UK rap, Homer's tongue and a sprinkle of Gaeilge
The latest language news + what to watch, read and listen to
I recently made my annual trip to the hairdressers. A man with vibrant, green-streaked hair washed my more mundane brown while he answered my question of what made him move to the UK. ‘Harry Potter of course,’ he said. A self-proclaimed “post-Soviet cocktail”, he was born in Kazakhstan and then forced to flee to the Czech Republic as a young child. I later asked him what languages he speaks.
‘Russian, English and Czech,’ he said.
‘What language do you feel most at home in?’ I asked.
‘English.’
He presented me with a viewpoint that seems to be increasingly uncommon in the media nowadays, which was that he was grateful that English is the world’s dominant lingua franca (see here, here and here). The fact that he had to learn it to live in a country that allowed him to be his full “fruity” (ie queer) self, the way you can just make up a word or a phrase and be understood.
The fluidity of the English language is such that UK rap has changed the language of the nation, with grime in particular the vehicle for Multicultural London English, a dialect born in London’s African-Caribbean communities in the 1970s and 80s. Key to this spread is social media, of course, taking the linguistic style to various corners of the country. But according to Christian Ilbury, a lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh, this export of a British vernacular through cultural forms is nothing new. From the Beatles to the Arctic Monkeys, music has long been a vehicle for amplifying the presence of industrial working-class accents.
Last month French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, lamenting the dominance of anglophone content on social media platforms, called for francophone countries to pressure digital networks to "defend the francophonie around the world" and set up joint-financing of French-language cultural productions to compete with the high-budget creative industry in the U.S. Perhaps he was inspired by his Belgian neighbour. Flanders is looking to implement legislation to compel Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to financially support the creation of Flemish-language films and television series.
This urge to preserve language is felt not just in the modern world but the ancient too. Romeyka, an endangered form of Greek that is spoken by only a few thousand people in the remote mountain villages of northern Turkey, has been described as a “living bridge” to the ancient world. Apparently, it has more in common with the language of Homer than with modern Greek. With the remaining speakers aging, a new crowd-sourcing platform has been set up by Cambridge academic Professor Ioanna Sitaridou to preserve the sound, inviting Romeyka speakers to upload audio recordings of the language. While technology does offer hope for language preservation, it seems that it is ultimately accelerating the rate of language disappearance: about 97 per cent of global languages are characterised as "digitally disadvantaged”.
Though Irish is technically an endangered language, it sure is everywhere. Apart from Paul Mescal’s Gaeilge at the Baftas and Cillian Murphy’s cúpla focail as he accepted his Oscar in March (woo!), Ireland is witnessing English play second fiddle, particularly where the arts are concerned. It is key to Kneecap, the rap group trio from Belfast. It is the preferred language of young poets at bilingual spoken-word nights. Last year, An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl), became the first Irish-language movie to be nominated for Best International film at the Oscars. Other films since have provided Irish cinemagoers with that rare thing: an everyday experience of the language.
Elsewhere in the world, pupils in a school in Singapore sing regularly in Welsh while this writer makes the case for Japanese being the fastest language. Climate change is altering the Sami language while in Louisiana, preserving Indian French has taken on new urgency as climate-related hurricanes and coastal erosion threaten to displace the Pointe-au-Chien tribe from the land it has called home for centuries. But there is hope: last year they established a language immersion school, the first one in Louisiana to teach Metropolitan French alongside local French dialects spoken by the Indigenous and Cajun communities it serves.
What I’ve been up to:
Writing: A review of journalist Sophie Elmhirst’s first book, Maurice and Maralyn: A Whale, A Shipwreck, A Love Story. A poignant and pacy tale of a British couple whose grand sailing adventure in the 1970s is drastically cut short when a whale crashes into their boat, leaving them shipwrecked for four months.
Reading: Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. As a Jungian psychoanalyst, she looks at how our deep instinctual nature is damaged by society, using fairy tales as ways to illustrate ways back to ourselves. I’ve had so many ‘aha’ moments with this book, so perhaps you will too.
Watching: Hacks, a hilarious dramedy set in Las Vegas about the unlikely pairing of a comedian legend with a young upstart. The former needs to zhuzh up her material if she wants to hang on to her empire while the latter just really needs a job, given she’s been cancelled by social media. A fresh, smart and dynamic take on the world of comedy as well as intergenerational relationships.
Listening: To a replay of this episode of the podcast On Being with the writer Ocean Vuong. He talks about the power of language and its fluidity, saying “we often tell our students the future’s in your hands. But I think the future is actually in your mouth.” A powerful and tender episode.
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Aisling O’Leary is an Irish freelance journalist based in London. Her writing has appeared in Vogue, The Times, The Irish Independent and The Irish Times. You can follow her on Instagram @itspronouncedashling
Julia Webster Ayuso is a Spanish-British freelance journalist based in Paris. Her writing has appeared in Time, The Guardian, The New York Times and Monocle. You can follow her on Instagram @jwebsterayuso