Claire's Story — Accentricity

Sadie (voiceover): Keeping Accentricity online and available for free costs a little bit of money each month. So from time to time we need to think about how we fund it. To help with this, we’ve teamed up with Glasgow based artist Cat Ingall and asked her to design us an Accentricity t-shirt. You can find them by following the link in the episode description or by going to the Accentricity website. If you’d rather support the podcast in another way, you’ll also find links to our Patreon and Steady subscription pages and a link for making one off donations. If you don’t have any cash to spare, you can still help out by telling a friend about the podcast, by posting about it on social media, or by leaving a review on the podcast streaming service that you use. All of these things are also massively helpful.

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Sadie (voiceover): This is Accentricity Series Two: The Moving Project. Stories about migration, language, and identity from around the world.

Over the past year we’ve been working with a group of people, teaching them how to podcast, and helping them to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. This is Claire’s story.

Claire was born in Scotland but moved to England at the age of nine and then moved back to Scotland again as a teenager. Now she researches people’s relationship with Doric: the variety of Scots spoken in the northeast of Scotland. Part of that work means examining her own relationship with Doric, as someone who has roots in the area but who hasn’t always stayed rooted in one place.

First, you’ll hear Claire’s 10-minute audio piece where she examines her own linguistic identity and how it relates to her work and her relationships. Afterwards, you’ll hear a conversation we had shortly after she’d finished it. In it we dig a bit deeper into some of the ideas that came up in her episode: where home is, how it feels to move, finding your linguistic identity, and the connections between language and social justice. But first, here’s Claire’s audio piece.

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Claire (voiceover): I’m Claire Needler and I live and work in the north east of Scotland. In this podcast I’m thinking about Doric, the variety of Scots traditionally spoken in this area. Here’s a clip of two broad Doric speakers from Peterhead, a fishing town about 20 miles away from where I live.

Female voice 1: We were brought up with richt grammar.

Female voice 2: Ah ken. Even though it was Doric you had to say the richt thing. Kind of.

Female voice 1: Aye.

Female voice 3: You’d get slapped round the lug.

Female voice 1: Aye, just exactly.

Claire (voiceover): You can listen to more of this, and other varieties of Scots too, on the community page of the Scots syntax atlas website.

[cow mooing]

For the last 15 years or so I’ve lived on a farm in Aberdeenshire and my husband’s family have farmed here for over 200 years, so I’ll probably always be an “in aboot comer” no matter how long I stay. I’m doing a PhD at the Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen. I’m researching contemporary use of Scots, and I’m learning Doric too, and this causes some friction between my husband Hamish and I.

Claire (to Hamish): Who do you think can speak Doric or should speak Doric or…?

Hamish: Well, people who have been brought up in this area and speak Doric anyway. That’s your natural Doric speakers and anybody else that wants to learn it, that’s got to be a boost.

Claire: I think it’s really interesting that sometimes you find it funny when I’m trying to speak Doric because I think it makes you nervous or something.

Hamish: Doesn’t make me nervous. It’s just that you’re not a natural speaking Doric speaker, so it doesn’t seem natural. And I haven’t heard you speak Doric before you studied it.

Claire (voiceover): Okay, so it doesn’t seem natural to my husband but surely studying a language is the only way to learn, unless it’s your mother tongue. What is going on here? I think I need to dig a little deeper.

Claire (to Hamish): Why is it different for you when you hear me trying to speak Doric than when you hear me trying to speak French?

Hamish: Well because most Doric speakers are -- that’s the native tongue in this area.

Claire: But if I tell you that I’m learning Polish as well. So at the moment -- at school I did loads of languages. I did French and German and Latin and Spanish, a little bit of Russian at Uni, lived in the Netherlands so learnt Dutch, and at the moment I’m learning Doric and Polish. But it’s Doric that you find problematic.

Hamish: It’s something that isn’t natural to you. Whereas if I’m speaking to people, because I’ve been brought up in this area and the farming community, if I’m speaking to people, country people and all that, then I will go into a Buchan dialect.

Claire: I’d just like to understand a little bit more about why me speaking Doric is different from me speaking French because when I speak French, I’m clearly not a native speaker and I probably have what might be considered to be a bad accent as well. But it doesn’t -- like when we go to France, it doesn’t embarrass you if I speak French. So why is it different for Doric?

Hamish: Well, I haven’t heard you speak Doric in the -- to your friends.

Claire: I don’t think you’ve heard me speak French to my French friends either though.

Hamish: No because they can speak perfectly good English.

Claire: And why’s that different?

Hamish: French is a different language and Doric’s more a colloquial local language.

Claire (voiceover): This is a key point. Doric is a variety of Scots which is now considered to be a language but in the past was often thought of as slang or bad English. Clearly Hamish is proud of his part in the local community and Doric, or the Buchan dialect, is an important part of that. He continues:

Hamish: It would be a shame to see in 20 years’ time nobody speaking Doric. And so, it’s, yeah, it’s part of our culture and it would be a shame to see an end to it.

Claire: If you were trying to keep Doric going, what do you think would be the best things to do?

Hamish: Have some classes and bothy ballads.

Claire (voiceover): Just so you know, bothy ballads are folk songs about farming life.

Claire (to Hamish): What do you think about outsiders coming here and learning Doric?

Hamish: People who are likes of the Polish, Lithuanians, whatever, that don’t understand what people in Fraserburgh and Peterhead are saying when they work in the food factories.

Claire: So why does that make sense to you? That someone from Poland or Lithuania should want to learn Doric so that they get on better at work but someone like me who would be learning Doric for study purposes is strange to you. Why is it different?

Hamish: It just sounds a little bit different because you’ve got an English accent.

Claire (voiceover): Now I’m the one feeling uncomfortable. I was born in Scotland but spent my teenage years in Croydon, south London. When I lived in England, I was teased for sounding Scottish and although I’ve been back in Scotland for over 20 years, I still don’t sound like I should be able speak Doric. What is going on here?

Dawn: I don’t see the Doric as just a dialect.

Claire (voiceover): That’s my friend Dawn. She’s a linguist and a teaching fellow at Aberdeen Uni. Like me, she studies Doric but like my husband, Doric is part of her family life.

Dawn: I see it as like a way of life up here and something that’s really, deeply ingrained in the Scottish psyche. Doric is my granda who’s a ploughman, and the way he used to speak and everything. That’s Doric for me. It’s something much, much, much deeper than just using the words.

Claire (voiceover): This really chimes with some of what Hamish said. People from the farming community are real Doric speakers. It’s more than just a language, it’s the psyche and the way of life. But what does that mean for people who are trying to learn? How on earth can we find a way into this language when we start with learning the words?

I asked Dawn how her thinking had changed towards people learning the language.

Dawn: I think in terms of like hearing folk from out and about speaking Doric, I think what I said to you at the time was people were saying to me they were learning Scots. And I was always like “well, what Scots?” Because I don’t see it as being this like monolith that can just be learnt as this one big thing.

Claire (voiceover): Time for some clarification. Scots is one of three indigenous languages in Scotland alongside English and Gaelic. It is spoken by over 1.5 million people and there are many regional varieties of Scots, including Doric also known as North East Scots, which is what we’re talking about in this episode. It’s bundling it all up together as Scots that’s annoyed Dawn.

Dawn: But I suppose quite a lot of it is to do with my own biases and my own perhaps lack of linguistic self-esteem. Because I couldn’t see why anyone would want to learn it when I’d been discouraged from speaking it, probably.

Claire (voiceover): And Dawn’s not alone. In her research she found similar attitudes and experiences time and time again.

Dawn: I think people need to be taught about the validity of the language they speak. So in my own research I’ve come across lots of north east youngsters saying stuff like we just speak make up words. There’s made up words or we just speak slang. And I think like well maybe if you knew a bit about the history of what you speak and a bit about how it’s connected to other languages and how those words have evolved then maybe you wouldn’t feel the same.

Claire (voiceover): I think this probably gets to the heart of what’s going on with Hamish. If native Doric speakers were discouraged from using it, perhaps it’s not that surprising that they find it strange when people want to learn it now.

Dawn: So I think in that regard my thinking’s probably changed a bit now. And I think well, well why not?

Claire (voiceover): Hearing Dawn, who is a native speaker, talk about her lack of linguistic self-esteem makes me think of my own lack of confidence as I’ve been learning Doric. Within the classroom environment, I definitely feel that my Doric is improving, but Hamish is right: I don’t speak Doric with my native speaking friends, and I definitely don’t try it out at home. What is stopping me just giving it a go?

Dawn: I think one of the main problems is the proximity of Scots, linguistically and geographically, I suppose, to English. And I think that’s where this almost neurosis comes from. If I was to start speaking in French, then that would be so different from speaking in English that it wouldn’t -- there would never be any risk of it being viewed as appropriation or a caricature.

Claire (voiceover): So maybe Hamish doesn’t think it’s funny when I’m speaking Doric. Maybe the discomfort or nervousness I thought I sensed is because he thinks I’m appropriating his culture or laughing at Doric speakers.

Dawn: I suppose if you were to speak start speaking French or German or Russian or whatever, that’s putting a whole other hat on, isn’t it?

Claire: Ah, so all foreign language speakers know that they are speaking another language, but some Scots speakers don’t yet recognise that Scots is a different language than English.

Dawn: Yeah, because I wouldn’t hear a French speaker and say “oh you’ve just made that up” you know what I mean? You wouldn’t think of doing that to someone who speaks another language, so why do we do it with -- why do we do it with Scots?

I wonder if it’s got something to do with marginalisation and the fact that Doric speakers have probably felt marginalised at some point for the way that they speak. And that sort of digs in a really strong sense of identity. So then when someone else is learning it, maybe it sometimes feels like they’re just trying on your clothes for a second but that they’re not going to have to live with them.

Claire (voiceover): Am I just trying on Scots as if it was someone else’s clothes? I think there is some truth to this. It doesn’t yet feel like my own language and I’m not sure that it ever will to be honest.

I went back to Hamish to ask what he thought the future holds for Doric and how best to keep the language alive.

Hamish: Well, by bringing in a little bit of education on the local history and how Doric was used as a language and still is used as a language.

Claire (voiceover): On this journey, I’ve seen that there isn’t a simple answer to why people feel the way they do about Scots. It’s not just because I don’t have a local accent that I feel uncomfortable speaking Doric with my husband, but perhaps because I feel like both an insider and an outsider, I can begin to work through these complicated feelings and encourage others to do the same.

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Sadie (to Claire): You moved about quite a lot as a child, so what are your memories of moving? What was that like?

Claire: Well, my early move when I was three, I don’t really remember very much, except that my neighbour -- we moved the day after my third birthday and our neighbour gave me a packet of Smarties that I could eat in the car. A big box of Smarties. So that’s my only memory really from that one. But my parents also split up not long after I moved to Aberdeen, so then we moved house a few times in between. So really my early childhood we moved a lot. Sometimes in the same town but every couple of years we moved house. So it just kind of became normal to move a lot but definitely moving from Scotland to England was a bigger deal.

We’d never been abroad, and we were going to go to holiday in Tenerife for the first time. My stepdad got a job in London so instead of going abroad, which was hugely exciting when I was nine, we got on the train, the sleeper train, with the car and the pets and everything and travelled to London overnight. And never got our holiday abroad until many years later but I got to start this new life. It was really different. Aberdeen was very -- well as I remember as a child in the early 80s, it was I guess just about the time when the oil boom was starting so Aberdeen was still pretty homogenous: pretty white, pretty Scottish. And then going to just outside London was really, vastly more diverse. One of my earliest memories is going to McDonald’s and we didn’t have one of those, in my part of Scotland anyway, and seeing all these faces, all these people from different ethnic backgrounds and all this business and also going to this such an American idea of McDonald’s. It was just spectacularly different than anything I’d known before.

Sadie: Do you remember how aware you were of the linguistic differences at that age? Do you remember understanding that your accent was different from a Croydon accent and hearing different accents and understanding that?

Claire: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. When I got to school, yeah, I really clearly remember them pretending that they didn’t understand what I was saying because of the way I was talking, and using that to exclude me from games, playground games. Which is just mean really. And then also, but it didn’t feel so mean, people would parrot back to me, like try and copy my accent but that didn’t feel -- it wasn’t horrible. It was just curious, I think.

My sister is 11 years younger than me, so she was born in Croydon. When she was learning to talk, she had a really South London accent, but we moved back to Scotland when she was three or four, and so she very quickly picked up a Scottish accent. I guess a bit of sibling rivalry I was always kind of envious of her that she is pretty much the only one in the family who fitted in linguistically in all the places we lived because of the age she moved about whereas I was always -- I think when I was in England, I was very conscious that I was Scottish and very much wanted to hold onto my accent. Because you would think at nine I could have lost it if I’d wanted to, but we still had family in Scotland, we still came to Scotland for all our holidays, and I just think it was definitely a really important part of my identity.

Then when I was 16 and we moved back to Scotland, and I got teased for sounding English I couldn’t stand it. You know, that seemed so unfair like a double bind. In England as a Scottish person I was a curiosity, whereas in Scotland as an English sounding person that was definitely less good, you know? That felt really unjust, that I was persecuted for being the English oppressor when I wasn’t English and when I’d just experienced years and years of being teased for being Scottish already.

Sadie: Did you think of yourself as having a Scottish accent at that point when you moved back from England and then people were like oh actually you sound English?

Claire: Yes. Absolutely.

Sadie: It’s like I’m not English enough for England so…

Claire: Exactly, exactly. That was tough but then by the time I got to Uni, which was only a year later -- I went to Aberdeen Uni when I was 17 -- and that was mainly because my dad still lived in Aberdeen, and I wanted to come to somewhere that was really familiar after all this moving around. I had a great time. I really loved it but towards the end of my time in Aberdeen I met somebody who said to -- who I kind of like a casual acquaintance, who said, “but you speak such good English” and I thought “what do you mean?” And she said that all the time she’d known me, so for four years already, she’d assumed I was German and that was --

Sadie: -- Oh.

Claire: -- Yeah and that was equally strange as a native speaker to be thought of as not a native speaker by somebody, some casual acquaintance who didn’t know me from anybody else.

Sadie: That’s really interesting. --

Claire: -- That was strange.

Sadie: -- I wonder why they thought German? Huh.

Claire: Yeah, I know. I know. And then when I moved to the Netherlands when I was in my early 20s, I spent two years there and I was working on English language dictionaries, so I wasn’t really kind of integrated that much, but I did put a lot of effort into learning Dutch. Although I couldn’t speak it very well, I could read the newspaper and watch the telly and stuff by the time I came back. Of course, ever since then people have always said “where you from?” and when I’ve said, “well I’m from here and here and here” they always say, “oh it’s the Dutch I’m hearing.” I think that’s really strange because it must be the smallest linguistic influence on my accent of all of them, particularly now I’ve been back for more than 20 years. It’s funny.

Sadie: Is it just people who just don’t know how to place you so they --

Claire: -- Yeah, probably.

Sadie: Because to me I think I just hear your accent as Scottish. [laughs]

Claire: Good. [laughs] Good. Finally I pass except within the farming community of course.

Sadie: So now you’ve lived in -- so how long have you been in Aberdeenshire now? Is it Aberdeenshire you’re in?

Claire: Yes. I’m in Aberdeenshire on a farm. I’ve been here for -- I’ve been on the farm for 15 years and I’ve been back in Scotland for about 20 years.

Sadie: And then you’re married to Hamish.

Claire: Hamish. He’s a farmer and his family have lived here for hundreds of years.

Sadie: Do you feel pretty rooted in that particular area now?

Claire: I think that varies actually. When I moved back, I definitely wanted to move home. And when I had children, it was really great that my parents were nearby and my in laws are next door, so I thought that I had all the family support network round about me that I hadn’t really had when I was growing up. In that sense I’m definitely back where I belong and that -- and in that sense I do feel rooted. But in terms of the very settled farming community who don’t go anywhere for generations, I definitely don’t feel that rooted.

I think that’s one of the reasons I have been drawn to doing so much work with different migrant groups because although my experiences of moving to England as a child are not really comparable to an adult moving from Lithuania to Aberdeenshire say, I think there are some commonalities and I empathise and relate to that experience more than to people who’ve always lived in one place all the time, I think. But having said that, sometimes I think when my kids leave home then I could go anywhere again. What I really want to do is go and do something like teach English in Bolivia for a year or two. Then probably come back to Aberdeenshire and then probably stay in Aberdeenshire. So yes and no. I guess I feel a bit conflicted about that but like everything else.

Sadie: Do you think Hamish feels more rooted than you do in the area?

Claire: Yeah, absolutely. Very, very definitely. He went to the local school, he was born in the house just down the road, his parents live in the house next door. They built this house 30 years ago and he’s lived in it for -- yeah, so he’s lived here for a long time, a lot longer than I have. Many of his friends are from the farming community so also have lived here for generations. He works with and socialises with people that he knew right through from primary school and whose parents know each other. I think that much stronger network of social ties is something that, yeah, that I’ve never had. But maybe my children will, maybe. Also, I figure that they’re less likely to stay here and less likely to have this lifelong connection to this place unless they become farmers at a later date. It’s too early to tell but at the moment they’re not really showing signs that that’s what they’ll do.

Sadie: I was going to say because they’re teenagers, right? So do they speak Doric or…?

Claire: No.

Sadie: Not at all?

Claire: No but Hamish doesn’t really speak Doric either. I think that’s one of the reasons that this stuff I’ve been doing for you has been so emotional for me because obviously Hamish’s parents presumably would have been Doric speakers but were educated out of it for really class-based reasons. Although Hamish wasn’t sent away to school or anything, he went to the local high school, he isn’t really Doric speaking, but he can and does speak more Doric with his farming friends, or contractors, or agricultural country people that he’s known forever and who he respects. He’s not at all critical of the way they speak but when I started with this, he just thought it was stupid. A waste of time, a waste of money, a waste of effort. Why are you doing this? Just didn’t understand it at all. I thought in the beginning that was because I was an incomer in some ways but actually, I think it’s all about him and not about me at all. Or that the way that many dialect speakers have internalised this must speak proper English to get on in the world, and it comes out differently in different contexts.

The kids that I met at school in Banff who maybe didn’t know that they were speaking Doric until they were a bit older because they were in a completely Doric world and then when they came to school they were told to speak differently. I think that’s one way of experiencing this external pressure that you then internalise, to speak a certain way. I think here in our family set up it’s -- oh -- yeah, I think when Hamish is being negative to me learning Doric it’s really about the way that he feels about Doric somewhere inside himself. Though he doesn’t articulate that in that way when I ask him.

Sadie: Do you think having spent that time away from the area between nine and six -- I’m just thinking that between 9 and 16, is perhaps the age when you’re more likely to be socialised into a feeling of this type of language is stigmatised and you should speak this way and not that way. Do you think that having spent that time away has --having that -- I guess it’s given you that insider/outsider perspective? But do you think it’s allowed you to escape some of the internalised stigma around using Doric?

Claire: Yeah, maybe because it wasn’t really part of -- my immediate family didn’t really speak Doric either and absolutely, between 9 and 16 I guess is when your friends are more important and all the -- your linguistic influences are much more your friends than your parents at that time. I guess I was used to being a curiosity, linguistically. I guess maybe that’s when I started playing with language because it was already something that was a bit different and a bit fun for me to do. And because at school I learnt many languages. So when I came back -- in fact, one of my clearest memories with Doric, just after I met Hamish, is sitting around the kitchen table with two of his farmer friends who are broad Doric speakers all the time. At the end when they left, Hamish said, “did you understand what they were saying?” and I said, “yes, I did understand it, but it was as though I were processing it as if it were German.” It was -- it did sound like another language, it is another language, but it did sound to me like another language that I understood well but I had to concentrate on.

That isn’t the question you asked me.

Sadie: No, it’s very interesting though. I suppose historically the way that Scots and Doric has been incorrectly talked about by some people is that it’s just a bad version of English. You know, it’s just bad English and we know that that’s not true. It’s a language in its own right and there’s no such thing as bad English anyway but [laughs] I guess you never would have really been in a classroom -- well you would have but between 9 and 16 you wouldn’t have been in a classroom where people were being told you shouldn’t be speaking Doric.

Claire: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. And in fact, I kind of had it in reverse. When I was learning to read, my teacher in our reading homework when I was in P2 or P3, talked about ironing, ironing the clothes. And I came home, and I read out my reading and my mum said, “but Claire, it’s ironing.” So no, I definitely didn’t get told to speak more English and less Doric because I didn’t really speak Doric in the first place anyway.

Sadie: How did you get into the PhD? Why did you decide you wanted to do PhD research?

Claire: [laughs] In about the year 2000, I’d started doing a PhD in the Netherlands looking at definitions or looking at the visibility and invisibility of women in dictionaries because I was working as a lexicographer with a real interest in feminist linguistics at the time. So that was what I was doing but I only did that for about a year and then I dropped out. That was when I moved back to Scotland actually. One of the reasons I dropped out was it just seemed kind of navel-gazing actually, to be working on this -- on these dictionary definitions and then trying to find something that wasn’t really there. Although I guess I was coming at that from a personal perspective it’s not really that personal what’s going on in a dictionary definition even though I was also working, writing definitions. I was invested in it, but it just felt too, yeah, too insular, and too inward looking.

When I moved back to Scotland, I started doing community work. I think for a little while I was still working on an English language teaching dictionary and so I did a TESOL course, a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Language courses, and in the college, an evening class. That was the first bit of teaching qualifications I’d had that was obviously very closely related to language and that was because I was still working in dictionaries at the time. But that opened those skills, those teaching skills, opened the door for various community work projects that I’d been doing more or less ever since. I’d worked with groups of women, and I’d worked with groups of people with learning disabilities or mental health problems, and I’d worked with groups who didn’t speak English as their first language. I guess that’s what I mean when I say I come at this from a social justice perspective because it’s all about what difference -- what difference can I make through doing this kind of work. Or how can we collectively work together to improve the life chances for these groups of people, including myself as a participant, as an active participant in these groups.

Then I think really, I’d wanted to come back to PhD studies for quite a while but didn’t really know how to get back into academia having been out for a long, long time. Then I got that -- this job, this lovely job in Peterhead working on a research project about migration in Scotland. The prerequisites for that job were that you had to have a PhD in a social science and be a Russian speaker. I had neither of those things, but it was completely the right job for me and I really -- I feel like I blagged my way in there. Because I didn’t have the prerequisites, but I did have the community knowledge and the group skills and the insider perspective and all sorts of good things for that job. Anyway, I got that job, but my supervisor said to me if I wanted more work like that, really, I should get myself a PhD because that was what you needed. I looked on the find a PhD website and because I’ve got family and they’re very rooted here it had to be in this area. When I saw this one about Acknowledging Language Bilingualism in the Heartland of Scots, was the title that I applied for, and I thought oh, but I can’t do that, I don’t know anything about Scots. And I thought how ridiculous that I could blag myself a job for which you already needed a PhD and to be Russian speaking and I did that without a second thought. I worked really hard, but I thought I can do that so why on earth couldn’t I do a PhD, about Scots, in Scotland, given that I live in Scotland and I’m Scottish.

I wonder if that was in some way my own linguistic insecurities coming out in that I thought I couldn’t really go for it. But very quickly when I got it I very quickly thought that it was the perfect thing for me because, partly because I have a different understanding of Scots than some people who’ve lived here forever or somebody who isn’t Scottish, and also because I’ve done all this community work over the past 20 years in this area, I really kind of understand some things about it and also can bring all these action research skills to try and make things better, to try and make a difference. For the kids who are growing up taking the Scots language award as a school subject who maybe don’t actually feel that confident in Scots. What we’re hoping to find out is that if you teach Scots as a school subject, does it boost people’s self-esteem and confidence and abilities in other areas of school life. I think from a person-centred approach, it really, really does because you’re working with people on what’s really core to them and it’s not just a school subject I don’t think. It’s so much more.

I think that’s why it’s really interesting and that’s why it’s doing something different for me than my dictionary definitions PhD because it’s really emotional work and that’s important, I think. I think it’s what I really want to do is work that I feel. My key question really in my research is how do you feel about Scots? And I think it’s because how I feel about Scots is how this whole thing is manifesting itself. It’s all about the emotional connections that people have for their language, or the emotional disconnections that people have for their language as well, and then what we can do to bridge that gap and make fewer people feel -- including myself, feel more connected with the language of this country that we live in and what else that does when you learn that language. What will learn more about that language or learn more about yourself. What does it do for you as a person or a community or a group, in terms of belonging?

Sadie: It’s so important, isn’t it? Because language is always so connected to the people that speak it and when you’re valuing and legitimising someone’s language, you’re valuing and legitimising their identity as well, right? That’s so important in school to feel like who you are is valued is such a -- as part of your education is vital really, isn’t it?

Claire: Yeah, absolutely.

Sadie: So is part of your work -- you’ve been learning Doric quite formally, right?

Claire: Yeah.

Sadie: Have you actually been going to classes?

Claire: I have been going to classes. Well --

Sadie: -- What’s that like?

Claire: -- Well, I’ve been to three different sets of classes, and it’s been different every time. In the first place I went to school, and I sat in the classroom with the 15/16-year-old pupils. I sat there and said, right I’m here just to be a pupil and I’m here to learn, and they looked at me as if I had two heads. So that didn’t last very well. Very soon, I became much more a facilitator. I was there as a researcher and to pretend I was a pupil was disingenuous, but that wasn’t how I meant it. I really did want to learn alongside with them and be immersed in the process.

I did learn some stuff, of course I did, along the way but then there was an evening class at Aberdeen University through Scottish Cultures and Traditions. Ally Heather, the journalist guy, was the teacher, and he was a colleague as well. I went along to that and that was really, really helpful. In that class there were some people from overseas or other people who were staff members from other departments at the university who had moved and wanted to know more about Scots and Scotland. There were also many, about half of the class, who were native speakers, many of whom were performance poets and writers and short story writers and storytellers, who used Doric in their performance all the time, but felt that they were, I don’t know, lacking in some confidence somehow, even though this was their medium. Or they wanted to know a bit more -- wanted to know how to write it correctly. How to spell words and all that kind of standardisation stuff, which we did talk about a little bit within the class, but it wasn’t really the aim.

Ally’s aim as the teacher was to get us all producing new works in Scots. He was always recording us and putting things out as little sound clip things or making us write short stories or making us retell fairy tales or something like that. So rather than passively learning, we were actively producing in that class. That was really liberating actually, to begin to make my own Scots, to begin to use it for myself rather than just to be listening and recording other people and feeling like a bit of an outsider. Also, I know that I’m switching between calling it Scots and Doric I think something that feels a bit -- probably it’s a false dichotomy actually -- but it feels to me that when you do it in an educational setting then it’s Scots but when you do it at home it’s Doric.

Sadie: [laughs] It does seem that way, yeah.

Claire: [laughs] It’s probably not really how it is but that’s probably part of the language revitalisation strategy that people who are working with it are calling it Scots even if it’s North East Scots, also known as Doric, so that it fits within the bigger Scots language picture, I think. And then so that was the school class, the evening class and then Dawn, Dawn Leslie, did the first ever undergrad course in North East Scots. And I signed up early and I went to more than half of it, but I didn’t immerse myself in that undergrad experience quite as much because I was juggling other work commitments. And also, I think I was really interested in it from a pedagogical perspective, I really wanted to know what she was doing and how it was different --

Sadie: -- I do too, I’m so interested.

Claire: -- Yeah. Yeah, it was great. What it was like learning it as a student compared to the kind of funny things that we did in our evening class. Oh, and then also we had an online class as part of my Home-Hame-Дом-Dom project with migrants. We had some people -- some Lithuanian people said that they really wanted to learn Doric so that they could understand colleagues better, for example. So we set up this online course and then it very quickly changed, I think because the online environment actually wasn’t that great for beginners. Also, because again in the class, although we called it Doric for Beginners, about half the group were native speakers again. So we ended up dressing up online and making little poems and songs and things online and kind of playing with the language.

I think that the thing that I want to say about all of that is that everyone who comes to these classes comes for personal reasons more than -- they don’t really come because they want to learn a new language. They come because they want to be more comfortable with the language that they already use, I think. I think in lots of ways that made me feel a whole lot better because it seemed very equalising. If everyone who uses Doric, even native speakers who use it for poems that they write themselves and use in public, if even they feel a bit uncomfortable with the language, then it’s not just me and it’s not just because of my experience. It’s because of systematic oppression. And that I guess is where I’m going next. It was really interesting to tease that out a bit by being in class with other people.

Sadie: It’s fascinating to me from so many points of view but from a teaching point of view. Is it quite different being in a Doric for beginners class and being in an English for beginners class?

Claire: I think because the kind of language stuff I usually do is conversation café type stuff. It’s much less formal than classroom-based stuff. I think my own perspective is that it’s all about making connections and all about making yourself understood. In the English teaching stuff I do, I wouldn’t usually be saying “no that’s wrong,” unless someone had specifically asked. Although I do understand that in a formal classroom situation that might well happen. In the Doric classes, or Scots language classes, we very much weren’t saying that’s right and that’s wrong. But sometimes we were doing things by group consensus. If for example, we said “this is the word we’re looking at how do you spell it?” And Ally would say “well you can spell it this way, this way or this way, and the whole standardisation debate is rumbling on. So how will we spell it?” And I really like that. --

Sadie: -- I love that.

Claire: -- So we kind of made a classroom standard which probably more closely aligned with the way that Scots has been written in current newspapers than the poets who creatively invent their spellings and change them according to what they want to do. I guess we were very gently saying this is more right than this is right, maybe but not hard and fast rules. People would say oh -- in fact one of the people I interviewed said this. He was doing a book reading of his own work in a library. He was from Fraserburgh, and this was in Inverurie, so he’s from the fishing community and this was a farming town. He was reading his own work and some man in the audience said “that’s not right. That’s not how you speak Doric.” I think the only answer to that is “no, that’s not how you speak Doric. This is how I speak Doric.” And that there has to be room for a multiplicity of voices and a multiplicity of way of doing things. I think even if that’s not really the case in an English for speakers of other languages classroom, it could be or that would be a really nice way to do it.

I guess the other thing is in our Doric classes we’re not teaching to the tests, so we can just play with it, and anything can go. But then again maybe that’s a bit different in the classroom, in the school classroom, where the kids do have to pass an -- well pass a continuous assessment to get the marks and maybe -- maybe in more formal settings there is a right or wrong. I think for me because I kind of mix languages and play with them and I don’t really care how people do it, it’s not important to me at all if there is a right or a wrong. It’s more important just that we’re together and that we’re expressing ourselves in one medium or another, I think.

Sadie: It just makes me think that maybe all language teaching should be more like the Doric classrooms that you’ve been speaking about. Maybe experimenting with those kind of teaching methods has something to teach language teaching more broadly. It’s just really interesting.

Claire: Yeah, I think so. I think it’s a really inclusive way to do it and I think -- I’m sure it would build up in layers like anything. I’m sure people would get more competent or more standardised or more -- certainly when I write in Doric, I know that its mostly English, but I’ve got a few Doric words in. I think it’s the whole Scots/English continuum thing. I’m pretty sure it would work with other languages as well if you start with interspersing small bits of the language you’re hoping to learn and then as you build up your repertoire then it would become more like the language that you’re wanting to use and less like English or your first language. I think that would be an interesting thing to try.

Sadie: That’s really interesting. Yeah, I imagine it might help to take some of the anxiety out of language learning a little bit, that we feel when we’re trying to construct a sentence in a new language, a language that’s new to us, from scratch kind of thing.

Claire: Yeah.

Sadie: How has it felt to you -- so for me I’m someone with a lot of passive knowledge and understanding of Edinburgh Scots, and Glaswegian Scots I guess too, but Edinburgh’s where I grew up. I don’t use it very much. Obviously, I use bits and pieces here. Like I’ve got -- I’ve very much got the accent, I’ve got parts of the syntax, I change it depending who I’m speaking to, but I’ve been away from Edinburgh for a while, I’ve been in universities for a while. I don’t really use a lot of it day to day. To me it would feel very strange to go to a class and -- yeah, even with that different classroom format it would feel strange because it feels like -- I think I would have that in my head of is this something that is mine? Or if I’m going to a class does that feel like it’s not mine? Do you know what I mean?

I thought this was something you’d been exploring in a way that I find really interesting, is that feeling of does it belong to me? You’ve talked about in your interview with Dawn, she talked about how maybe Doric speakers sometimes feel like when people are learning Doric it’s someone else trying on their clothes but not having to live with those clothes. It must be really complicated for you because they kind of are your clothes, you know? [laughs]

What is your feeling now about Doric and your relationship with it in that way? That’s a really complicated question. [laughs]

Claire: That’s a really complicated question. I think I’m not finished with it yet. I think I’m still kind of -- so I think I am more confident in trying on those clothes and wearing them for a period of time now. You know in the beginning when I would try on these clothes and try and speak Doric, it would be really like these are not my clothes, this is not my language. It’s really uncomfortable like having to wear a ball gown to the supermarket or something like that. Now I would feel more like -- well certainly when I’m in a classroom now I feel like oh yeah, I can do this. This is what you do, this is how I speak here and it’s okay. But when I leave this room where I work in, because I work from home, and Hamish is on the other door, on the other side of the door listening -- well he’s not listening, he’s watching TV, but he’s heard bits of it and then he says you know what were you doing? [laughs] Why were you? Partly because we do -- well I do, not everybody in the class but in the online classes I really will go and dress up. We did a whole thing about clothes, and we did a whole thing -- we did a Burns supper thing, so I went and put on Hamish’s kilt and bow tie and everything. I suppose what Dawn was talking about people putting on -- a non-Doric speaker putting on a Doric speakers’ clothes to see what it’s like, I suppose I am actually, literally, figuratively, and metaphorically --

Sadie: -- Started with a metaphor, yeah.

Claire: -- doing that really and it kind of helps. I wonder if putting on that costume is part of becoming a speaker in a -- but in a positive way, not in an appropriatey way. Not in a stealing somebody else’s culture way but in that it is kind of like scaffolding, like linguistic -- language learning scaffolding that helps me put on this identity so that I am more able to speak it. Maybe that’s why when I go to the shops or meet my Doric speaking friends, when I’m just being me rather than being a Doric language learner, I don’t speak it.

When I was in Banff it was just beginning to shift. I was beginning to feel -- when I was speaking with the young people who were speaking Doric most of the time -- I was beginning to feel that I could produce Doric in a natural fashion. They could say something, and I could answer the question. Or I could just throw in the occasional word here or there and it didn’t feel funny anymore. So I think that maybe that would be the next step. I think I would need to go on a -- like a language immersion course. Like go and stay in another family or something and then it might creep under my skin a bit more than just being in my clothes.

So I think there’s a lot to be said about Dawn’s metaphor but that it’s not necessarily a negative thing to be trying on clothes in the way that she thought it might be. And I do understand what she was saying about not having to live in them, not having to live with that stigmatised by some people variety language. I do understand the point she was making but I think for me it works the other way round.

Sadie: Sorry I realise we’ve been speaking for ages; I won’t keep you much longer. But I just wanted to ask you a little bit in the end about Home-Hame-Дом-Dom, the project you’ve been working on. I wanted to hear a little bit about that, and I wanted to ask you about -- you’ve been working with people who are migrants to the area who are learning Doric. I wanted to ask you about what you think the similarities and differences are between their experience and yours? So their experience of coming to a place and learning Scots as something completely new and then your experience of coming back to the place where you were born and rediscovering it or learning it but kind of already knowing something about it.

Claire: I think while I can’t exactly speak for their experience, I think what I’ve witnessed is that somebody say who moved to Peterhead who didn’t speak much English and no Scots before they got here, they learnt them both in the general environment. When they’re speaking, they would throw in Doric phrases or English phrases equally without any apparent differentiation between them. And that looks so liberating. I’m sure that it isn’t because it must be much, much harder for them to move here and not speak either language and to have to learn both and be much more obviously foreign than I am given that I’m not even you know even, even. So I don’t want to take away from any of the difficulties of what it must really be like for them but in terms of English and Scots, learning them without baggage, looks great, [laughs] you know? I think that’s definitely different from my own experiences, very much different from my own experiences.

Like I’ve said many times in this last hour with you, oh I’ve been learning Scots but you’re absolutely right. I knew it fine before I started. I just didn’t speak it, but I can read it and I can write it a little bit and I know it and I know the words, it’s just not something I speak. So that’s a whole other question really, isn’t it? I guess maybe that’s the question that I should be asking myself and probably the other people I speak to who know it but don’t use it all the time. Why don’t you use Scots or Doric in your everyday life? Because it’s not in my list of questions. It’s definitely something I should look at more. I don’t think that’s even a new speaker thing for me. I think it’s probably a class thing too. How people know, more educated people, might well know how to read and write in Scots than somebody who speaks it as part of their everyday life, and I don’t know if there’s an answer to that either. It feels like you ask one question, and all these other questions pop out. Or it’s like peeling an onion and you’ve kind of worked on one of the layers but not on any of the others. Yeah, I don’t know.

Sadie: I think I feel the same way about when I start to examine my relationship with Scots. I think as soon as I think I kind of understand it, I get a layer deeper [laughs] and then I’m like yeah and it’s like if I don’t even understand my own relationship with it [laughs] then how do I understand Scots in general? I suppose as well, your own relationship is probably the most difficult thing to understand, isn’t it? You can understand facts about Scots much more easily than you can understand why I speak in a certain way in certain situations and why I don’t in others.

We’re used to having language presented to us as puzzles that we learn the different parts and we learn how to fit them together. When we learn languages in school, they’re presented to us as a skill that you learn and we -- I think what I mean is sometimes when we’re learning languages we try and take the emotion out of it a little bit and take the identity out of it. I remember asking my French teacher in school being like “but are we learning posh French? Or if we spoke in this French accent what would French people think of us?” And she was quite like that’s a stupid question. [laughs] Like she wasn’t really --

Claire: -- Really?

Sadie: -- Well, she didn’t say that, but she didn’t really -- maybe she didn’t like the question because she wasn’t sure how to answer it in a way that would satisfy me and would not put me off. Because we were learning posh French and she might have been aware that in our particular classroom, that wouldn’t go down well. Like we wouldn’t want to sound posh even in French. I think my language education certainly -- and I know things are changing and things are different from place to place but my language education was very like this is a subject in school. I wasn’t really taught much about -- when I was taught French, I wasn’t taught much about it as a social thing and an identity thing. So yeah, I don’t know. I mean I love sociolinguistics so of course I would say put the sociolinguistics back into language education [laughs] but yeah, that’s how I feel, I think.

Claire: It would be amazing.

Sadie: It would. Maybe I would now be a more confident French -- I mean I’m not a -- I don’t speak French ever really but maybe would have got more into it, into language learning, if it had been made a bit more personal.

Claire: Mm-hmm.

Sadie: I don’t know.

***

Sadie (voiceover): Thanks to Claire for sharing her story and for doing so with so much honesty and curiosity. Thanks as always to the Accentricity team: John McDiarmid and Martha Ryan, to Seb Philp for the music, and to Aileen Marshall for the transcription. Remember to follow the links in the episode description to buy a t-shirt, to become a member on Patreon or Steady, or to make a one-off donation. Thanks to our current supporters and past donations, we’ve been able to run the Moving Project without any additional funding and at no cost to the participants. We’d like to keep doing things like this in the future and your support will help us to do so. Thanks for listening.