McGarvey – AKA Scottish rapper Loki – offers an intelligent look at the British class system, from Greggs to Lauriston Castle, and asks whether it’s ever possible to move within it
The Guardian has a general policy against reproducing people’s accents in print. Mostly, I presume, for ease of understanding and smoothness of communication – there’s a reason we took to standardised spelling after all – but partly, I suspect, because it allows prejudice and mockery to slip in. Either from the writer’s side or from the reader’s. We are free, but everywhere we are in sociolinguistic chains.
Which makes reviewing the opening episode of the four-part documentary Darren McGarvey’s Class Wars (BBC Scotland) a very interesting proposition. It concentrates largely on the part that accent and language play in how we differentiate social classes and – crucially – in stopping us moving between them. His own accent (McGarvey was born and bred in the notably impoverished area of Pollok, Glasgow) is inescapably present throughout and gives further torque to what is already an impassioned and more rigorous examination than we customarily get from documentaries about this perennially fascinating subject.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3743VFl
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