcoats — school texts like Of Mice and Men, To Kill A Mockingbird, and An Inspector Calls. Our teachers worked hard to convince us of the relevance of things that had happened in Salinas, California, or Maycomb, Alabama, but now we had a local book; suddenly it seemed as though Morvern Callar — dangerous, youthful, Scottish — was lurking right outside the classroom window. I devoured the novel, as did my friends, as, eventually, did my mum and dad and sister. The thing that captured all our imaginations was the strange familiarity of the protagonist’s voice: Morvern was an enigmatic and illusory presence, but she still spoke like someone we knew from down the shops.
We all speak a dialect and this, whether we like it or not, forms part of our identity. Yet the use of dialect in modern novels has fostered debate on many fronts. How to represent class and nationality in literature is a question that stretches back to Dickens and the Brontës and beyond to the 18th century, when authors began to experiment with a wider variety of local speech. Today, authors are often under pressure to tone down dialect in novels for the sake of reader accessibility.
One only has to consider the furore over another Scottish novel — James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late — to get a sense of the controversy surrounding dialect. The novel, written in what critics described as working-class Glaswegian vernacular, won the Booker Prize in 1994 to the horror of the columnist Simon Jenkins, who claimed it was “literary vandalism” and compared Kelman to an “illiterate savage”. One judge, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, said the book was not “publicly accessible” and threatened to resign if it won.
Perhaps it was the swear words that did it: an estimated 4,000 fucks. But Kelman wasn’t the literary disruptor some people painted him as: “Most of my stories were written from within my own culture,” he said, “so you use the language as people use it.” His book, which tells a day in the life of a newly blind ex-con called Sammy, is a letter-perfect feat of ventriloquism. The reader is fully immersed in the thoughts and speech of the Glaswegian protagonist and every aspect of his life in Nineties Scotland — the DSS, the worn cassettes (Dylan, Kristofferson, Cash,), the pubs called Glancy’s. We are treated not only to Sammy’s personality, but the personality of place.
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Subscribe“Much may be made of a
Scotchman, IF he be caught young”.
(Dr Samuel Johnson.)
I gave up on “How Late it Was” about halfway through. Not because of the dialect – having lived in northeast Scotland for 40+ years, Glaswegian is hardly challenging.
Just the relentless negativity. In the end, like its author, I just thought, “ah, f*ck it”.
At the time, things weren’t going so well for me and I wanted to escape the atmosphere of such writing, not immerse myself further in it.
If an author wanted positivity he’d set his book in Edinburgh.
Like ‘Trainspotting’ then?
I still speak ‘Glaswegian’ even after 40 years in England – I haven’t had to lose the accent as most English people understand it if you speak clearly enough and not too quickly, though I obviously don’t use locally defined words. However I cannot read prose in the Glaswegian dialect – it’s just too difficult even for me to follow unless I read it out loud, and it smacks seriously of pretension too.
Reading how you speak is ‘pretentious’? The words ‘Scottish cultural cringe’ mean anything to you? You’ve been brainwashed by spending too much time in Scotland-hating England.
I think writing non-conversational English in any dialect is pretentious – you rather presumptuously assumed it’s because I don’t like Scots dialect in particular. That assumption says rather more about your own filtered view of people.
I am the same, Glasgow born living in England, still have my accent but can’t stand reading anything in dialect.
Just call me a pedant, but when I read “it’s” when it should have been “its” my heart sinks. Especially when the article is about language…
“Trainspotting didn’t enter my teenage consciousness until it’s adaptation for the cinema in 1996″
Nice article. But hard to understand . . .
@ben arnulfssen has a point, but overstated. There are indeed good reasons for gaining mastery of a standardised Language and there are also good reasons for engaging with local languages which are generally known as Dialect. It has been the misfortune of Scots that since the Union of the Crowns there has not been a Court around which the processes that would have sustained one form of Scots as a standardised language, as a result of which it has a good many regional dialects but no national language.
I say this was the misfortune of Scots (the language) but it may have worked to the advantage of the Scots (the people), as dominies taught the use of a more widely understood standard English. Here I support @ben arnulfssen. But there again, the stigmatisation of popular speech as “bad English” rather than its recognition as local dialect must have been hugely to demoralising to pupils who were native dialect-speakers. Modern teachers of “English”(the school subject) ought to include in their curriculum both the use of the standard language and of local dialects together with discussion and awareness of where these variants are appropriate and effective. Literary works that use dialect should thus be used as a classroom resource to reinforce the awareness that “English” is no one thing.
The stamping out of Scots and Gaelic by the English over the centuries has been no mistake.
I naively thought the aim of writing was communication. If you have a good story to tell then tell it to as many people as possible. The dialect hurdle is a source of friction that deters many – if not most – people from reading Shakespeare or Burns. And they had good stories. So, in a world that is riven by conflict rooted in misunderstanding, I believe we should all at least talk the same language to each other sometimes. The alternative is that we a’ fa’ on wur bahookies.
But we don’t… There are enough of us in the Scottish diaspora to make sure that disnae happen.
I mean stating language is just communication is like saying, as certain early 20th century architects do, that architecture is just about building functional edifices. It’s a phillistine reductionism. And yet everyone gets outraged with buildings but somehow are fine with ugly language, without connotations, history, rhyme or complexity. Shakespeare reduced to a Basic Emglish vocabular telling ‘stories’ is a soulless abomination, just as the simple lamguage versions of the KJV bible or Book of Common Prayer were. No one wants to work to appreciate anything, everything has to be served on a platter of toddler-speak.
I enjoy remembering my secondary school teachers – it was the seventies, and two young woman teachers (maths and geography) in particular used to captivate the boys in their boots and leather mini skirts. Mrs Haldane and Miss Walsh, we loved you!
They’ll be about seventy years old now.
We had a young English teacher, Miss McKniff, who wore low cut tops and regularly bent over to “check our work” as we scribbled away at our desks (just the lads, mind).
That reminds me of that famous Scotch ditty :
“ When the moonlight flits across your tits, Oh Jesus Christ almighty “!*
(*Derek & Clive)
Scotch is a drink, not a nationality, decorticated, semi-evolved, semi-sentient simian.
“semi-sentient simian” an excellent description of your good self!
Scotch is a rather old fashioned term I grant you, much favoured by Dr Samuel Johnson as you might recall.
However it is STILL a correct description of those unfortunates living well to the north of Hadrian’s Wall. Why else would we still have a ‘ Scotch Corner’ on the A1 for example?
Rarely is an article ever written so clearly and yet so eloquently, pleasure to read.
A hundred years ago Mencken was complaining that young people in America were taught “The King’s English” at school but spoke differently. He tried to get people interested in teaching in the medium of spoken American.
He got bored with it. His English was fantastic.
Wasn’t he also a virulent Anglophobe Mr Wheatley?
When I read about things happening in the UK at the moment, I become an anglophobe. So what.
Londoners think that London is everything but now it is an also-ran, something with only a past.
Am I correct in thinking you live in Wales?
If it is he?
Thanks, I stupidly hadn’t thought of that!
Ehh Jammy, yeh no ken chib eh
Odd to think that however unintelligible Scotch is, ultimately it is just another English dialect.
L’Anglais n’est qu’un autre dialecte Francais.
Un peu trop d’allemand!
La verdad. Veramente, und wahrlich.
To switch to language of the Gods, if I may:
“Usque ad mortem bibendum!”
( Gosh my predicted text gremlin didn’t like that!)
From the Sonnets, Mostly Bristolian, by Richard Craven:-
……….
Sonnet 141
Après avoir ces cent quarante écrits,
je suis épuisé et me considère
une langue craquée léchante, dedans, un puits
empli d’une boue visqueuse, d’une croûte grossière.
Il en reste quinze encore, coincés, cachés:
des crapauds rotants que les murs moussus
font résonner. Enfin, bloquée, fâchée,
la langue, toute sèche et vulgaire devenue,
va bifurquer, et désormais siffler.
Chaque midi, pour un instant, le soleil
éclaire cette vie grimpante – viens regarder!
Voilà en bas, frétillante et vermeille,
la langue, les crapauds fugitifs, la chasse
avant que l’ombre couvre la disgrâce.
Button it, ya radge-bag!
Anyway, one reason for being a fan of vernacular language as the narrative voice in fiction is that Trainspotting (read when I should have been swotting up for my finals) furnished me with a whole new vocabulary of colloquialisms, insults and rhyming slang, totally distinct from that found where I had spent my youth:
Radge (mad/aggressive)
Chorrie (steal)
Lemon (girlfriend)
Chib (knife/stab)
Skag (heroin)
Morningside speed (cocaine)
Marvellous.
“Skag” was common parlance at secondary school in the late 90s. I suppose it was the influence of tje film.
Better make a version with subtitles for across-the-ponders.
Two new books for my reading list! Ta! Oh, and I never had any trouble understanding Flashman’s father-in-law, or the early 17th Century dialect in Barth’s “The Sot-Weed Factor”, so this sounds like fun!
One aspect missed by most reviewers of Trainspotting was the differences between the language used by different characters to narrate the story. Welsh wanted readers to understand that the main characters came from different backgrounds. To most reviewers however they were all just Scottish.
About 27 years ago I wrote an entire novel under a pen name, in Estuarine. It garnered a solitary review before the publishers went bust:-
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XIzQpu1HeXsC&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=bile+by+mark+brand&source=bl&ots=QJGMm9xklh&sig=ACfU3U2iAF2eXVhXrnksnR54DzV0USnYNQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiKgsW7k4n7AhV6hf0HHUkFD4E4HhDoAXoECBkQAw#v=onepage&q=bile%20by%20mark%20brand&f=false
Bad luck, you deserved better judging by your erudite contribution on here over the last couple of years!
Thanks, I really appreciate your kindness.
Obviously cos yer not Scottish. 😉
How much MORE disadvantage does this writer wish to inflict on the younger generation? Present a CV written in such a fashion, and you may as well mark it “delete before reading”; present actual work in that fashion and you won’t last long.
I realise this is a deeply unfashionable point of view in certain narrow circles (and I dont eat figs except as a laxative, and what’s a nine-over-six?) but education DOES gave a function, and this isn’t it.
The author is talking about dialect in fiction as a narrative voice.
Although fiction is a good description of some of the CVs I see these days.
Not everything in this life is about employment.
What else? Is it not necessary to have a function in life? Work for charities comes and goes but is still employment.
Please don’t say ‘family’ because zillions of people are employed and also bring up families.
Maybe looking at your phone is the other alternative?
What a joyless existence you must endure that your parents and teachers never encouraged you to read as a child.
Raised as a North London working class boy, I understood from the earliest that I should master two forms of English and know when to use them. It wasn’t difficult, so I think that you are worrying unduly.
Agreed. Many, many people do this and you just get used to it.
It’s called diglossia and people have been doing this intuitively everywhere in the world since the beginning of recorded history. So, as you say, it’s a non-issue.
You must be a canny linguist…
“Nine-over-six” is a way of describing the configuration of panes in a sash window. Sash windows took over from casement windows which themselves were the first mobile windows, taking over from the immobile mullion windows with fixed panes of glass that one sees in say medieval buildings.
An upper sash with nine panes and a lower sash with six panes. I believe this was the popular configuration in the 1790s. Throughout the 18th century when double sash windows were first widely used* the to early 20th century when they started to disappear one sees a range of different numerical combinations of panes in each sash that went in and out of fashion.
* The first sash windows were invented around the 1670s but were not widely popular until the Georgian period when in the early 18th century “six-over-six” was the first major style
Simply because local dialects and Scots as a language with its own dialects are not seen as important in high-falutin’ Edinburgh where English must be treasured at all cost. Yes, teach children English, but don’t rubbish the way they spake at hame and let’s get more of how they talk down on paper. Then more might want to learn English and leave school literate. Instead of being bored, talked down to and illiterate as a result.
Rubbish. Spelling and grammar were fluid in Shakespeare’s day and we’re still admiring his work today. The fact that a writer chooses to use dialect does not suggest either they or their audience are stupid. Emily Brontë is mentioned in the article; you may wish to re-read Wuthering Heights to gain further insight.
Excellent recourse to the tedious, unimportant English literary canon.