Lost Languages

I was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the official language was, and still is, English. I never heard anybody speaking Gaelic as a child, and I didn’t know of its existence until, many years later, I read the novels of Flann O’Brien (one of the many pen names of Brian O’Nolan), among them The Poor Mouth (1973), translated by Patrick C. Power from the Gaelic An Béal Bocht (1941), which originally appeared under an invented Irish pseudonym which O’Nolan used for his Irish Times column, Myles na gCopaleen. And yet, the language of Northern Ireland as I experienced it growing up wasn’t quite monoglot: there were those who said ‘shit’ and those who said ‘shite’, those who said ‘bread’ and those who said ‘pan’, those who said ‘little’ and those who said ‘wee’. There was, in a word, an ‘official’ English (English-English) and an ‘unofficial’ English (Irish-English). And this was also reflected in pronunciation. My grandmother, who came from York, and who spoke what I always regarded as a slightly affected English, would constantly berate us for saying ‘fork’ pronouncing the ‘r’ (‘forek’). ‘There’s no ‘r’ in it’, she’d say, ‘It’s “fawk”’. To which we’d reply, laughing, ‘There’s no “w” in it granny!’ Like many of my peers I was, for a brief period, sent to elocution lessons to iron out this aberrational pronunciation – I still remember some of the exercises like ‘red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather’ which were designed to improve our pronunciation. But they didn’t work – they just became a source of laughter and struck us as ridiculous, and I soon ...