Grammatical Memory: Finding my vestigial Irish English

where I grew up

I was listening to David Naimon interview Doireann Ní Ghríofa on his podcast “Between the Covers” (which I’d highly recommend) and just understood something I’d never understood before (in addition to all the things I learned from their discussion.) Doireann Ní Ghríofa has a captivating voice, rich with the sound of an Irish speaker of English. (She speaks and writes in Irish, also. And her reading voice is particularly mesmerizing.) 

I grew up in Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland and left when I was 9 for Canada. We weren’t Irish—my Litvak parents moved there from South Africa—but obviously Ireland was formative in my acquisition of the English language. I know that there are things I continue to stumble over, all these years later, hesitating between a North American locution and a Northern Irish one. I don’t have an Irish accent, though I do retain something of my earlier language context. For example, I say “carn’t” instead of the more normative North American “can’t.” And I sometimes feel a grammatic difference, an unfamiliarity, an undertow, when I speak though I am monolingual and haven’t lived in Ireland for 48 years. I also feel this pull when I listen to Irish people speaking English. Sure, I have an identification, a kind of nostalgia for my childhood. I do adore Ireland and the sounds of Hiberno-English as it is called, from both North and South in all its varieties. But I think there is something more happening. I know I feel a related kind of pull from the kind of English Jews speak, particularly Yiddish inflected speech. That’s an identification more than actual exposure, I think. Sure, there was some of that kind of speech in my parents’ and my grandparents’ speech patterns but not very much, at least not that I remember. And certainly, I didn’t speak this way. For me, I began to channel it more during and after when I was writing my novel, Yiddish for Pirates. 

But back to Ireland. In the way that I’m pulled by the colours, textures, smells, tastes, stories and landscapes of my Irish childhood—and, I must admit, the ways in which I have recreated them in my own mind over the years, I also have that sense of language as a landscape. I’m not nostalgic for it, and though I certainly feel somewhat of an identification, a leaning in, an impulse to ventriloquize greater Irishness when I hear it, there’s an earlier layer of language acquisition at work I think. (When I last returned to Ireland, to Dublin, I showed my Canadian passport and the custom officer said, “Welcome home,” because she saw that I was born in Belfast. I didn’t say, “Ah to be sure,” but somewhere in my brain, it was forming in all its fake liltedness—not that I ever had that kind of accent—I was from the North.) 

But this is what I think I learned listening to the podcast. My connection to this speech isn’t just the leaning in of identification, of wanting to participate in a group, but it the fossilized traces of my earlier understanding of language. A kind of lingual body memory. I feel like I'm always in translation.

And to think I thought I was a poser—or only a poser. I wouldn’t say it now, but I think “he’s only codding around.” “What a desperate wee maun.” “Och aye.” It’s harder to explain the grammatical pull, the shape, the pacing, the contours of language rather than just phrases. My voice was very high, more than was usual for a North American man, and it had the uptalk of Northern Ireland. In my early 20s, I began to deliberately lower its register and to lose the uptalk to meet more normative notions of the male voice and thus, I suppose, masculinity. 

What other vestigial grammars exist in my speech? What viral inflections? I mean other than the voice of my Grade 7 teacher speaking about spelling and grammar. Language and speech is sedimentary, not only over historical time, but within each voice.And so the texture, the flavour of how I experience the world, the conceptual and musical portals through which I experience life are suffused with this earlier sense of language. To paraphrase a Doireann Ní Ghríofa book title, ghosts haunt the throat.