Old Tongue
by Jackie Kay (Life Mask, Bloodaxe Books)

When I was eight, I was forced south.
Not long after, when I opened
my mouth, a strange thing happened.
I lost my Scottish accent.
Words fell off my tongue:
eedyit, dreich, wabbit, crabbit
stummer, teuchter, heidbanger,
so you are, so am ur, see you, see ma ma,
shut yer geggie or I’ll gie you the malkie!

My own vowels started to stretch like my bones
and I turned my back on Scotland.
Words disappeared in the dead of night,
new words marched in: ghastly, awful,
quite dreadful, scones said like stones.
Pokey hats into ice cream cones.
Oh where did all my words go —
my old words, my lost words?
Did you ever feel sad when you lost a word,
did you ever try and call it back
like calling in the sea?
If I could have found my words wandering,
I swear I would have taken them in,
swallowed them whole, knocked them back.

Out in the English soil, my old words
buried themselves. It made my mother’s blood boil.
I cried one day with the wrong sound in my mouth.
I wanted them back; I wanted my old accent back,
my old tongue. My dour soor Scottish tongue.
Singsongy. I wanted to gie it laldie.

We give an impression of ourselves the moment we open our mouths; our choice of words — and the accent we employ to deliver them — defines us in the minds of others, which is why, if we want to get ahead in life, we might choose to leave behind an accent that roots us either in a place or in our past. Conversely, as adaptable children we often unconsciously adopt the accent of a new place when we move home — even just a little — not simply because we hear it all the time but also to fit in better with everyone around us. As children we absorb all aspects of our surroundings like sponges.

When I was a child and living in Devon, while I didn’t acquire a Devonshire accent, I adopted the handy local slang when out with my friends because it made them less uncomfortable with me; our differences were less apparent. I wasn’t conscious of it until one of them telephoned and I was the first person to answer the phone (so no one could warn me who was calling). My friend asked if I was in, not recognising my usual voice at all, and thought it hysterical when she realised her mistake. If I hadn’t tempered the way I spoke my friends probably wouldn’t have had anything to do with me. My usual manner of speech — or rather, my lack of their kind of accent — was alienating to them, and they would have considered it a barrier because it represented differences in our upbringing, also emphasising the fact that I was not properly local at a time when it mattered. Our accents embellish our words with clues about us.

And here is Jackie Kay, imagining the transition between the loss of a Scottish accent and the adoption of a more English one, when her character was “forced south” at the age of 8. Some would see the loss of one’s accent as a betrayal of one’s roots; others would see it as a necessary adaptation to changing circumstances. We outgrow the lives we occupied as children; our accents, our slang, our playmates, our clothes, our bedrooms and our ideas. They still represent the “us” that we once were, but they become incongruous with our older selves, although we might pine for that period because often it was a time when we were free from the burden of any responsibility.

Kay tests the lost words, listing them like shopping: “eedyit” translates as fool or nincompoop — or idiot; “dreich” means dreary; “wabbit” means exhausted; “heidbanger” speaks for itself. “My own vowels started to stretch like my bones,” her character tells us, and we can see that she is growing up even as she is learning to speak in a new way: “crabbit/ stummer teuchter,” says Kay, recalling her Scottish vocabulary (this would apparently translate as “bad-tempered, thick-witted Highlander”). “Words disappeared in the dead of night,” she says, and I see them scurrying off like refugees, no longer able to find a home.

Our conscious mind clings on to everything during our waking hours; it’s when we sleep that our subconscious mind starts cleaning house, replacing the old, fading words with bright, shiny new ones. Kay calls them “ghastly, awful, quite dreadful”, which might also be new words; “scones said like stones”, she tells us, so we know exactly what that sounds like (as opposed to scones said like “bronze”). She wants to know where all her old words went, and includes us in her ruminations; “Did you ever feel sad when you lost a word . . ?” And I think of all the words I’ve lost through circumstance and lack of use.

When living in Australia in the Nineties, for instance, with few opportunities for conversation and suffering from M.E., I lost words by the dozen. Speech was pared down to the bare necessities, and the meaning of some words became indistinct. My book of choice was the Oxford Dictionary. Other words that I used as a teenager no longer fit me; they sound ridiculous if I say them — the verbal equivalent of wearing blue eye shadow and sporting a perm while wearing platform shoes with stripy socks.

Kay asks us if we ever called back a lost word, like calling back the sea — and of course the sea will not come because it answers only to the pull of the Moon. The idea of the word is cast out on to the image of the ocean and into the vast space that the ocean occupies, and is lost. Her character wanted back her “Dour soor Scottish tongue” and “to gie it laldie”, meaning that she wanted to give it a thrashing (implying vigorous use of the language). The poem revels in the idea of the lost accent and missing words, but knows that they are gone, despite the hankering. The child that once was — who spoke that way — is represented as a woman who has evolved beyond any childhood constraints of place, accent and vocabulary, and in the language she now uses she tells us how she feels about it.

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