by Delia Forrest
Recently I went to listen to an Aboriginal singer, Gina Williams, singing in her ancestral tongue. To do so, she had had to learn the language that even her own mother doesn’t speak! Afterwards, we got chatting about language, I mentioned Scots and Gaelic, and she told me that she got her inspiration from Scots and Welsh. Her songs, like ours, were all about love of culture, and loss or leaving.
We use language to identify and express ourselves culturally. Some linguistic features are subtle, like the Scots way of attributing things as ‘wee’, while others are more explicit, such as different vocabulary or semantics. And in Scotland, as in most countries, we only need to travel a short distance down the road to hear people speaking differently to ourselves.