The Importance of Language, Dialect and A Dose of Yiddish

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

It's not just Yiddish, It’s the same as Irish English or English spoken by the black working class in the US. I suppose it’s that they are ghetto languages or one arising from any oppressed minority within the dominate culture or victims of colonizers like the English in Ireland who forbade the speaking of Irish. To dominate a culture or nation as invaders, the language of the colonized has to be suppressed.

As I write, the same can be said of working class dialects in general, they are much more expressive, colorful and very much linked to everyday life experiences as an oppressed class. The North of England was the Industrial heartland, the cotton mills and coal mines were prevalent, so was Birmingham. The working class accents were very strong and in the UK they can, or could, tell our class background by our accents. Having a northern accent would not open doors and a friend who was educated at a private school in the north told me they tried to breed that Yorkshire accent out of them. We had our "Ebonics". Now both the Irish accent and the northern ones are sort of trendy, almost fashionable..

When I worked with Irish immigrants in the UK as a young man, the stories and tales told in this hard to understand English were just so full of life, humor and a reflection of hard times too, but normally with humor attached to them. I once asked my friend Sean (John Throne) why it was that when I worked on building sites in London and used to go to the “tea hut” during lunch, it didn't have the same friendly atmosphere as when I worked with the Irish immigrants. What was it about the English workers on those sites? Everyone had their seat and the skilled workers like the brickies used to wear a shirt and tie with coveralls and a collapsible ruler and perhaps a pen in their top pocket. They’d have their little lunchbox and their seat was their seat.

 

English

Sean said that it was that the English workers were mere conservative, had been more industrialized. It was not to do with genetic make up or Englishness. After all, what is Englishness? The Irish workers I worked with at the time in the 1960’s were overwhelmingly rural. Some had never ventured outside of their villages and in those villages the Catholic Church and its agents (priests) ruled. Ireland was still a peasant county in a way, its economic life suppressed under English and later British rule and these workers were among the most brutally exploited including by ruthless Irish contractors like Murphy’s who brought them over. I likened them to the Mexicans here in California. The Irish were a source of cheap labor and cheap food.

But back to language. We had laid some pipe through this rich person’s rather large garden and lawn, really tore it up.. Naturally, we had to re-sod it. The day we planned to do it, it was pouring down with rain. I was standing next to the Ganger man and we were waiting for the digger driver (backhoe) to bring us another front bucket full of sod. Then he appeared; his name was Charlie. The Ganger man looks over at him slipping and sliding on this soggy ground in the pissing rain. He nods his head in disgust and says in a thick accent,  “Here comes Charlie shnailing (snailing) along." You can’t get much slower than a snail folks.

Language is so important to us. I cannot understand why people hate when immigrants speak their first tongue. I go in my local store and greet my buddy behind the counter in Arabic. I say thank you in Arabic and goodbye in Arabic. I once told him I was Akbar Kelb. I hear enough talk of Allah Akbar that Akbar just means great or big and Alllah God. Christians say God is great all the time. I already knew Kelb was dog from my travels in Iraq. Apart from it not being a good thing to call an Arab a dog in most cases, he understood when I told him that saying someone was “the big dog” in US or British English was not necessarily bad. So he told me how to say it properly, Al Kelb Al Kabir.  I am the big dog.

Yesterday I walked by a Latino family on the trail, and I should add that I have seen so many people with their entire families walking in the neighborhood and up on the trails what with the virus and all. I say “ola” and the kids and all of them respond with their "ola". The husband was a little back and as we passed each other I say “Ola Senior” and he responds with “Ola, cómo estás" I say, “muy bien y usted.” He responds “Muy bien”. But he liked it, it was obvious to me.

Now I can’t converse in Spanish and certainly not in Arabic. But when we do this and especially if the language we speak is the dominant language of the land, people really appreciate it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t say it right, it really changes the relationship.They see that you are respecting their language not disrespecting them for it and this is especially the case if you are a European/white American with the present head of state we have and the Nazi’s and racist xenophobes he has given confidence to crawl from under their rocks. Mind you, they have always been with us so it’s not necessarily a bad thing they are out in the open.

I’ll end here because I’m getting a long way from Monty Hall and Yiddish---sort of. In the US where identity politics is used to obscure the class question, you might hear a black person saying rather derogatively about another black person who is speaking grammatically correct English that she is “speaking white”. This is a con game at worst and outright confusion at best. What that person is speaking is educated English. She may be university educated, a professional and a solid member of the black middle class; she could be a worker that speaks that way like a teacher or whatever. She is not speaking like many of the working class white people I have lived and worked with all my time here. There is no such thing as a language called “white”.

The black middle class grew extensively after the black revolt of the 1960s forced the white racist ruling class in this country to open some doors, to build a buffer between themselves and the black workers and their revolutionary potential. This doesn’t make a black person speaking middle class American English a bad person. They may be a revolutionary person, a person who uses the skill and education they received from a university education and society, as a result of the 1960’s movement, to advance the interests of the black worker and all workers. In the last analysis it’s what a person does with that education not how they speak.

Over and out.