All summer I’ve been working on blog posts, while you’ve been reading updates to my archives on Thursdays. This week we’re going to talk about words and language. Probably my favorite subject. After my son and the Irishman. And my cats. Oh, and books …
✱ Them versus us.
I’ve written a lot about the differences between American English and (ahem) English English. (Here: “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Yank,” “Cuts Both Ways,” and “You Say Tomato,” for starters.)
The fact that folks get so bent about it amuses me. Who “owns” English? I’m not even gonna tackle that question, but Dr. Sandi Mann, a psychologist at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK raises another: “Is It Time to Abandon UK Spelling?”
I am finally holding my hands up and admitting that maybe we can no longer hold back the tide of Americanisation (Americanization?) flooding over our written word any longer. Internationalisation (internationalization?) means that we are increasingly all one community and it is making less and less sense to insist on our own way of spelling things (even if it is our language). We have to accept that American English is dominant; spoken and spelt far more than UK English ever will be again. By clinging to words like colour, flavour and centre, we risk alienating ourselves from the rest of the world and whilst at best this could be viewed at quaint, at worse we could find ourselves being dismissed as parochial and out of touch with reality.
Needless to say, she upset a bunch of her countrymen (sample responses: “Just because our relatives over the water have lazy rules in the use of their version of English does not mean it should happen here” and “A big NO to changing to the poor American spelling of words”).
Now wait, y’all. Soap-boxing is fine but no personal attacks, please. And as one of the commenters pointed out, much of US spelling was English spelling at one time. (I’ve also addressed this in one of the posts above.) English people who came to this continent were isolated from the mother tongue, which fell under the influence of French spellings (all those ise/ize differences we have now) sometime in the 1600s. So in many cases US spelling is how the English once spelled those words.
It’s an interesting argument, and I recommend the article—and the comments—to you. 🙂
✱ And you thought you had problems.
Before their next-door neighbors spent hundreds of years beating it out of them, the Irish had their own language. They still do, actually. There are pockets around the country in which Irish is still spoken daily (I’ve written about the Gaeltacht here); demonstrated competency in Irish is also a requirement for graduation from high school in Ireland. Irish enjoys constitutional status as the national and first official language of the Republic of Ireland; it is an official language of the European Union too.
But when I read this article—“Irish: A language for all speakers”—I realized it’s an endangered piece of Irish heritage.
Irish speakers talk about second-class status, but there are also tiered statuses among speakers themselves. In my experience, there has never been a grá shared between the Gaeltacht and the Irish-speaking environs of Dublin, even though Dublin has the potential to hold the key to the language’s future. Given the massive population of young people attending all-Irish speaking schools in the greater Dublin area, there’s an argument for Dublin eventually even being the largest Gaeltacht in the State.
That said, the Gaeltacht areas aren’t just about the language, but neither is the language just about Gaeltacht areas. Yet if you want to “keep up” your Irish in the capital, you’re pretty much on your own. As someone who only became fluent at 12 upon entering secondary school, “keeping up” my Irish is something I have done in isolation, although such dedication has led to becoming a presenter on TG4, an entity that has done an incredible amount to modernise, celebrate and make visible the diversity of Irish-speaking voices in the country.
This also is an interesting article—with many interesting comments—that I present just for your edification. 🙂
* Because it’s almost summer and because I am still positively slammed with work (not a bad thing) and because slammed with work means less time to write the kind of thoughtful blog posts I want to write, I’m writing a series of updates to reconnect you with my archives. Let me know what you think.
Tweet: Them versus us. Who “owns” English?
Tweet: The Irish language is an endangered piece of Irish heritage.
Tweet: Who “owns” English? Soap-boxing is fine but no personal attacks, please.
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