Orality & Literacy; Gaelic & Patter

"Language is so overwhelmingly oral that of all the many thousands - possibly tens of thousands - of languages spoken in human history only around 106 have ever been committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced literature, and most have never been written at all. Of the some 3,000 languages spoken that exist today, only some 78 have literature."

So argued the Jesuit scholar, Walter Ong, in his work on Orality and Literacy (1982). I cannot speak to the historical or contemporary precision of this accounting, but even if the figures mentioned above are taken to be indicative and approximate, the thought is astonishing. I've always found Ong's central thesis -  that literacy comes to structure our consciousness - immensely thought-provoking, not least because I'm someone who lives in exaggerated intimacy with the written word. Ong seems to suggest that the transformation effected by literacy is basically binary - a little literacy going a long way to rearrange our consciousnesses. In our society, where the wholesale absence of any literate knowledge of language is an almost unknown phenomenon, Ong's binary distinction doesn't speak very eloquently to our existence and the continuing place of orality in our literate culture. Yet peer around any place of social congress and you'll find innumerable folk leading lives dominated by oral exchanges and for whom reading - and even more so, writing - is decidedly secondary. This always struck me particularly forcefully in Glasgow, with its famous patter and its idiomatic, witty formulas. For Ong, such proverbial tendencies are a hallmark of orality. Just as formulaic description recurs endlessly in Homer's Odyssey, so too the ensemble phrases of  Glaswegian patter might be seen to attest to the dominant orality of both forms of communication. This might also explain, in part, the charm of Michael Munro's The Complete Patter, which applies the technology of that great apotheosis of literate logic - the dictionary - to a field of language that had previously remained substantially uncodified. 

In my experience, different  vocabularies and patterns of Scottish speech are primarily attributed to class considerations, with your literate bourgeois taken to be the most "Anglicised" speaker of Scottish standard English. I undoubtedly fit into that category. However, Ong's analysis might suggest another pregnant and unanticipated distinction - between those Scots like myself, who learn to talk like books and those whose consciousnesses remain dominated by language understood primarily orally, who simply speak and for whom it would be a nonsense to say they are "speaking texts". Much more could be explored and said on the subject but the line of thought strikes me as a potentially interesting one.

These are just a few of the sideline Lowlander thoughts, provoked by this interesting piece over at BellaCaledonia by Alasdair Mac Gill-eain in response to a recent article in the Sunday Herald. Entitled Bad Language and Dodo Journalism, Alasdair isn't speaking about Scots, but instead about Gaelic and the Herald journalist's oddly imbalanced assessment of the importance of far-flung endangered languages in comparison to those we have it in our domestic power to nurture, preserve and foster. I'm not a Gaelic speaker myself. Indeed, I don't have more than a word or two. Alasdair quotes Dr Johnson to wry - but pointed effect - about some of the curious haughtiness and scorn which metropolitan Anglophone Scots fairly regularly express towards our Gaelic speaking friends. Its a curious phenomenon, one we would do well to unpick and attempt to understand and alleviate, lest in due time we'll have to echo the old walnut-faced Auden, lamenting...

O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silence
Of dreadful things you did...