Anam Cara

Language and Belonging

Each language has a unique memory. The thoughts, whispers, and voices of a people live in their language. Gradually, over time, all the words grow together to build a language. The sound of the wind, the chorus of the tides, the silence of stone, love whispers in the night, the swell of delight and the sorrow of the darkness, all came to find their echoes in the language. As it fills out, the language becomes the echo-mirror of the people and their landscape. No one knows the secret colour and the unique sound of the soul of a people as their language does. A language is a magical presence. It is utterly alive. Because we use it every minute to feel and think and talk, we rarely stop to notice how strange and exciting words are. It is like the air: we cannot live one moment without it, yet we rarely think of it. The most vital centre of your life is your mind. Your world is moored to your mind. Now there is no power that awakens and opens the mind as language does. Words form our minds, and we can only see ourselves and the world through the lenses of words. As they age over centuries, words ripen with nuance and deeper levels of meaning. The memory of a people lives in the rich landscape of its language. The destructive things done by them and to them live there too.

When strangers intrude and take over what is not their own, everything in the place reminds them that they do not belong there. Their guilt and unease can be assuaged by making the take-over as clean and thorough as possible. They must control everything. This is what a colonizer does. Our Irish language was targeted in this way. The flow between the feeling and the language was broken. Your own language fits your mind. Ancestral memory and nuance break on the shores of thought.