Several things happened this week to make me think about identity. It started out with me wondering about languages and nationalities on www.dark-angels.org.uk courses. I was totting up the numbers: 20 courses run now, over six years, which means hundreds of people have become dark angels.
But where are they from? The expectation might be that these are British people working for businesses based in the UK. The reality is that we have had a large number of people whose first language is not English but Swedish, German, Czech, Danish, Polish, Norwegian, and many more but I mustn’t forget Welsh. They’ve all spoken and written well in English. We also get people whose first tongue is an America, Australian or African form of English. So the English language becomes a wonderful stew, mixing ingredients brought by people and languages from all parts of the world. Which enriches what Dark Angels is really all about: not English but storytelling.
At the same time I received what I thought was a ridiculous request from the finance department of a British university where I lectured recently. To pay me a small honorarium (interesting how people fall into Latin when embarrassment is a possibility), they asked me to send photocopies of my passport. This irritated me, particularly on the day when the news was full of the assassination of a Palestinian in Dubai by (possibly) Israeli agents using stolen British passport details.
That same day I was happy to be interviewed for research on ‘leadership’ carried out by the much respected Zoe, one of our dark angels from Aracena. We talked on the phone and, at the end, inevitably I was asked for details such as ‘How would I describe my ethnic category?’ I gave the only answer that seems truthful – white British – but it makes me slightly uneasy. It’s not really how I see my own identity, except it suggests the language I speak. And language is a vital part of each of our identities.
Later that evening I was watching a BBC TV programme about the Foreign Office. Part of it showed black and white film of the British Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, resigning over the Suez crisis in the 1950s. He was interviewed by a young BBC reporter on the steps of the Foreign Office. They spoke what now seems an alien language of strangulated accents and patrician stiffness. A ‘tone of voice’ we now laugh at. Yet this was the language of the people who ran the country I grew up in.
My conclusions from this: we should all be thankful for change. We should be particularly thankful that English is a language that’s constantly changing and infinitely flexible. It’s a beautiful chameleon of a language and we should treasure it in all its forms.
And you?
English is indeed a lovely ‘chameleon’ of a language.
However, it is the ‘Queen’s English’ which gives more contemporary British language (written and spoken) its RELATIVE power and attraction.
Without classical music, the punk movement would have been pointless. Picasso mastered the human anatomy long before he fractured forms and played with colour.
I sometimes fear that the texting generation don’t and won’t know what they are missing by first mastering the rules, before unknowingly breaking them…
Grumpy and Old Fashioned,
Surrey
John
A matter of identity
As someone currently training to become a Spanish to English translator, I recognise the richness of the English language.
David Lodge, in his latest book ” Deaf Sentence ” pays tribute in his dedication to the translators of his novels. He draws attention to the difficulty of translating the novel’s title, a play on words on the novel’s background theme, the difficulties that becoming steadily deaf cause in daily life. Indeed, as someone coping with this state of affairs, I am struck by how the problems of encroaching deafness, as covered by the book, uncovers yet a further layer of rich very funny english prose resulting from constantly misheard conversation.
Nice work !
Paul
Having lived for the first ten years of my life in Tunbridge Wells – the epitome of conservative attitudes and manner of speaking, I believe that the strangulated manner of speaking came from very limited contact with others except like-minded friends and isolation from work. I associate this form of speaking as being more common in women (again isolated) than masculine although the Public Schools and prep schools have a lot to answer for in their isolation too!
I welcome the much wider use to which English is put although the quality of the grammar may be hard to bear. I also welcome the fact that Universities are a good influence in discouraging excessive differences in how the language is spoken