Introduction

This chapter examines some of the ways in which Scotland's languages are used in twenty-first-century fiction to challenge metrovincial perspectives, in relation to Paul Gilroy's concepts of postcolonial melancholia and conviviality (2005). Post-devolution Scottish fiction provides a multitude of examples of local cultural references, knowledge – and especially language – that establish narratives within their own self-determined centres of power and place. Detectable in many such texts is a rejection of the local as ‘parochial’, often stridently assertive of specialised cultural knowledge. Such writing inverts traditional metrovincial paradigms, where the provincialism of the metropolis is allowed to dominate unchallenged. Metrovincialism is a ‘mindset in which Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland appear, to adapt a phrase, as “faraway places of which we know little”’ (Jeffery 2007: 100)2 the ‘we’ here being the entitled, blinkered metropolitan. London is foregrounded, everywhere else is increasingly marginalised by its distance from this assumed centre, and the cultures, languages and practices of ‘the faraway’ are dismissed, stigmatised or ignored. Blasting against this stifling hegemony are the energetic multilingual practices evident in the work of a growing number of contemporary writers, a nonexhaustive list of whom includes Alan Bissett, Karen Campbell, Anne Donovan, Bill Duncan, Matthew Fitt, Harry Josephine Giles, Jackie Kay, James Kelman, ‘Wulf Kurtoglu’, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Chris McQueer, James Robertson, Suhayl Saadi and Irvine Welsh. Their works frequently reposition the local as the international, engaging with many of the varieties of language found in modern Scotland.

This spectrum includes both ‘broader’ varieties of Scots, stereotypically associated with the working classes, and ‘prestigious’ forms of Scottish English, and also includes elements of Scottish Gaelic, Urdu, Panjabi, diverse English dialects, and inventive science fiction hybrid forms. This multiplicity of voice has been used to articulate a wide range of perceptions of place and identity and engages directly with the lived experience of language in multilingual Scotland, yet tensions remain around the uses of ‘non-standard’, non-conformist language that by its nature challenges standard linguistic and cultural hegemonies. Saadi complains that ‘[m]ost mainstream anglophone writers and publishers cannot grasp this essential instability of language’ (Saadi 2007: 31).