Secrets of Language
Language and politics I’ve been meaning to write about language and Northern Ireland for some time. It’s taken a while, the reasons for which the ensuing will shed some light on. Being the language nerd that I am, I didn’t think twice last year when I lived in Sweden to learn the basics of its language and play around with it a bit. It made sense, it was fun, and it gave me some new words for my collection of ethno-linguistic field notes. Here in Northern Ireland it’s different. I’m hesitant to go near the native language, apart from the fact that Irish is impossibly complex, an unintelligible jumble of random letters. Swedish, triangulated with Dutch, English, and a bit of German, held pretty much no surprises. Irish on the other hand… “Mo sheacht mbeannacht ort.” I mean, what? But apart from all that, I hardly dare touch it. As so much else in this corner of the world, from colours to musical instruments, language has become weaponised, simultaneously appropri...