• ‘N u there p?
• L yes b.
• N Working on this Diego thing
• L how is it
• N It’s making me think about my Kreol. Did I tell you how I lost it?
• L I know you mourn it
• N It was the first language I knew
• L the first one you spoke?
• N y. the only one. Til I went to nursery school and no one understood me. They told my folks to speak English to me. So Kreol became language of adults/familial authority
• L Didn’t you know any kids who spoke it?
• N nope.
• N I never stopped understanding it
• N but the speaking seized up
• L Funny when you think how under colonialism, use of pidgins/creoles by colonised subjects = justification for colonials to infantilise them, while English = language of authority…
• L Have you read Moten’s ‘Blackness and Nothingness’?
• N No. Send!’

—Enn Gramaten

A cautionary tale of academic privilege and misadventure in Diego Garcia via a Kreole translation, and parallel live chat.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

‘Ohwnleeeinn Bellphasst wudyah b’borninn ahplace cauld Frendleee Whay wiffahfuckin myuralaffa bandahfukin terrroristz whanwiffah rauckettlawnchar whanwiffah ayedunnowha anh whan blade wiffah masheeengunn.
Frendleee Whay iffyur furrrtha rahpublikin cawz lak.

Whattzap frum Flukeyluke anh Daza mahcuzinn. Uppattah Sentraall Staishinn abowtaah gyett affah trane frumm Larrnn tha shitehoal werther wuzah yoovee-eff parrteee tha nite baahphore furr summ kunt ouwttah maggabbreee. Flukeyluke ohvarherd summ kunt slabbarinn tha therr wuz gunnah beeah striparr attah thiss parrteee.

Here, for Dialecty, Robert Herbert McClean presents us with a phonetic tale of Flukeyluke and Belfast friends.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

• ‘Shetland wis won by Harald Hårfagre, in da days whan
• da Vikings wir settin oot in aa da aerts wi dir axes,
• longboats and stinkin haps tied aboot dir backs. Dis cam eftir
• da time dat giants roamed an fokk wid wakken in
• dir beds tae hear bairns greetin wi a big wan clawed trow
• comin in da bedroom window, tearin at dir throats.’

Helen Nisbet makes a return to family history and memories of Shetland and the displaced reverberations in her contemporary life.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

Commissioned from open submission, Harry Josephine Giles & Martin O’Leary have used a neural network to produce poems that return to the vernacular language found in the ballads and poetry of nineteenth century Scotland and Northern England.

Harry Josephine Giles is a poet and performer and Martin O’Leary is a digital artist and designer: they came together from their different disciplines and perspectives over a shared interest in online texts, twitterbots, procedural generation and computer poetry.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

‘In De vulgare eloquentia, Dante developed a poetics of the vernacular – the collectively accessible speech of the household and the street, distributed unilaterally rather than intentionally acquired via a disciplined pedagogy of grammar, and transformed in open bodily exchange, irrespective of social position, gender or rank. “The vernacular,” Dante says, “[is] the language which children gather from those around them when they first begin to articulate words; or more briefly, that which we learn without any rules at all by imitating our nurses.” A vernacular is not structured according to a valuing hierarchy or an administration of history; it is improvised in tandem with the rhythmic needs and movements of a present-tense yet tradition-informed body among other bodies, each specific.

Lisa Roberston’s reflection of political subject formation, through poetry and vernacular forms, acts as a critical anchor for the ideas and experiments published in this new series, Dialecty.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

Adam Pendleton’s Notes on Just Back From Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer stems from the transcript of the script prepared by Pendleton for Yvonne Rainer to read during their day spent filming at the Ridgeway Diner in Chelsea. The text mixes citations from Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and excerpts from Rainer’s own published works; the film ends with the gospel song ‘I Am Saved’ by the Silver Harpes over the footage of Rainer’s now canonical Trio A, 1978. Pendleton’s chapbook plays on the duality of meaning in the word ‘movement’, exploring the synchrony of art and politics, and shared potentials of language and the non-verbal.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.