Language, Culture and Division

June 2001

Issue 396

John Kirk

T he relationship between language and culture resembles the relationship between nature and nurture: nature reflects language (i.e. English, Irish, the traditional Scots dialect still spoken in Co. Antrim, Urdu, Cantonese ,etc. of which there are native speakers) whereas nurture reflects culture – including the functions for which language is used, and also status whether as first or second languages or as languages or dialects.
In terms of cultural theory, three possible roles between language and culture can be claimed:
Language expresses culture - i.e. there are native speakers who spontaneously speak it as a mother tongue, without conscious learning; Language substantiates culture – i.e. language has a transactional or utilitarian or functional value of its own, without the need for translation or assistance from other languages; Language symbolizes culture- language has a significance for insiders and/or outsiders regardless of the first two.
Within English, all three roles are overwhelmingly true in abundance: consider the vocabulary of Hollywood, McDonald's and Microsoft as examples of the changes in our behaviour and attitudes, linking us with what we perceive as an increasingly homogenised and global culture.
As for the Free State and the Republic, Douglas Hyde and de Valera envisaged an Ireland where Irish would be a natural first language being both a fully-fledged, all-purpose spoken and, by the 1930s increasingly standardized, written language, expressing and substantiating all aspects of Irish culture. Except that that never quite happened, although some small, naturally-speaking communities persist in Connemara and other isolated areas.
In Northern Ireland, there has come to be nurtured the West Belfast Gaeltacht by learners of Irish as second language, but whose children and grandchildren now learn it naturally as a first language. It forms a self-contained community which conducts its life through Irish. In Irish-medium schools, where the curriculum is taught without recourse to English, all three criteria of Irish expressing, substantiating and symbolizing culture are to be found. From cultural symbolism, Irish now functions in all three cultural functions.
The naturally-occurring traditional dialect of Scots, where still unmistakably spoken, has all three cultural values associated with English, with which it is inextricably bound up. The naturally expressive spoken dialect and its literary adaptations – especially represented in Jim Fenton's short stories and poems unquestionably express and substantiate the culture of its speakers. In 'The Flow', for instance, Fenton uses words used for peat cutting (trinketin', breeshin', underfittin' etc.) which have no English equivalents.
By contrast, the new written dialect known as Ullans is not at all natural but an artificial invention or an amalgam of bits of Scots from all sorts of sources. Like Esperanto, as it has no native speakers, Ullans does not expresses culture for it is not acquired as a natural language or transmitted by native speakers; nor does it substantiate culture for it almost invariably is used purposelessly in translation - the latest being the 2001 Census form. Without vitality or autonomous utilitarian value, Ullans appears to function as cultural symbolism.
The terms Ulster-Scots and Ullans if used as if interchangeable synonyms has created a lot of confusion. The cultural distinction between the spoken Scots dialect and written Ullans is usually blurred by activists – and this has been carried over into legislation. The promotion of Ullans in the name of Ulster Scots has done no favours to the latter's native speakers, who form a natural constituency, and among whom many celebrate their identity through cultural media other than language.
Nobody disputes the status of English as the province's first language, for it fulfills the necessary structural functions and, probably for what is surely the vast majority of people, still all the cultural functions which they need. For some people, however, and for some cultural purposes, English appears no longer to be not enough, or unable, or inappropriate, or unsuitable, and Irish and specifically Ullans are being demanded as cultural symbols. With English came the imposition of British cultural, social, and emotional norms, but these are not the norms of the Irish. Nor are they the norms of many Scots – for there are cultural, social, emotional norms which only the Scots dialect expresses, as Fenton's poems, in a continuous line from the seventeenth-century revival of vernacular poetry in the Scots national dialect onwards, so clearly shows – norms which Ullans is unable to fulfil.
This move from monolingualism in English to trilingualism in English, Irish and so-called 'Ulster-Scots' – but specifically Ullans - from mono-culturalism to multi-culturalism - is symptomatic of cultural change that has been witnessed throughout the twentieth century. The legacy of the nineteenth century has been the rise and fall of the European nation state, with its intrinsic, rather standardized ideology of one nation, one language, one culture. What Northern Ireland is slowly coming to realize, accept and respect is that nature is diverse, and that the nurturing has to accommodate and integrate harmoniously the entirety of that diversity.
The case of Irish in a liberated, post-colonial, structurally independent Ireland is easy to explain. However, Northern Ireland unionists, loyally pro-British, although not always pro-the British state, have also been questioning the ideology of the British hegemony and their relationship with it - somehow unequal, yet somehow not survivable without it – and the basis of these relationships as symbolized in the English language. Unionists' recent recognition of Scots as the ancestral tongue of the majority of unionists – after all, by the end of the seventeenth century Scots outnumbered the English 4:1 – quickly led to campaigns for linguistic recognition and for recovering the Scottishness of Northern Ireland as the ancestral cultural identity of what probably still is a majority of unionists – certainly of Presbyterian unionists.
The evolution from a region of a mono-lingual nation state into a multi-lingual, post-colonial, quasi-autonomous devolved statelet is the change of nurture/culture which is slowly but surely working its way out here for the better for all of Northern Ireland's people together, and which the GFA is seeking to redress. Its policy seems equality, but in reality it is equity (Part III of the European Charter provides for Irish as expressing and substantiating culture, whereas Part II accepts Ullans as no more than symbolizing culture and urges its promotion. The provision for lesser-used languages and for the deaf and brail communities is even less). Whereas the GFA addresses the reality of multi-lingualism, it also recognizes differences of function and cultural status and creates an equitable but not equal division of resources and, at the end of the day, of power between these language-defined social groups.
The current zealous politics of linguistic recognition forms both an equality campaign for the same rights, and also an equity or cultural campaign for special rights. The Irish and the Ulster Scots communities seek tolerance, empathy, and respect for members as individuals and for each social group as a whole. The campaigns are motivated by several factors: by unequal power, authority and legitimation – unequal with English, and unequal with each other; by a lack of fit between official or institutional categorizations and arrangements for these languages and their speaker groups self-ascriptions, perceptions and demands; and in effect, by language-based cultural conflict.
Linguistic-cultural inequalities have, however, powerful reinforcements: specifically segregation in religion (perhaps inevitable) and in education (by no means inevitable), and - on the basis of what has become major substantiating cultural differences between religion and politics – there is also the growing dichotomy of sectarian ethnicity. Sectarian ethnicity has adopted linguistic reinforcement (catholic nationalists with Irish, and presbyterian unionists with Scots but specifically with Ullans). It is this usurption of language as a metonymic symbol of ethnic identity, and as the basis of the argument which has triggered the present – and, in terms of provision in the GFA, I would say successful - campaign for cultural identity recognition. As Mari FitzDuff so persuasively argues, language debates in situations of conflict are never about the languages per se and invariably about something else!
Many people of culturally heterogeneous northern Ireland are, in terms of a binary ethnicity, not ethnically clean but rather - to use Mark Adair's memorable expression - 'mongrels', with elements of more than one culture, and certainly many more will be so in the future.
Harmonious multi-culural co-existence is incompatible with inimicable monocultural ghettoisation, both that of the dominated culture (Irish and Ullans), as well as that of the dominating culture (English). An English-only strategy is no longer defensible - for all its mutual intelligibility and flexibility and self-contained, confluenced cultural heterogeneity, English is not sufficient to absorb and accommodate the local cultural diversity for which address is being sought. Inter-culturalism is a strategy which goes beyond ghettoisation and multi-culturalism, and which encourages people from different language-based cultures to communicate and interact with each, as Adair also shows. Structural, civic society in Northern Ireland may be integrated and operating, for all intents and purposes, well; yet, three years after the GFA, the different, emerging language-based groups or communities have yet to show how they are building that intended lasting peace and envisaged cultural integration as a harmoniously settled society occupying the one and the same piece of ground.
A more secure society accepting and accommodative of cultural difference will only mature and develop through communication with each other – not least about the common investment in conflict-free societal issues. A policy of dynamic, responsible inter-culturalism is urgently needed - not least as a condition for government-sponsored cultural support.
The second element of this language-based strategy would be pragmatism. Pragmatism recognizes that the practice or enacting of language-based cultures should not block the progress of a whole society. Specifically civic, structural society should not be held to ransom over unnecessary or unwanted cultural or especially linguistic symbolism or transactional practices (such as prescriptive translation where the utilitarian value has been satisfactorily accomplished in English). Preserving culture does not mean slavishly clinging to the past but rather maintaining it by changing it as the whole society evolves and by taking that shared evolution into account. The GFA provides an unprecedented context for the enactment of responsible pragmatic inter-culturalism.
For many people, to assert their ethnicity as Irish, all they want is some knowledge of Irish, not a fully-fledged, all-singing, all-dancing competence; for others, who was to assert themselves as ancestrally Scottish, all they want is some awareness of their ancestral dialect, for the purposes of knowing something about it and of reading its traditional literary manifestations based on the natural dialect, not a fully-fledged literacy in Ullans.
The pragmatics of such a strategy lets us distinguish between fulfillable and enhancing personal choices and unrealistic and divisive societal prescriptions. Nature might give us a first language by right; but nurture does not give us culture without responsibility.
Within the ethos of the GFA, Irish and Ulster-Scots are intended to unite both their respective self-defining language-based communities as well as the new post-agreement, post-troubles society of which each forms one of the largest social (some activist would urge ethnic) group. Towards this goal, there should be no better leadership than from the North-South Language Agencies which have benefited so generously in status and resources as an outcome from the Agreement. If language-based ethnic groups are genuine and sincere about their participation in the creation of a lasting peace, and of a tolerant and humane and civilized society together on this same piece of ground, how will society be reassured that the practice and enactment of the cultures being conducted around Irish and Ulster Scots/Ullans,- and being promoted and practised by their activists and now by the North-South Language Board and its two Agencies – will not in turn divide or be seen to divide afresh?