March 29, 2026
I picked up Object Lessons (1995) by Eavan Boland (1944–2020) thinking it was a memoir, but it’s more focused than that: a meditation on the emergence of her identity as a poet, specifically a woman poet and an Irish poet.
This identity is further complicated by her emigration from Ireland as a five-year-old girl when her father, a diplomat, took up work in London in the mid-20th century:
Hardly anything else that happened to me as a child was as important as this: that I left one country and came to another. That an ordinary displacement made an extraordinary distance between the word place and the word mine.
In England, everyday words reinforced her sense of difference and lack: ‘They [the other children at school] could say “orchard” instead of “garden” with the offhand grace imparted by nine-tenths of the law. I could not.’ But it would be an Irish English word that crystallized her alienation:
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books, Hiberno-English, Ireland, language, language and gender, literature, poetry, writers, writing | Tagged: amn't, books, Eavan Boland, gender, Hiberno-English, identity, Ireland, Irish books, Irish English, irish literature, Irish poetry, language and gender, literature, poetry, words, writers, writing | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
April 10, 2020
Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline has a passage on the challenges (and opportunities) of using a second language. The narrator is giving a writing workshop in Athens and meets a woman who describes her experiences outside of English:
She wasn’t quite sure how the language barrier was going to work: it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect; until you remembered something you needed that you had had to leave behind. She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language: in English she was by and large a humorous person, but in Spanish for instance – which at one time she had spoken quite well – she was not. So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew: it was an interesting thought. There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable.
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11 Comments | books, language, literature, translation | Tagged: bilingual, books, identity, language, language learning, literature, multilingualism, psycholinguistics, Rachel Cusk, reading, translation | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
November 1, 2013
Wikitongues has been on the go since 2012, but I heard about it just recently. It’s a project aimed at documenting linguistic diversity and exploring identity, in the form of short videos of people speaking different languages and dialects – about 50 at the time of writing.
Based in New York, the project is spread across social media websites: Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and YouTube, the last of which may be the easiest place to browse the videos. Speakers talk about themselves and their languages for 30 seconds to 18 minutes, though most videos are around 1–4 minutes long. A few have transcripts.
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8 Comments | dialect, language, linguistics, speech | Tagged: culture, dialects, identity, language, linguistic diversity, linguistics, speech, video, Wikitongues | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
This identity is further complicated by her emigration from Ireland as a five-year-old girl when her father, a diplomat, took up work in London in the mid-20th century:
Sentence first 