Review: Donal McLaughlin's 'Naw much of a talker', a Scottish-Swiss novel.

NAW MUCH OF A TALKER

by Pedro Lenz, translated by Donal McLaughlin

Freight Books, 153 pp., £8.99, August 2013, 978 1 908754 22 6

As the title suggests, Donal McLaughlin's book is written in West-of-Scotland vernacular, a translation of Pedro Lenz's first Swiss-German novel, Der Goalie bin ig. Pedro Lenz himself, on his own website, describes the language he wrote the original novel in as Mundart, i.e. vernacular. In doing so he avoids using the word Dialekt to describe the language he writes in, just as McLaughlin has avoided the word 'dialect' to describe the language of the translation.

The question of whether we call McLaughlin's language dialect or vernacular will hopefully not interest most of his readers in the slightest; they might well just be hooked on and running through an understated, charming, stoical story. The question will continue to bother the minority of McLaughlin's readers who can speak -- and who occasionally write -- a language which one person will term dialect, another The Scots Language and a third 'demotic urban speech'. McLaughlin seems to have a savvy strategy, in the interviews he's given about the book: he's not limiting himself to a single, dominant concept when discussing the book's language. In one online interview however, he did distance himself from the word Scots, saying that he never learnt Scots at school, and implying that it's a concept that has little to do with him.

Jakeys Scotland: Salmond's queerest re-branding yet

(Full copyright to this photo belongs to comedian Jamie Andrew, who I'd like to thank for putting this image in the public domain. I'd also like to thank the two men portrayed in the photo, and the photographer, all of whose names I've unfortunately not been able to find out.)

     After Police Scotland, Survivor's Scotland, Scotland's Railways, One Scotland & Creative Scotland, we're all real bam-pots not to have seen this one coming: Salmond has decided to re-brand that loveable section of the Scottish population who sniff glue, drink their weans disability living allowance & then give their wives a real doin, all while relentlessly maintaining that irresistible, gallows-type Caledonian patter -- yes, we're talking about the jakeys -- as a part of Old Alba's socio-independent social fabric that we can all feel good about. Jakeys Scotland. Giving his press statement this morning not, as usual, from the oh-too 'Let me show you ma Peploes' -ambience of the steps of Bute House, but, instead from in front of one of the few surviving old men's pubs down the bottom of Leith Walk, Salmond was clearly revelling in his coup de grâce:

                                             "For decades we've felt uneasy about our Europe-topping levels of heart disease, alcoholism & poverty-caused, very early deaths. With less than 13 months to go to the Referendum, it would be ungracious of me to start harping on about the W.H.O's 2002 report on people in certain areas of East Glasgow dying, on average, aged 52, at least 22 years earlier than citizens born in the same year in the west of the city. But we need harp no longer: