Róisín Gallagher’s short film, What Will We Lose If We Continue to Discourage the Use of Scots?, is the 2020 Second Quarter winner of the John Byrne Award.
Based on a conversation generated from an English exercise at school. This piece shows a child’s understanding of their own language and the school’s education system’s attempt to take that away from them. Quote below from Facebook.
My aim is to get people more comfortable and acquainted with Scots and through my art practice I address the taught self-hatred we have towards the way we talk. My work explores and supports the recognition of Scots as a language and hopes to address damage done by school systems that brought up the generations before mine. The Scots language has been discouraged from being spoken for the past 300 years since its definition as a “provincial dialect”, often described as “Bad English” by means of implying that the speaker is of a lower class. Scots speakers therefore are dissuaded from using the language that plays an important part in expressing their cultural belonging and sense of place …