Tae speak withoot shrinkin
For writer Samar, one language feels like home; the other glows at a distance. In the space between Scots and Urdu, she reckons with loss and longing, exploring what it means to speak yourself into being and understanding that reclaiming a language isn’t just about fluency.
By Samar Jamal | Aled Haywood
It is through words that we can both hold our experiences and show them to others. The make-up of our language is a showcase of our being – retelling, evolving and existing. So yes, this is a piece about language, but language, like for so many, is one facet of my identity.
I was born in Pakistan’s Punjab, in a wee village south of Faisalabad. A short three years later, my family and I moved to Scotland, eventually settling in Wishae (formerly known as Wishaw), where I’ve spent most of my life. The migration from Pakistan to Scotland entails the usual dilemmas ae diaspora. Unsurprisingly, one of them is about language.
Specifically about two mother tongues – one that has always felt warm, familiar and another which glows brightly in the distance.
The former is about West Central Scots I grew up speaking – a language of elongated vowels and harsh Rs, often reclaimed only as a caricature by the media. For me, Scots isn’t just about sounds but a memory of the experiences that made me, that I hold dearly. The latter is Urdu, a language I never fully learned, which was never shared with me in full because it was expected to already be mine.
When I think of speaking Scots, I can’t tell you exactly where it began, but I can place where it started to waver off: when I moved to Stirling for university. I became friends with mostly international students and, knowing they hadn’t spent much time with people who sounded like I did, I toned the Scots doon. It felt like a practical decision initially, but it was when someone pointed out that they (still) couldn’t understand me that I felt really shattered.
At that time, I was just beginning to carve out a space that allowed me to express parts of myself authentically. So I swallowed my Scots even more, retreated to a place that felt safe and socially comfortable, despite what it asked of me. Looking back, the irony of that isn’t lost on me – I was letting some parts of my authentic identity flourish while drowning out others.
A few years later, I moved to Glasgow, and eventually those friends moved back to their home countries, but my use of Scots never really returned in the same way. It wasn’t until I was with the occasional person whose Scots rolled off their tongue with ease that I felt its absence. It is often in the absence of something that you really notice you once had it in abundance. Thinking back, it’s funny how hard it was to lose Scots but how passive I felt about Urdu – the tongue I’d spent my whole life being told already belonged to me, despite it never feeling close.
I especially noticed the loss of Scots when friends who I had been at high school with took the mickey out of me: “Mate,you’ve goat a Glasgow Uni accent”. “Naaaaw, wit a riddy”, I thought – I was pure ashamed. Thinking back to that, it wasn’t just about how I sounded but the association with people whose reasons for their “Glasgow Uni accent” were so distinct from mine. What they were hearing was an ensemble of stripping and kneading parts of myself to fit in. It felt like an erasure of identity, layers that had been bred from the places that I had grown up. Now here I was knackered, being policed again. I was scrambling to retrieve my Scots.
I’ve also witnessed the other end of it, the shock some people have at hearing a person of colour with a thick Scottish brogue. I’ve seen the discourse on TikTok around hearing Black people speaking thick Glaswegian (though I’m not sure how much of that response is from Americans, influenced by their lack of exposure to the breadth of Britain's Black community). As much as it’s intended as a celebration of diversity, the shock feels jarring to me. When I’ve faced that response, I wonder if people consider that the South Asian community has been part of Scottish history for decades, with migration tied to colonialism. If not, that reaction can feel like an ignorant shock, an erasure of history.
In some senses, I can understand people thinking, Why’s this lassie speaking lit at?”
Growing up in Wishaw’s Craigneuk, I could count on one hand the number of households from Black or ethnic minority backgrounds. So few, we seriously stood out when we moved, welcomed with our windows being pelted with eggs.
What also feels uneasy is that I often find, between the lines, it is riddled with assumptions. To be shocked by how I sound, which would happen more often when I spoke more Scots, can feel like a projection of a narrative of who I am, who someone expects me to be.
I think that narrative can begin the moment dialogue begins; speech is an initial point of connection. I realised how often I’ve felt I had to step forward with the other person's comfort in mind, like ensuring I don’t let the slang slip in front of the middle-class people in certain spaces, an exhausting process requiring me to mould myself into spaces that I don’t fit.
I think this is also about the access to spaces where Scots would be spoken. There’s an intersectionality that I find missing from many working-class spaces, and the impact of that is two-fold; few working-class people of colour in those spaces, and secondly, a feeling of isolation when we do enter them.
So there’s a deep-seated sense of belonging with Scots. Belonging, which also comes from access. I’ve had access to Scots most of my life, or at least been adjacent to it. I’ve understood its layers, from its comedy to its class discourse, and I know where in this city I’ll be more likely to hear it.
Whereas with Urdu, I don’t have that understanding. I know it’s a language of depth and beauty, and yet it’s never felt fully reachable. The desire for closeness to Urdu isn’t just about understanding but expanding. There’s a desperate desire to cling to Urdu as a vehicle to expand my understanding of my Pakistani culture.
Growing up, my mum would encourage me to speak Urdu instead of Punjabi (which is what we always spoke at home) when I’d call my relatives in Pakistan. It was considered the formal, respectful language, unlike Punjabi, which was seen as too boisterous, too animated.
I’d stutter my words, forming clunky sentences, speaking with an awkwardness that deprived everyone of a conversation with any substance. I felt it was something to perform properly or not at all.
As I grew older, I began rejecting the request to speak Urdu with family members, having never seen the merit in it. And importantly, understanding the classist roots behind its encouragement. I didn’t realise at the time that the language that felt closest to Scots wouldn’t be Urdu at all, but Punjabi. I embraced my limited Punjabi.
Something about speaking it reminded me of Scots. Its roaringness and ability to encapsulate intensity, as far as I knew (largely in its vulgarities). Every time I watch Bend it Like Beckham, the line “Chak de patte!”, which roughly translates to “Lift the floorboards,” will always equate to the Scottish refrain and energy as “Here we f***ing go!”
But much of the culture that I want to connect with isn’t written in Punjabi but in Urdu and it was when I found a stack of letters written in Urdu from my dad, that the desire to learn Urdu grew – to not only understand the depth of its flowering ghazals (poetry) but to savour a time capsule of someone no longer here. To understand a world that is my own, that I often feel removed from or distant. Learning Urdu is as much about remembering as it is about cultivating.
So how do you flip the script? How do you reclaim a language that, over the years, you lost – and another you never fully held? With Scots, I think that it’s about cultivating malleable spaces that don’t ask me to perish parts ae masel. I know these spaces exist because most of the people closest to me don’t speak Scots. Still, there are parts of my identity that they know in their fullness, beyond language. There's also always space for me to code-switch in a way that doesn’t leave a tinge of sorrow. Especially because some feelings are too enormous for English to encapsulate, like telling someone off – “Get him telt!” – it carries the doing and having done, sandwiched between a gentle, firm scolding.
I remember years ago, watching Limmy skits and thinking, ‘A cannae show this to anyone, they’ll no get it, they’ll no understand the comedy gold of “gies yer laptop”’. I know it’s a bit trivial but ye wanna share parts eh yer “culture” with the people closest to you. Eventually, I did show it to a close friend. They were really confused initially but once I translated, they got it and “Gies yer laptop” or any mention ae Yoker were staple monologues. I still introduce Limmy to folk, it's reasons teeter between ‘This will solidify our friendship’ to ‘You’ve just moved to the dear green city, here’s a taste ae it’.
With Urdu, I’m still figuring it out. It’s a harder one to grapple with since I don’t have many people around me who use it regularly. I think it goes back to access, not just of the language. Reclamation would look like a few things. Firstly, by connecting with people in Pakistan who align with me. People who are connected to the culture, are interrogating the country's systemic cultural inequalities, class issues and are working towards inclusiveness that upholds and celebrates working-class roots. That means meeting people who can share parts of the culture that I’ve yet to absorb. I also understand it’s a lifetime of discovery – learning and unlearning. And after 15 years, it probably starts with a trip back to the homeland.
