Roxy Harris Language and Power: Language Materials for Students in the Multilingual and Multiethnic Classroom.(ILEA Afro-Caribbean Language and Literacy Project in Further and Adult Education). Harcourt Brace and Janovich. £24.95
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Some years ago in Cork I was walking down a quiet street when I heard what I took to be a Welshman calling out to someone across the road. When the man continued speaking I realised that he wasn't Welsh, it was just that as a native of Cork he lifted his voice at the end of his sentences in the way that some Welsh speakers do. This interested me, as I had noticed in previous years similarities between Belfast and Glasgow speech (a Glasgow speaker in the Irish Republic is likely to be asked - as I have been several times - whether he is "down from the North") and between Dublin and Liverpool speech, notably in a certain "soft-ness" of the vowels and the "t" sound. In fact these Belfast- Glasgow, Dublin-Liverpool, Cork-South Wales common pronunciation features indicate how one's ear can detect the pattern of bygone trade and social interchange buried in the present-day speech of ordinary people speaking ordinary language.
This point is central to Language and Power, a large, innovatory, and very practical textbook aimed at teachers of English in secondary and further education, and newly published as one of the final products of the now-abolished Inner London Education Authority. The book was compiled by a group of teachers in the ILEA's Afro-Caribbean Language and Literacy project, described in the introduction thus:
The Afro-Carribbean Language and Literacy Project attempts to promote the maximum level of student performance in written Standard English, and believes that this cannot be done without addressing the issues of language and power. It is important to recognise that attitudes to languages and different language varieties are largely determined by the power relations between different groups in society.
The co-ordinator of the Project and ultimate editor of Language and Power is Roxy Harris, who co-edited the 1988 anthology My Personal Language History (New Beacon Books 76 Stroud Green Road London N4 3EN, 3). This stimulating anthology reproduced the personal reflections on the history, status and com-munication value of their own language and accent by 93 further education pupils and four lecturers in London, all from different linguistic backgrounds, different parts of the world, and different parts of Britain. That anthology, it can now be seen, formed the prelude to the present volume, which systematically ad-dresses the questions that the 1988 anthology raised.
Language and Power is a large-format book, spiro bound able to be folded back and material photo-copied for distribution. In other words, one book can do a school. The book is in sixteen sections divided into three main parts. The first deals with the history of English and its status as formed and affected by successive invasions; its continually changing form over the years, for example in the Lord's Prayer as written in the ninth century, in 1603, and in the New English Bible of 1961; the history of spelling and the advent of the modern rigidity of "correct" spelling; the letters of the alphabet, their development from the Phoenician via the Roman; the place of English in the context of the world's total of 3000 languages; the history of alphabets and scripts in this world context; the common ground of all languages, making the all-important distinction between prescriptive and descriptive grammar; the story of personal names: the fact that the adoption of surnames is a comparatively recent development in Western history.Part Two, "Language Power and Identity," brings the history to bear on the present under three headings: The Suppression of Language, The Educational Issues, and Language and Equality. From the first, an extract from an 1848 report on Welsh education:
My attention was attracted to a piece of wood suspended by a stick around a boy's neck and on the wood were the words Welsh stick. This I was told was a stigma for speaking Welsh. The Welsh Stick or Welsh Not as it is sometimes called is given to any pupil who is overheard speaking Welsh and may be transferred by him to any school-fellow whom he hears com-mitting a similar offence. It is then passed from one to another until the close of the week when the pupil in whose possession the Welsh Stick is found is punished by flogging.
Similar experiences are quoted from Nigerian, Irish, Kurdish, Jamaican, Cypriot, Cockney backgrounds. One of the questions arising from this - "Has anyone ever made you feel that the way you speak is 'common'?"
Finally the book deals specifically with Caribbean history, culture and Creole languages, their origins in a mixture of the colonial overseers' tongues - English, French, Dutch, Spanish - and the West African languages of the places from where the slaves were forcibly removed. There are comparative folktales, and examples from contemporary Caribbean writers including Amyril Johnston, Louise Bennet, Michael Smith, Samuel Selvon. And of course there are examples of the denigration of the languages and the people. This in a memoir of 1858:
... their pronunciation is abominable, and the rising generation, not-
withstanding the pains taken to educate them, retain the villainous
"patois" of their parents.
Among many examples, a letter to the Trinidad Guardian of 1975 deplores the would-be treatment of Trinidad language seriously when it is no more than "a form of English but very bad English." Of course the parallels for Scotland especially its urban speakers are everywhere clear - or ought to be. The last such anti-Glasgow speech letter I saw a couple of months back got the Evening Times star letter award. It can all be traced, like everything else, it's not new.
One of Glasgow's oldest and busiest streets is Jamaica Street, laid down and opened in 1763: as David Daiches puts it in his history of Glasgow, "its name recalls one source of Glasgow's prosperity." But the source of this prosperity requires some detailing. According to the statistics of L.J. Ragatz's The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean (New York 1971) the population of Jamaica in 1768, five years after Jamaica Street's opening, consisted of 17,949 whites and 166,914 slaves. One should bear this in mind looking at the names of some of Glasgow's oldest streets, or at the newly- named "Merchant City". The abominable conditions endured by children and adults working in such as the tobacco processing factories, according to Parliamentary Reports, links these bygone factory workers with their slave counterparts overseas. The link lives on in the contempt heaped on the language varieties spoken by the descendants of both.
Language and Power demonstrates how a language is seen to have status according to whether it is used by the governing or the governed; whether professional linguists have published academic works on it; whether it can be shown to have a grammar, a distinctive sound-pattern, a "full" range of reference; whether agreed value has been, or can be, placed on works of literary art that use it as a medium; above all, whether ways have yet been found of agreeing a form of the language in serious dictionary, thus - more even than fixing meanings to words - fixing pronunciations to fixed spellings. All this it puts up for discussion and argument. Everywhere the examples, as the end of Smiley Culture's reggae Cockney Translation:Cockney say scarper. We say scatter
Cockney say rabbit. We chatter
We say bleach. Cockney knackered
Cockney say triffic. We say waaacked!
Cockney say blokes. We say guys
Cockney say Alright? We say Ites!
We say pants. Cockney say strides
Sweet as a nut... just level vibes. Seen?
Humans speak Language, and all are equal in that fact. The rest is status. Language and Power is the best educational tool I've seen yet that provides a systematic method for teaching those who speak low-status languages to garner some pride in the universal validity of their own specific language form, and to put this and the high-status languages of governance in a critical historical context.
