Language has such power, culturally and personally. The substance of thought, ideas and beliefs, it can enlighten as well as obscure. The expression of a nation's identity, it carries its history and re-shapes its past with an imagined future in mind. Through it we're able to share our thoughts and feelings as well as hide them. With linguistic facility, individuals are able to express their own identity, communicating what they think and who they are with greater or lesser confidence.
Growing up in a place where my first forms of expression (I can't say English was a second language) were seen by me as worthless had the effect of undermining any confidence I might have had in communicating what I thought or who I was. To begin with, this was a problem only in fairly formal situations; for example, when meeting those who weren't immediate friends or family. To teachers and headteachers, I must have come across as pretty dumb. My secondary school headmaster, in fact, suggested in June, after five years there, that I might as well leave the following month as I really didn't do myself or the school proud. After I left in July and the exam results came through, I found that I had passed them all. But by then, my own sense of self was hidden, even from me, under a blanket of shyness and embarrassment in social situations. And this, all because living in the no-man's land between two language registers, because, by the time I was a teenager, I felt uncomfortable using both my home dialect and that more standard version of school.
It was as if teachers had arrived as kindly missionaries with the aim of rescuing us from the dark practices of saying things like: Dinny tich that cause its mines and ah'll gee yi a skelp roond the lug. Whut's the mitter? Ah thocht yi wir m pal.
I haven't got to grammar and creativity yet; so there is more.
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