Dialect (n). A Prefatory Note
I. GAUNNAE NO TOK LIHT THAHT A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot. Max Weinreich’s oft-cited linguistic aphorism may have taken on the quality of a truism, and he may never have claimed it as his original anyway, but it still seems as good a place as any to start. In the first place it serves not only as a definition but also as a possibly somewhat paradoxical example of the phenomenon he seeks to define. Most interested English speakers that is to say, even if they have no knowledge whatsoever of the German language, would not have much difficulty in working out the meaning. Thus, calculating under some sort of principle of mutual understandability, the Anglophone reader might, pace Weinreich and as a result of the very form he uses to express himself, figure that the Yiddish tongue with its obvious lexical hybrids and expediencies borrowed from various sources, is indeed clearly some type of dialect, rather than a pure language like either English or German. It goes without saying that such a reading would have to be judged as an entirely ‘between the lines’ one, as although its conclusion ‘Yiddish is a dialect’ may not be different from that reached by Weinreich, its path there runs explicitly counter to his prescribed one. Yet this paradox is illustrative of the evidently irrational ground on which the definitions and differences of the language/dialect question are set up. There are in fact, no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing between a language and a dialect – indeed some linguists would say that there are only ‘dialects’, ie. specific forms of a language used by a speech community, and that for ‘official’ purposes some – because of prestige attached to various economic, political, social and historical factors – become the ‘standard dialect’ of a particular language. There may indeed be as many different backgrounds to the prestige of a ‘standard’ dialect as there are languages. In a recent Israeli film, Mama Loshn Kinder Loshn, the question is posed, why Yiddish was, and still is, to a certain extent, suppressed and considered an inferior dialect by the Israeli authorities. This is no minor tongue – as the lingua franca of Ashkenazi Jews throughout Northern, Central and Eastern Europe for arguably over 1,000 years, there were an estimated 12 million speakers at the turn of the 20th century. Over 1,000,000 still speak Yiddish and there is a vast body of accomplished works in literature, music, theatre, and film. How much prestige does a language need? (Oy!) Yet in officially Hebrew-speaking Israel the authorities seemed vindictive from the start in their attitudes to Yiddish. In the austere early years of Israel after its set-up in 1948, paper was often denied to newspapers that printed in Yiddish, and theatre in Yiddish was banned in 1951. The only plausible explanation, and one that still holds for the almost complete lack of Yiddish speaking in public life in Israel, is that in the drive to revive ancient Hebrew and set it up as the lingua franca for all the Diaspora,Yiddish was tainted in its connection with German, the Holocaust, and sufferings in Europe. Thus its putative status as an inferior bastardised
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German, designated for Jews only, was shameful. Indeed, on arriving in Israel, many people of mother tongue Yiddish – precisely because of their sufferings in Europe – could not bear to hear it, far less speak it themselves, and they took up Hebrew with a vengeance. Thus, although to a certain extent the ethnic Ashkenazi Jews make up a recognisable governmental and cultural elite in Israel, the tanks were called into Lebanon, and the gunboats still manoeuvre in the Red Sea entirely on the orders of the Hebrew tongue and not the Yiddish. As an example of the reasons for relegation to the status of inferior dialect, one has to hope that the Yiddish case remains the extreme one. That’s not to say that there are ever grounds which may be considered as pleasant or justifiable for suppressing or disparaging a particular community’s mode of speech. Nonetheless some interests – (notably the ‘bluecorner’, in Simon Kovesi’s blue-red antagonism of the politics of dialectal pugilism) – would maintain that for a modern nation a recognised ‘standard’ way of speaking and writing is needed for a smooth running economy and administration, and for cohesion and social unity. Just how this standard is to be enforced is of course another political question which leads us back to Weinreich. Doubtless in a literal sense Weinreich’s aphorism exaggerates while simplifying the language/dialect difference, but his clever and witty use of metonymy (or is it?) sets the right tone and scope for the difference as a political relation. For the idea of standard or proper – as in so-called Standard British English or RP – represents nothing but social distinction and a power structure. It is estimated that only around 3% of the population of these islands speak so-called Received Pronunciation, yet despite the endless parroting of the myth of democratisation of the voice in the British media, RP is still universally accepted as a non-regional standard British English. Tom Leonard famously defined that accent or dialect (or sociolect) as belonging not to place but to money, and while the odd poverty stricken lord or lady can always pop up by way of refutation of that thesis, Leonard is surely right inasmuch as power is money. This realpolitik of language and power in turn brings to attention another aspect of dialect, which can best be summed up in a shibboleth uttered as an example of the dialect of the urban poor of Rome – namely t’a da adatta. In the utterance of this phrase the circumspect underclass not only says I belong to the Roman sub-proletariat, but literally – ‘one has to adapt’. This literal meaning is important here, for the idea of appropriateness, of a dialect as expressing the concrete and the particular of a specific human community, has often been posed against a standard language’s deracinated, abstract and general approach. A standard language can, like Hebrew, order the army to march into
the Lebanon, but a mere non-standard dialect must come in quietly, so to speak, with its slippers on, creeping around the question of the geographical, ethnic, economic and social make-up of its environment. Is that to over-romanticise the question? Perhaps, but the point can nonetheless be illustrated by an anecdote of that daddy of all the romanticisers, James ‘Ossian’ MacPherson. MacPherson had been touring around the Highlands, collecting Fenian tales and Ossianic lore from local Gaelic storytellers and poets, so that he could publish them abroad and, of course, ultimately conquer the whole of Europe with their charm. He heard, probably rightly, that the bard of the Sleat MacDonalds, one John MacCodrum (or to have it right in the local dialect – Iain Mhic Fhearchair) had a great knowledge in that field. So he went straight to MacCodrum in North Uist and asked if he had something on the Fenians? (Am bheil dad agad air na Feinne?) As it happened MacCodrum was a famously subtle man (duine araid) and he did not take kindly to MacPherson, a bluff Invernesian, marching in demanding to know what he knew. For the Uist man, to have ‘something on somebody’ could also mean colloquially to have lent somebody something, and thus to have them indebted to you. So MacCodrum simply answered MacPherson that if he had anything on the Fenians, there was no chance of his getting it back now. (as they are all long gone into the mists of time, of course). The bluff Invernesian quite naturally misunderstood this remark, and marched off disappointed, missing perhaps his greatest opportunity to find rich material with which to trump Johnson and all his other detractors. If then dialects belong to speech communities, one might ask why it is that in some European countries regional dialects have what might be said to be a certain profile, while in other similar countries that profile is not noticeably prominent. Is it simply because some dialects have come to our notice by the powerful poetry of artists like Giuseppe Belli in Roman, Goldoni in Venetian, Pasolini in Friulano – and of course, Burns, MacDiarmid and Leonard? Or is it rather that the existence of these dialects, and indeed their persistence through certain structural – economic, social, political, geographical – factors, has made it possible for these poets to emerge, given a strong linguistic tool ready to hand? Some mixture of the two perhaps, but nonetheless we are aware that in some countries or regions, with or without famous poets, the very existence of dialects is considered as a strong and essential part of identity, whereas in others, while the existence of dialects is not disputed, their role in identity politics is either minimal, or indeed belittled. One can think of countries like Italy, Germany, the South Africa of Tsotsi as described here by David Archibald, and of course Scotland, in all of which dialects have at least survived if not flourished, and contrast this with the situation in countries like France and England. Could it be argued that while the disorganised (at least until very late) politics of Italy and Germany, the exclusive politics of South Africa, and the non-existent politics of Scotland have all allowed, to differing extents and in differing ways, for a plurality of voices (although none, of course, are or were necessarily in control), in France and England powerful imperial elites were established early on, who made sure that the image of their country in its global enterprise was identified uniquely with their language and their mores?
Needless to say, this crude idealisation of the situation suffers a good deal of displacement when seen in real time and space. Layers of unintentional irony are added to Joyce’s Ulysses for example, when Stephen Dedalus in fictional 1900 gets his linguistic prognostications all wrong. Dedalus characterises the idealised mother tongues of himself and Bloom, the Irishman and the Jew respectively, Gaelic and Hebrew, as the former being ‘revived’ and the latter ‘extinct’. Nothing could be further from the truth in the real 2000s, but when it comes to the moribund state of many ‘nonstandard dialects’, the relativist or the pragmatist might opine that granting a sum like £17m – as in the Ulster Scots case – for their preservation and revival, is just a waste of government money as the reason these dialects are extinct or dying is because they have nothing useful to contribute, or even say, any more. Can they have a new currency, or are their words, as Nietzsche might say, all just old coins with the heads rubbed off? It depends, of course, on which dialect you are speaking of. Tom Leonard pokes fun at the dictionarybound Scots of the Burnsians, while asserting directly, and by way of contradistinction, through his own Glaswegian dialect that, ‘All livin language is sacred’. He thus would probably not disagree with the relativism of Rorty, saying, ‘If there is social hope it lies in the imagination … in people describing a future in terms in which the past did not use.’ But is it naïve to expect, under given political conditions, that ‘non-standard’ dialects will be admitted or allowed by those in control to be discoverers of news or bearers of truth? As Pasolini says in and of his own Friulano, ‘Mond, te pous sta sensa de nos’. At any rate the most able speakers of those ‘non-standard’ dialects are often the ones handed the dagger by the establishment and political elites and the media at their beck and call and invited to do their duty. This is the sort of self-censorship which at best is known as ‘seeing oorsels as ithers see us’ (no need for that sort of self-reflection with speakers of so-called ‘standard’ dialects), and at its pathetic worst as being able to ‘laugh at ourselves’. It’s all too easy, of course, in mainstream media to ridicule the non-mainstream for elements which can seem old-fashioned, peculiar, twee, provincial, or associated with poverty, puerility or defectiveness. One of the most prominent recent examples of such a self-stigmatisation was carried out on BBC TV by the characters in the comedy programme Chewing the Fat. By just such an operation as described above, they have managed, almost single-handedly, to remove the grammatical construction ‘Gaunnae no …’ as in ‘Gaunnae no dae that’ from the Glaswegian dialect. On the face of it we might wonder why should that particular dialectal construction of a negative imperative be any more ridiculous than a negative imperative – a complex enough concept – in any other language. Yet many Glaswegians now laugh heartily when they hear any urban simpleton utter precisely this locution. The point is that as ‘standard’ modern English has no equivalent, ie. of a more subtle alternative to the ‘don’t’ command, one which uses the subjunctive mood (think of the Shakespearian, ‘I would thou didst not …) to soften the blow as it were, then the loss of this Glaswegian alternative construction is indeed a severe case of self-abuse. One is always conscious of course, while lamenting the inability of the poor and downtrodden to guard the purity and innocence of their inherited linguistic treasures, that to say the least with Duke Ellington – that kinda talk stinks the joint up. But nonetheless, before you laugh, consider the subtle difference in tone that was possible between ‘Don’t
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dae that!’ and ‘Gaunnae no dae that!’, and consider also that the slightly more formal, sensitive subjunctive mood of the latter alternative construction (alas now to be lost to the Glaswegian dialect?) is very similar to such constructions in, for example, the Italian and the Spanish languages. All of which only reminds us of course of the etymological connection between ‘dialect’ and ‘dialectic’, where Socrates’ bespoke method of getting at the truth was to hear all the voices, to let them all speak. Just so in Plato’s dialogues – especially the later ones – we find that truth is not some reified and fetishized essence, but something dynamic and suspended between all the voices of the dialogue. For if all the voices – including the negative command in a subjunctive mood – cannot speak, then we must suspect that armeys and flots (whatever they are!) have already come into play. And then, when Pasolini can say, the world doesn’t need us, the only possible response, as in Tom Leonard’s alarm-bell ringing rejoinder to his own black mass of Glaswegian alienation, is, ‘fuck thi lohta thim’!
II.
By Mitchell Miller I’m going to start my section with a quote I’ve recently been bandying with what you might call, gay abandon: And suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father’s camcorder and for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever, and it will really become an art form. Coppola hoped that this moment of creation would break through into a genuine art; but his desire to kill off the professional might just as easily be a cry for a good Babel in the cinematic trough. Film language, so we are told, is a wonderful thing, but we are never entirely clear what that language actually is. The cinematic world has been labouring for a long time under the assumption that we all speak English now – or at least in those countries where we don’t, WE JUST SHOUT A BIT LOUDER. If you have ever doubted the importance or existence of ‘film language’ then cast your mind back to the recent riots in France, the doctored footage of the liberation of Baghdad or the cheering knot of Palestinians in a West Bank Street post-9/11. The exact syntactics at play in such images may not be common knowledge (it is certainly not mainstream teaching in our schools), nor could you identify the specific ‘film sentence’ amid the gibberish, but as with the uninitiated Wordsworth in ODE’s postscript to this issue, simply took in its ‘music’ and rhythm, such as it was. And those professional men and women of the ‘creative industries’, who speak the speak so beautifully, gently took you by the romper suit and down the garden path.
And whither dialect? One could argue that Coppola seeks more than just art in destroying the professionalism of the film industry (and sweeping with it the jargon that keeps a professional cast tightly and snugly entwined into what David Archibald terms the ‘means of representation’). He is after the individual itself, the individual consciousness expressed directly through film, using the visual language not through some lexical convention of camera operators, but just in, and as herself. (The masterpiece may well be called, in broad American, ‘Why don’t you cheerleaders go f*** yourself!’ – or is that in itself a form of cheap, reductive iconography, as identified by Lars Kristensen? Probably). Our little fat girl is, in many respects, the Man Leonard himself, before the film schools can batter into her how she should speak. And that offers us just the possibility – and only that – of a language with the means to do more than just represent. One of the hot potatoes we at The Drouth have been tossing back and forth is where dialect meets the dialectic; in Leonard’s form this is obvious, but is there not some wider theorem that could be devised? When David Hume purged his word of ‘Scotticisms’ he established that the great dialectic he and Kant and Hegel and Smith and Marx were to kick off would be in a synthetic written language, purged of any trace of the native dialects in which each normatively expressed themselves. The written dialectic was in theory, transcendent, but it was also meta – a comment upon the great political and social factors that were shaping nations and thus, languages all over Europe and the ‘New World’. In fact, the language in which the ‘republic of letters’ functioned, purged of its Scotticisms, was a creation of those same factors. On and of itself, their dialectics created a new context for a shared language to develop at the very least, a jargon – in some cases a flexibility and organic intercourse of word and adaptation we might tentatively agree as a dialect of dialectics. But the written word remained obstructive to many for whom dialect was not necessarily a choice. Catholic Europe had its painting and decoration, with the possibility of a vernacular and a Hochendeutsch reading; photography and its cinematographic offspring was an important expositional gift to more iconoclastic cultures (hence the Calvinist Grierson going cock-a-hoop over Flaherty, or Iran proving such a surprisingly fertile bed for symbolist cinema). Film is a language, and any detailed analysis confirms the existence of what could be called a received pronunciation, a grammar, syntax and diction common to even the corniest of cornball movies, a dialect formed in the Jewish colony of Hollywood (an interesting reflection of Zionism, west rather than east, newness over tradition). The language is, in itself, an object of desire and admiration; filmmakers at this year’s Sundance film festival regularly spoke with almost alarming zeal of ‘the language’ they love, without any apparent ambiguity. Without wanting to appear paranoid over this (although I can assure you, deep down, I very much am), is this not reminiscent of the Scots language custodians of Leonard, or the more imperious guardians of the Queens’? Film is a language these people not only speak, but possess. Film language – one could say American film language – becomes in itself an enthusiasm, expressed as a positive, a means of washing a nice day down with a half-full cup of Californian wheatgrass – or, as the famous cinematic elocutionist never instructed, ‘The rain in New Spain falls mainly on the Hollywood plain.’ In the Story of Film (see review in The Drouth issue 15)
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Mark Cousins corrals the various strands of cinema’s ‘linguistic’ development – everything from the first attempt at a dolly shot to Ozu’s co-option of the midriff as a form of expression and emotional articulation – into a fairly convincing single narrative of its creation. His synthesis is beset with problems but at the very least offers a chance to see where the solutions to various technical obstacles have led. What he makes clear is that what we might think as the American or Hollywood language of cinema, draws upon a heteroglut of sources – some much more surprising than Japanese experiments with camera positions. And yet few would contest that this cinematic language (with a nod to Indian and Asian cinema) is dominant; it pervades Mereilles’ City of God, has increasingly influenced Bollywood and has entirely conquered mainstream British cinema. And what comment can we make on the saccharine Amelie, astutely described by Emily Munro as ‘reifying ideas of a Europeanness that perhaps ought not to exist’? Like that other global language, American English, the language in which most of these films are initially distributed, it is a succubus, absorbing and incorporating other forms of expression. Indeed, even Spanish films (with one of the largest global linguistic audiences to cater for) might be Iberian in its dialogue but in their cinematic language, shots, editing and so forth, could be said to be Spanish only in accent. The model for ‘linguistic’ success might well be the arrival at that state where language is no longer discussed, only loved. But is there anything especially wrong with a flexible, composite language enriched by a number of influences? What would The Drouth be without it? Yet, if we are to defer to the greater power of a Received Pronunciation and/or a linguistic standard then we had better be mindful of what we are buying into. The problem with simply loving a language for what it can do is that one tends to overlook its effects on those ‘speaking’ and ‘hearing’ it – that is, its relationship to other film languages – because there is more than simply one. What is missing from our Sundance filmmakers’ statement (and indeed, from the ethos of this most shiny and happy of festivals itself) is a recognition that if film is a language, then that language is in itself a political tool in contact, even conflict, with other means of expression and description. And, if we admit that, then (writing as one is in the city of Leonard and Kelman) the next two questions must be ‘What about the dialects?’ and ‘Whose language is it?’ That is, if the ‘global’ – or, as Stephen Davismoon writes in his preamble to the ‘Sonic Fusion festival’, a falsified notion of ‘universal’ – language of cinema can happily absorb Ozu’s groundbreaking method, what sort of power relationship does it represent? To speak of a ‘dialect of cinema’ no doubt seems faintly ridiculous; yet in our last issue of The Drouth, Tom Gunning describes films of the 1890s and 1900s that offer us something very like it. These films employed minimal cutting and a largely static camera, placed within a street scene or factory opening and overwhelmed by the human life that moved in front of, behind, and around it. Gunning speaks of the power of ‘the filmed’ to imprint themselves on the lens, rather than the lens’ power to swoop in, out and around them, MTV style. This ‘crude’ form of cinema is even more radical than the prospect of the fat girl making her mark. Film language today has conditioned us to expect the camera to be omniscient and agile. It can zoom in or out, swivel abruptly to follow what the operator decides is ‘the action’ and of course, there is an awesome array of techniques at the
behest of the editor to fundamentally alter this action. If the reader has any doubt of this, they need only watch tonight’s television news (any night will do). The operator does not just show us the world, he or she subliminally directs our eye, our perceptions and of course our sympathies to the point of view – or protagonist – of their choice. And what does this remind us of? At present, film language remains a craft language, an argot in the grip of those custodians of the three-act orthodoxy (the scriptwriter) and the gamut of shots and zooms (the guildsmen of cinematography, direction, lighting …). This, it should be said, is no dialect, but the language of a rootless, itinerant group of pros and prosaics whose slang exists in opposition to the dialect. Whereas a dialect adapts, contextualises, perhaps capitulates, their ‘speak’ is a rite of initiation. The best analogy I can offer is to direct you to Pirjo Honkasalo’s documentary The Three Rooms of Melancholia, a film shocking not just in the child-soldier subject matter but the application of a high end cinematic aesthetic to the meanest and most miserable extremes of the human condition. Its pivotal scene is the induction of two young Chechen refugees, Adam and Aslan, into the adult male community of their emigre mosque through the cycle of a rhythmic, repetitive ululating war chant, in the club, ready for war – army, navy and airforce. And yet these Chechens lack the sheer logistics to actually go to ‘war’ – they can only be terrorists, at most, included as a feature of the greater dialectic. Which raises the intriguing question as to whether terrorism is in its own way a dialect of war, and dialect a terrorism of language? Is everything disempowered automatically a dialect? Is language simply the outward sign of power …? Perhaps we should ‘cool the jets’ (and here we drift back into argot) before it propels us all the way to an Iranian misadventure. In any case, it is suffice to say that we who do not hold cameras remain ‘the filmed’ – just fat girls. Our role is to be enchanted by the mellifluousness of the cinematic tone. There are the filmmakers, and there are the filmed, never clearer than in the politically controversial area of documentary. This caste system is breaking down with the onslaught of digital technology, although whether the class of practitioners regain absolute hold of what Humphrey Jennings termed ‘the means of vision’ is hard to say until the technology itself beds down. What is clear from even a cursory view of independent film – that is, films made by ‘amateurs’, film students or non-professionals – is of a diversity of ‘language use’. Some consciously attempt to emulate the dominant languages, others try something new, others take the dominant film language and reinvent it to suit their purposes and resources. And there are of course, dialects or at least, a powerful vernacular – strong and almost alienating, as in Bill Douglas’ unique Trilogy, or heavily accented gangsta- slang confections such as Tsotsi (a bizarre metaphorical spin on the Kirsty Young-style mellifluousness derived from diluting dialect into accent). And then the smarmy RP patter that borrows heavily from PR; MTV is altogether too obvious a target, so I shall slander instead a film such as I Heart Huckabees, ‘an existential comedy’ by David O Russell. Huckabees is a remarkably popular film in some respects; it is deliberately unconventional, toying masterfully with its theme and its
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technique. Russell is an MTV-schooled director who uses the technique in odd and unconventional ways. But he is also insufferably smug, guilty of the worst kind of bourgeois nudge-nudge-wink-wink ‘it’s all a bit silly, isn’t it?’ laugh at the expense of both intellectuals who care about things such as existentialism, and the scruff who probably served Russell in the college canteen. Like a true bourgeois, only Russell’s middle road is natural or sensible: ‘Philosophy interests me only insofar as it is practical and makes people feel more alive and open – not closed.’ But, we must surely quibble here, albeit at the risk of turning this prefatory into a prospectus for the school of Leonard. If our interest in truth fades once the territory becomes dark, we must inevitably lose some of our potential for personal and collective authenticity. That is, all may well be bright and sunny and positive, but as long as we deny the shadows, we are left with a ray of sunshine that obscures its potentially sinister effects. On the surface of course, one chooses vitality over morbidity – language that lives, rather than a language revived. But do we not have the right, just occasionally, to an existentially bleak, terminally wrong-headed declaration of war of our own, a destructive, entirely inappropriate, slightly terroristic ‘fuck thi lohta thim’ (if only to clear the sinuses)? Perhaps only insofar as such rages ultimately pass, or are applied in some more constructive vein. In any case, I have reached the end of my section of this prefatory statement supplying neither a definite thesis or a title of its own. That is as it should be; the material that follows confounds, confuses and expands on easy notions of dialect – or indeed, what we think ‘interests us’ – ‘insofar as’. As summed up in Emily Munro’s perceptive apologia for the subtitle, each contribution will ‘encourage us to engage in dialectic and build a fuller discourse around what we thought we already knew.’ But to tide you over to the next page, the following non-title may be proverbially useful: UNTIL THE FAT GIRL …
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