Influences – Dialect and Dialogue

In 1996, Trainspotting hit the cinemas. In Scotland, everyone was talking about it, and one of the reasons that everyone was talking about it was because the dialogue was in Scots. Real Scots. It was a novelty indeed for Scottish audiences to hear an authentic portrayal of their own dialect on the big screen.

“[…] sparse prose combined with symbolism and imagery of land in authentic voices that reveal emotions and character and control the rhythm and pace of the story […]”

But it wasn’t just the Scots in which Irvine Welsh delivered Trainspotting and subsequent novels, it was also the colloquial mannerisms, the vernacular of a demographic in a certain time and place. I’d read Scots before but most of it seemed strange and lampoonish and akin to the Scots spoken by Groundskeeper Willie of The Simpsons. A lot of the ‘Hoots mon, och aye the noo, Jimmy’ stuff is probably offensive by today’s standards. Another early experience of the Scots language in print was Neil Munro’s Para Handy Tales, with the west Highland lilt and the humour that had my granny laughing. She had the big book of stories that were only two or three pages long, and I loved them but it was a lost world in another time; in Trainspotting there was Scots as spoken by Edinburgh’s working class, raw and bloody on the page, assaulting the eardrums as its points are driven home, dialogue that was current. I read Booker Prize-winning James Kelman after this; has there ever been a dialect or language more suited to stream-of-consciousness than Glaswegian?

Sunset Song (1932), which has twice been voted the nation’s favourite novel, is written in an artificial form of Scots, similar to the Doric-Lite dialect that I adopted for ‘This Is What You Get’, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon intended to capture the colloquial speech of the Northeast without his work being inaccessible to English readers. For me, the important thing is that it captures the turn of phrase and the character of the people and of the time, something that could not be achieved in standard English. Sunset Song was published during the Scottish Literary Renaissance of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and the popularisation of the use of Scots dialect is described in the The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English (1995) as follows:

‘The purpose of writing in Scots [. . .] was at once democratic (to revive and dignify the language of the home and the hearth) and European (to create an authentic indigenous, non-English literature).’

At the beginning of Sunset Song, LGG provides a note on the text in which he compares his version of Scots to a Dutch writer using Dutch vocabulary in a German text; in other words, he has made it accessible to a wider audience, and that is what almost every writer of Scots has done from Walter Scot to Irvine Welsh and beyond. It is still English literature, but the language is expressive of the characters that inhabit the work.

I would say this is true of all dialects, including English regional dialects, if the characters speaking the words, or the voice narrating the story are to sound genuine. Through the years I have read writers of other dialects: Steinbeck with his midwestern American drawl; Roddy Doyle, bringing his characters to life with the Irish brogue; the authenticity of Marlon James’ A History of Seven Killings (2014), which, delivered in anything other than Jamaican patois, would not have hit the mark.

The realism of these writers, addressing social injustice and showing that the reality of war and poverty is far from heroic or romantic, and delivering this in hard-hitting, sparse prose combined with symbolism and imagery of land in authentic voices that reveal emotions and character and control the rhythm and pace of the story – that is what I wanted to emulate.

I already knew that I wanted to write stories that paid tribute to the traditional oral story-telling culture of the Scottish Highlands, and that I wanted those stories to be relevant to my own experiences. Now I had the impetus to write dialogue (and narrative) that brought an added dimension to characters from the Northeast of Scotland; to add legitimacy and deliver the unique turn of phrase, humour and characteristics of this region.