2. TALKING POVERTY: URBAN SCOTS AND SOCIAL DEPRIVATION

Hardly surprisingly, like many fellow Glaswegians, I grew up believing that the language of the majority of my fellow citizens was slang¹ and hence to be disparaged, if not altogether despised. The fact that we were all equally able to express ourselves in Glaswegian or varying degrees of “Standard” English was conveniently overlooked. The hegemonical dominance of the “Standard” was total. Our native tongue was to be extirpated as rapidly as possible if we wanted any social advancement at all and in working class Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s social advancement was a major item on many a personal agenda. The multilingualism now so much à la mode was never an issue. Implicitly we were indoctrinated with notions of transient bilingualism whose goal, like that of the 19th and 20th century social missionaries in the Celtic areas of Scotland (and elsewhere), was to teach us the English in order that we forget the Glaswegian.