Caroline O'Donoghue: how language changes with time - and how it reflects on us

Caroline O'Donoghue: spellbound as ever by how language reaches us

I read something the other day that was so fascinating that I suspect it’s not true, but I’ll pass it on to you, anyway. I was trying to find out the origins of ‘like’ in the Cork dialect. 

Young women are often told off for using the word ‘like’ too much anyway, and when you’re a Cork young(ish) woman you tend to double up on your usage. You use it in the normal, arguably American way, which is as a filler word, when you’re telling anecdotes – ‘and I was like, no way, and he was like, yes way’ – and you use it at the end of your sentences, in the Cork way. 

As in, ‘c’mere to me, like’. This means a normal, modern Cork sentence could comprise of four or five uses of the word like. Such as “I saw the new Bond like, and I dunno like, it’s not like the old ones, which I liked better.” 

I started looking into the Cork ‘like’, and came across the following. As most Cork people are dimly aware of, we used to have a huge French Huguenot population. 

None of us knows what that means, exactly, except that they built a couple of nice buildings, there’s a nice graveyard off Paul Street somewhere, and French Church Street probably has something to do with it. The Huguenots, I’ve recently found out, were Catholics exiled from France who were welcomed, for obvious reasons, to Ireland. 

Hundreds settled in Cork, and began to learn English, where coincidentally, lots of Irish people were learning English, too. Cork was an upwardly mobile merchant city, shipping butter and beef internationally, and English was the language of business.

So: we’ve got two very different people, the French and the Irish, in the same small city, speaking a language that isn’t their own. The French often use ‘la’ as a filler word, particularly at the end of their sentences, which in this context means ‘there’. ‘La’ became ‘like’, and even ‘there’ burrowed its way into Cork slang, too. As in: “Do you wanna lift? I’m heading into town, there.” 

We’re constantly finishing our sentences with it, something I was unaware of until I moved to England, when whoever I was speaking to would look around, baffled, wondering at what ‘there’ I was referring to. 

Naturally, Cork became a big port for immigration, particularly to the factory towns in the north of England, where Geordies are ending their sentences with ‘like’ to this day.

I find all this riveting: the fact that a skirmish in 18th century France could lead to a melding of language in Cork, and the evidence has ended up in Cheryl Cole’s mouth. I’ve been telling every Cork and Newcastle person I meet since I read about it, and everyone looks slightly dazed afterwards. It’s a bit magic, isn’t it?

You can’t really think about the past without thinking about the present, and of course, the future. My own voice, in the past decade, has become a melding of Irish and English slang.

My boyfriend’s Essex by way of the East End roots means I now say the word ‘properly’ much more than I ever did. “He was properly mad”, for example. 

He, in exchange, now says ‘grand’ to mean ‘perfectly fine, basically mediocre’ as opposed to royal or imposing. But what about Cork as a whole? What does the next phase of our linguistic development have in store for us?

There are, of course, many gorgeous options available. “Akeed” is an Arabic slang word that just means ‘sure’, but fits nicely within the existing Cork-ism of ‘alright kid’. 

What if, in 100 years, the pronunciation of ‘alright kid’ became ‘alright keed’, the ‘ee’ getting forever longer and more playful? 

“Bas” is a remarkably flexible Hindi word that can mean “Enough!” or “shut up!”, but could also find a home within the Irish “alright boss?” 

In a century, perhaps ‘alright boss’ will remain, but have an entirely different, secondary meaning: a way of saying “I acknowledge that you’re older and more experienced than me, but please, can you shut up and let me speak?” 

There are, of course, endless permutations available to us. All of them beautiful, all of them fascinating, all of them ready to be traced back by amateur historians and Irish Examiner columnists in 200 years time. 

But with that, we must acknowledge a moment of pause. The French Huguenots were religious refugees who thrived in Ireland because we sympathised with them. We were Catholics ourselves, and had known persecution. They set up shop in the middle of the city, and traded freely, and built beautiful things. We learned a language together and we created a strange new dialect in the process. 

It’s hard to imagine all that happening if they were confined to bunk bed in a hotel room, or shuttled around from county to county, never being permitted to put down roots or forge lasting community relationships.

The longer Direct Provision goes on, and the more stories that come out – the hunger strikes, the horror stories, the mass covid infections at cramped B&Bs – it’s hard not to choke with shame at the gracelessness we have shown so many people seeking refuge. 

It’s easy to think about the things we deny them – decency, dignity, respect – and slightly more amorphous to think about what we deny ourselves. Our culture, whose depth we are so very proud of, shrinks every time we lock another person out of society. 

And what’s the good in that, like?