One of the members of the team, Stephen, was recently given the opportunity to do a session with a group of visiting Danish students on… pretty much anything he wanted. They were working with the Business department and Hamish (Section Head) wanted to give them a few sessions for interest and enjoyment on Scottish culture, and asked if he would do something related to literature. Having only an hour and a half, he decided to focus on short poems and explore language and cultural identity, and spent the 90 minutes trying to convince them that Scots is a language in its own right, not a dialect of English. Stephen started by showing them the beginning of Ken Loach’s Sweet Sixteen – a film in which the language is so challenging that when it was shown in England they had to subtitle the first 15 minutes – and asked them why it was so difficult to understand. They came up with the usual answers – the accents are very thick, they are speaking very fast etc. Which interestingly enough is the same difficulty that a Spanish speaker has understanding Catalan – or a Danish speaker has understanding Norwegian and Swedish. Scandinavians are, for this very reason, the perfect target group for such a discussion because they have an innate understanding that closely related languages can be very similar but still distinct. And a distinct language gives a distinct culture, as they explored through discussion of Liz Lochhead’s ‘Kidspoem\Bairnsang’ and translating Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘Wheesht, wheesht’ into English. By the end, Stephen had about half of them convinced.
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