Scottish Cinema’s Understated Linguistic Diversity: A Brief Overview of the Scottish Film Industry

Abstract

Scotland’s cultural revival of the last decades has been accompanied, in Scottish film, by an exponential increase in Scottish productions and co‑productions. However, the optimism with which we might greet this development is somewhat mitigated by a perceived lack of diversity.Researchers generally concur that the dominant discourses and representations of modern Scotland in film are of white urban working class heterosexual male experience (Sillars, 2009; Martin-Jones, 2009; Hill, 2000; Lea et Schoene, 2003; Morgan, 2003; Neely, 2008), despite the decline of the industries, growing unemployment and evolving demographics. Seldom noted but directly related and relevant is that the rich heterogeneity present in the set of language varieties known as Scots (whose status as a distinct language rather than as a ‘deviant’ variant of English has been steadily undermined since the Union of the Crowns) is also lacking, so that Scots is now a language that is often only spoken at the margins of Scottish films, and increasingly limited to stereotyped comical characters. Hence the multilingualism inherent throughout Scotland, where both Scots and English are widely spoken, is undervalued. However, this has not always been the case, as we will see with reference to the films of Douglas’s childhood trilogy (1972–1978), predominantly in Scots, and Radford’s Another Time, Another Place (1982), unique in Scottish film history as a bilingual film in Scots and non-subtitled Italian.Given the dominance of the three myths of Scotland (Tartanry, Kailyard and Clydesideism), coupled with the prevalence of English as a commercially viable and culturally dominant language of cinema, Scotland’s multilingualism is rarely showcased, but nevertheless a handful of filmmakers have brought either community languages (such as Urdu, Punjabi or Polish) or foreign languages (such as German, Italian or Arabic) to Scottish screens. In these films foreign languages are linked to the politics of power, and brought to rural Scottish communities as a consequence of war, whilst the presence of community languages are to be found in films that explore diasporic communities and syncretic ‘new’ ethnicities, particularly in the urban setting.The centrality of multilingualism in shaping and informing our evolving cultural identities and inter-cultural relations is often overlooked, to the extent that even when linguistic plurality is present in films, it is often passed over ‘in silence’. Accordingly, none of the Scots language films that will be discussed in this article are recognised as such in their technical production details in the industry. Similarly, the fact that filmmakers such as Douglas, Loach, Radford and Ramsay value foreign languages such as Arabic (Douglas), Italian (Radford), German (Douglas), Spanish (Ramsay), Urdu (Loach) has gone largely unnoticed. To understand and encourage further expression of multilingualism in Scotland, we might perhaps begin by admitting the linguistic diversity which already exists.