This is one of four linked blogposts, building on the Norman Maclean “Talking Points” series of discussions, which focus on specific contributions from the participants.
Jane NicLeòid was raised speaking Gaelic, and later English as well, on the Isle of Lewis. A trained teacher, she worked on the mainland for some years, before recently returning to her home island, where she continues to teach Gaelic, and is also closely involved in the new pressure group, Guth nan Siarach, to promote the interests of vernacular speakers.
Jane made a thoughtful and challenging early response to the 2020 “Gaelic Crisis” report by the Soillse team led by Conchúr Ó Giollagáin, on the influential Bella Caledonia website, in which she drew on her rooted teaching and community experience. You can read it here.
And in this final extract from the Norman Maclean Language Contact discussion Jane summarises key points of commonality identified in Norman’s thoughts, and underlines her own perception of the disconnect between institutional support for Gaelic, and a grassroots activism and egalitarian sensibility uniting the various interest groups.
Links to the three other blogposts in this short series are given below:
This is one of four linked blogposts, building on the Norman Maclean “Talking Points” series of discussions, which focus on specific contributions from the participants.
Audrey West’s first language is Jamaican, and she’s trained to teach Spanish and French, as well as in Cultural Memory.
This gives her an awareness of the intergenerational post-trauma resulting from the trans-Atlantic practice of enslaving Africans for European colonial gain.
Resident in North Wales, she works as an artist, poet, linguist, psychotherapist, trainer, and community development practitioner.
In this extract from the Norman Maclean Language Hierarchies discussion Audrey reflects on her unrecognised bilingualism, being brought up in a Jamaican home in London. Norman’s exhortation to maintain the mother tongue struck home as she acknowledges how stigmatisation prevented ongoing intergenerational transmission.
Over the course of the Talking Points sessions, Audrey also circulated this filmand the script of her poem amongst the participants, an extract from which is given at the end of the Language Contact discussion. She’s kindly agreed to share the full text below.
How did you end up here? Where do you come from?
I remember a place Where I am cradled by the Mountains Rocked by the sea…
Mi memba a plies We di mountin dem kriegl mi We di sii rak mi in aar skort Op di goli, pan tap a di hil Mi kyan si faar faar Plenti chrii, plenti griin, plenti sii
Memba a plies We dem nuo mi niem Dem nuo mi mada, nuo mi faada Nuo mi fambili Mi a smadi
Mi nuo se mi kom fram wie bak A Timboktuu dem kaal it? Mi piipl dem chravl a Hiijip Riich bak uom, A di mountin an di sii
Iz ou mi hen op ier?
Mi nuo se som a wi De pan buot Pak op pak op, stingk op stingk op Kyaan briid Bot wi riich
A wan plies dem kaal Jamieka Nier di mountin, bai di sii We dem Mek wi wok Brok wi bak Tek wi uman Kil wi pikni Fi notn
Bot iz ou yu en op ier?
Mi nuo se mi kom fram faar faar Mosi wan plies we niem Fraans We dem fait. Nier di mountin, bai di sii Fait so bad, dem kaal dem Espeute, fi suod. Dem kaal dem Juu Mek dem ron
Chravl faar faar Riich klier a San Domingue We dem Mek dem wok Bruk dem bak Tek dem uman Kil dem pikni Fi notn
Mais d’ou viens tu?
Ron klier a Virginia Weh dem Mek dem wok Bruk dem bak Tek dem uman Kil dem pikni Fi notn
Bot iz ou yu en op ier?
Mosi chruu wan plies we niem India Nier di mountin, bai di sii Dem bring wi bak Fi wok Til wi bak brok Lef wi uman Lef wi pikni Fi likl ar notn
¿Pero, como llegaste aquí?
Ron we, beli onggri Go klier a Panama Nier di mountin, bai di sii Luk fi wok Til mi bak brok Dem tek mi uman Kil mi pikni Fi notn
Bot, a we yuu kom fram?
Mosi fram wan plies dem kaal Skatlan. Plenti hil, An di sii skort uova aar fiit Nier di mountin, bai di sii Iz ou yu gaan klier a Skatlan? Iz ou yu en op dier?
Onggri beli Kech buot, kom a Hingglan Riich a Soutamton bai di sii Riich a Landan. Bes suut Fi luk wok Til mi bak brok Sen fi mi uman Dem kil mi pikni Fi notn
Mi no si no sii. Mi no si no mountin. Grie so til. Gaan bak uom. We dem nuo mi niem, Nuo mi fambili Mi a smadi Tek mi uman Lef mi pikni Dem aal rait
How did you end up here? O le wyt t’in dod?
Pikni riich a Naat Wales I’ve come a long way baby Back to the mountains, Back to the sea Back home, to Luxe, calme, et volupté
Homage to my parents
Alvin and Mary West
Copyright: Audrey West
June 2020
You can follow this link to get Audrey’s own translation of her poem into Standard English.
Links to the three other blogposts in this short series are given below:
This is one of four linked blogposts, building on the Norman Maclean “Talking Points” series of discussions, which focus on specific contributions from the participants.
Kalyan Das Gupta was raised in Kolkata, speaking Bengali, Hindi, and English, and spent a large part of his professional career running Community Interpreting and Translating Services, first in Edinburgh, and later in Lewisham in London, where he now lives in retirement.
Below is a transcript of Kalyan’s opening points in theTalking Points session on Language Hierarchies, in which he looks back over his life and career and recalls a series of personal and professional experiences related to this topic.
As an English speaker, I personally seldom experienced direct “linguistic hierarchism”, if you will, in Britain or in any English-speaking country, except as a function of blatant racism or a racist “colour-blindness” of the well- or ill-intentioned kind.
During my first visit to Britain, in the summer of 1980, our organised coach from London to Edinburgh halted at 2 a.m. at a motorway café in Doncaster, Yorkshire. As I squinted to try and read the menu stuck on the door, a group of white teenagers lounging inside saw me and decided to come out. One of them placed his face in mine and unleashed a torrent of what sounded like working class mock Indian words or sounds, or Indian-accented slang English. They all laughed. I headed for the toilet. Unfortunately, that was outside too, in the dark, in the back. They surrounded me, inside, whistling. I quickly exited onto the better-lit pathway and dived into the café, losing them.
As a new junior lecturer in Coventry, I and my white English boss stood confused and bemused as the dinner lady asked her “And what’s he having?”. We both just burst out laughing at this uncannily immediate real-life illustration of the example we had been discussing in our anti-racism trainer briefing session just before breaking for lunch, where we used the example “Does he take sugar?”.
More serious examples sometimes came second- or third-hand, and I hope my memory serves me well. A senior lecturer in our training team, a very dark-skinned Ugandan Asian gentleman, and former national hockey star from Uganda who spoke eleven languages, including highly polished English with a Rugby School accent, routinely received uncomprehending blank stares from his local white bank-tellers when he greeted them at the counter. Once, a concerned English white health professional requested him to see if, with his eleven languages, he could perhaps crack a seeming mystery. A distressed Asian mental health patient, sectioned in a ward for four years, had been known to break into animated apparent gibberish quite frequently at mealtimes. It turned out she had been desperately asking for the occasional Indian meal with chapatis in Gujarati, but no-one had bothered to check till now.
As the co-ordinator of the interpreting and translating service, I was once invited to Saughton Prison in Edinburgh to see if I could help a Chinese inmate there. When he was jailed for murder ten years earlier, his English was virtually non-existent and he was offered no interpreter at all to put his own side of the story to anyone. Now, ten years later, this handsome, clean-cut, polite young man spoke very clear English, having taught himself the language in prison, as well as law. He cheerfully, but with great propriety and almost professional self-restraint, entreated me to trigger a review, insisting he had been framed.
My Chinese predecessor in the job had campaigned for years against the practice of English-only registration forms being left dangling unexplained and unsignposted at health service receptions in clinics and hospitals. His mostly rural-derived women clients from Hong Kong were often illiterate even in Chinese. They frequently waited in those reception lounges, unserved for a while before leaving. There was no proactive guidance, service or translated signposting or explanatory literature, and many of them with urgent care needs simply felt like cyphers.
In France, around the same time, a woman who had come into a hospital for a pregnancy check-up was wrongly given an abortion before anyone realised what was happening. Staff there had not bothered noting the clear difference between her full Vietnamese name and the full name of another Vietnamese woman patient actually waiting for that procedure.
Community Interpreting and Translating Services started to be grudgingly set up as a public service in Britain, initially just in the voluntary sector, and purely as an adjunct to health or local community council or local authority or legal services, or immigration and refugee services, only following in the wake of a series of Race Relations Acts which themselves were legislated following a decade or two of major uprisings and struggles across cities in Britain, such as in Handsworth (Birmingham), Brixton (London), Toxteth (Liverpool), Cardiff and so on. A key stimulus in this was the Iqbal Begum case.
Iqbal Begum had been jailed for life in 1981 for murdering her abusive husband. In 1985, a chance visitor discovered that Mrs Begum had not had any clue as to what was being said to her and what the language mediator was either asking her or saying to her, so she had stayed silent in her confusion. This silence had been interpreted as an admission of guilt. The mediator, who was a Gujarati-speaking accountant press-ganged into service by the court, did not communicate to her clearly for her purposes. Mrs Begum’s particular dialect was a Pakistani variant of Punjabi. Mrs Begum was released, but, having spent four years in jail already, unable to bear the humiliation she later killed herself.
Under the joint cosh of the notorious Tory and Labour Private Finance Initiative drive, PFI, to privatise public services, the Interpreting and Translating services, which had for a while become grudgingly incorporated into the general local or health-initiated funded local authority services, started to become out-sourced to private, non-local, money-making outfits around the turn of the century, eventually succumbing to the re-worked version of the racist rant “Speak English!”, now sounding to our ears like “Learn English!” but with no difference in funding or support involved.
Many will find this testimony moving and powerful, yet elsewhere in the series Kalyan made a point of cautioning against over-reliance on personal experiences and anecdotes. In this clip from the session on Language Endangerment, he disavows linguistic expertise in favour of an explicitly political analysis.
Links to the three other blogposts in this short series are given below:
This is one of four linked blogposts, building on the Norman Maclean “Talking Points” series of discussions, which focus on specific contributions from the participants.
This post features the Linguistic Scholars Professor Conchúr Ó Giollagáin, Professor Udaya Narayana Singh, and Doctor Joseph Farquharson.
Conchúr Ó Giollagáin is Gaelic Research Professor at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland, and the Director of the UHI Language Sciences Institute and of the Soillse inter-university Gaelic research network.
Udaya Narayana Singh is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Chair-Professor of the Amity Centre for Linguistic Studies at Amity University Haryana in India, and formerly Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati, Shantiniketan, and Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. He also has a keen interest in Creative Writing.
Joseph Farquharson is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the Department of Language, Linguistics, and Philosophy at the University of the West Indies Mona Campus in Jamaica. He is also the Co-ordinator of the Jamaican Language Unit and the Unit for Caribbean Language Research.
Professor Conchúr Ó Giollagáin
In the opening session on Language Endangerment – Gaelic Trajectory?Conchúr elaborates on 5 major points touched on by Norman, linking them to sociolinguistic research and findings. He finishes with a challenge to academics and policy-makers to engage in honest debate with the Gaelic-speaking community.
Professor Udaya Narayana Singh
In the second session onLanguage Hierarchies – English Ascendancy?Udaya reflects on prevalent linguistic accommodation in South Asia and offers an overview of language hierarchies in that region. He acknowledges the status of English as a “High Code” while emphasising the dynamic and enduring inter-relationships of other languages.
Doctor Joseph Farquharson
In the third session onLanguage Contact – Bilingual Balance?Joseph considers the normalisation of the “monolingual ghetto”, agreeing with Norman on the narrowed worldview it affords. He goes on to introduce the concept of “Conquest Diglossia” resulting from a colonial schooling process that denigrates low-status languages.
Other Posts
The format for the other contributions to this series of blogposts is slightly different, as they include (or link to) significant additional writing as well as similar short video clips:
Old Island Voices friend, Will Lamb, delivered some fascinating insights into the development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Scottish Gaelic in a recent seminar for the Soillse inter-university research network. In a step-by-step approach, he outlined the progress made so far, the current state of the art, and plans for further development to a local and international audience representing a range of languages in addition to Gaelic, including Basque, Friulian, and Maltese.
Will has also made a PDF of his presentation available for anyone who wants to study it in detail. This includes live links to other online sites and resources for further background reading (or viewing).
Here at Island Voices we have, of course, been following the progress of this development closely for some time, and were very pleased to contribute substantially to its initial phases through the provision of our own collection of ready transcribed recordings, which Will generously acknowledges.
The benefit has been mutual, as the ASR project has in turn provided Island Voices with the impetus to develop the subtitling of our videos using the YouTube Closed Caption option. It was nice to see a sample Island Voices clip used in Will’s presentation, as well as one from the Ceòlas collection!
Revived interest in storytelling brought the Island Voices Storytellers page into renewed focus recently. First put together nearly ten years ago, it was a pleasure to look back over this collection of videos, many of which pre-figured later exciting developments, such as further series of recordings of Norman Maclean and the Stòras Beò style of conversational capture.
But it turned into more than an exercise in fond reminiscence! Given the existence of Clilstore transcripts for three of the items it became a relatively simple exercise to use these as the basis for incorporating YouTube subtitles into the films in question. This has now been done, which means you can view the videos with Gaelic subtitles, using the CC button. And further, using the Auto-translate function in settings you can also get subtitles in a host of other languages too. The translations are not perfect, of course. (Iain does not work a 400-hectare “harp”…) But they’ll generally give you a good gist in any place where your own Gaelic is not yet up to scratch. Take a look and see!
“Master raconteur Norman Maclean tells the spine-tingling Gaelic tale of Àiridh na h-Aon Oidhche, a local landmark out near Rueval in Benbecula, and reveals how it got its name… He relates the story for Mary Morrison, an enthusiastic community participant in the Island Voices/Guthan nan Eilean project.”
“Norman Maclean tells the story in Gaelic of the Battle of Carinish in 1601 – as if it was yesterday. And, master storyteller that he is, he brings it right up to date with references to current singers who still mine this rich cultural heritage.”
“”Difficult Encounters with Mother Earth” – Iain talks to his old friend and neighbour, Mary Morrison, a retired English teacher and revitalised Gaelic learner. Their conversation covers three generations of family and friends from the acquisition of the croft, through the many changes since, to current practice today, via English-teaching in Spain, the North Uist Highland Games and other highlights.. Iain speaks clearly and precisely and is always keen to encourage Gaelic learners. This is Mary’s first Gaelic interview.”
The Gaelic Books Council has announced a support scheme for new authors, and wants to spread the word!
While the Island Voices emphasis is on spoken language, we’re more than happy to help get the message out about a project titled “Ar Guthan”, even if the voices here will be written ones, especially when island communities are listed among the under-represented groups from whom applications are particularly welcomed.
Alison Lang, Director of the Gaelic Books Council, talks about the scheme here:
You can read more about the scheme in Gaelic or English in this press release, which also gives details of how to apply.
Irish-speaker Seán Ó Muiris has announced a new voluntary and non-profit initiative to replicate his work in producing an Irish language karaoke repertoire with a parallel Scottish Gaelic stream. First fruits can be tasted in the YouTube link above, with his rendition of Runrig’s classic “Alba”.
Scottish Gaelic enthusiasts “of a certain age” may recall a previous venture in the karaoke genre, spearheaded by Comann an Luchd-Ionnsachaidh, nach maireann, in collaboration with Clydebank College (also no longer with us in the shape pictured here).
As Gordon Wells’s notes to that pioneering production point out, “Scottish Gaels had of course … developed their own (pre-electronic) means of musical entertainment without instrumental backing, in the shape of puirt-à-beul…”. He also remarked that “Singing can be very helpful for the language learner. It allows you to concentrate on your pronunciation, and helps to fix unfamiliar vocabulary in your memory.” So, given that the original cassette-based package may not have fully withstood the test of time, this new venture in the world of Gaelic karaoke could well be overdue!
Seán makes the point strongly that his innovative approach is undertaken in a completely voluntary capacity, without any institutional backing, for the benefit of the Gaelic languages. You can hear him talking about it in detail in this interview in Irish for RTE. With over 100 karaoke versions of Irish songs on his YouTube channel he now wishes to start something similar for Scottish Gaelic and is offering to run free training seminars for anyone who might be interested in helping out.
Sna seachdainnean mu dheireadh aig a’ phròiseact Mediating Multilingualism aig Institiùd Rannsachaidh Cànain Oilthigh na Gàidhealtachd ‘s nan Eilean thàinig na com-pàirtichean eadar-nàiseanta sna h-oilthighean ann an Alba, Diaimeuga, agus sna h-Innseachan còmhla airson cuspairean san robh ùidh aca uile a dheasbad cuide ri luchd-labhairt às an Rìoghachd Aonaichte aig a bheil cànanan coimhearsnachd. Chleachd iad pìosan a-mach à Saoghal Thormoid airson na deasbadan (a chaidh a chumail sa Bheurla) a thòiseachadh. Chaidh na còmhraidhean seo a chlàradh, agus tha iad a-nis ri fhaighinn air sianal YouTube Guthan nan Eilean.
Bheir an clàr shìos ceanglaichean ris na deasbadan gu lèir, cuide ris na bhidiothan le Tormod MacGill-Eain a’ bruidhinn.
Agus ma tha ceistean agad, no ma tha thu airson puingean a thogail air-loidhne sna deasbadan seo, faodaidh tu pàirt a ghabhail sna còmhraidhean a bhios a’ dol ann am MOOT Guthan nan Eilean! Rud nach bi a’ tachairt a h-uile latha… Siuthad! Carpe diem!
Well, the idea of an Island Voices “Multilingual Open Online Teach-in” is now no longer, um, moot – for want of a better word. “Chan ann a h-uile latha a bhios mòd aig Mac an Tòisich”, mar a chanas iad, (“It’s not every day Mackintosh throws a party” – loosely) but its time has come.
“Talking Points” with Tormod
We’ve recently placed a whole series of “Talking Points with Norman Maclean” recordings on our YouTube channel, built on a merging of materials and ideas from the Soillse/UHI Language Sciences Institute projects Mediating Multilingualism and Saoghal Thormoid. In the last few weeks of the funded period for Mediating Multilingualism, linguists in universities in Scotland, India, and Jamaica discussed topics of common interest with UK-based community language speakers, stimulated by brief extracts from the final session of Saoghal Thormoid. And these discussions are now available to view.
It’s an experimental format, mixing subtitled Gaelic recordings with live English debate. The topics are sociolinguistic, covering Language Endangerment (Gaelic Trajectory?), Language Hierarchies (English Ascendancy?), and Language Contact (Bilingual Balance?). And they may raise just as many questions as answers, if not more. Just the thing then for the enquiring mind, and quite in the spirit of the “Teach-in” philosophy described in our 2019 post! In the end, we didn’t set up a separate online forum then, and we won’t now. There are perfectly good comment and reply functions on YouTube and here on WordPress for any questions readers or listeners may have.
YouTube Playlist
But to help provide a degree of focus or sense of direction – without closing down the options for diverging lines of thought and enquiry – we’ve put together a special “box set” International Island Voices MOOT playlist on YouTube that brings together the Talking Points material with some other key videos from our overall body of work which underpin and exemplify our multilingual approach.
Previews
By the way, we knitted some 2-minute Norman Maclean “highlights” into the recorded discussions, as an aide memoire for the longer extracts that were being discussed. If you want a quick taste of a topic, we’ve extracted them here, and you can take a quick look at any of them now, before choosing which full discussion to dive into for the wider treatment.
There’s no start or stop date on this. The “Talking Points” participants are separated by up to ten and a half hours difference in time zones between India and Jamaica, so a simultaneous “launch” has not been feasible. And our geographical catchment is worldwide, so the approach is deliberately asynchronous – completely independent of any timetable. View the videos, ask questions, and make comments (which will be moderated) as and when you can and wish. Please be polite, and be prepared to be patient if waiting for responses.
Choosing where to comment is up to you. Specific queries about particular videos may be best posted under the relevant YouTube clip. But if your point or question is more general, then a comment here under this WordPress post may be the best place.
Binge-watching the whole playlist in one go is probably doable, if challenging, but perhaps not the best way of giving yourself time to think through issues that arise and about which you may have questions. A better approach might actually be to split up the longer discussion videos into smaller chunks – for which the “chapters” function in YouTube may well come in handy. If you take a look at the video description for any of these long clips you’ll find timed listings for each of the speakers, which you can click on to go straight to that particular point in the film.
And any time you catch yourself wondering which one’s Treebeard, it’s probably time for a break…
We’re pleased to have a receptive and supportive audience and readership, of course, but comments, questions and other feedback are always very welcome. Wikipedia tells us “Teach-ins are meant to be practical, participatory, and oriented toward action. While they include experts lecturing on their area of expertise, discussion and questions from the audience are welcome…”
Dear readers, whether you have questions or suggestions, the MOOT is open. We invite you to “unmute”!
This is one of four linked blogposts, building on the Norman Maclean “Talking Points” series of discussions, which focus on specific contributions from the participants.
