Paper short abstract:

Language usually means communication, but there is a silence created by people's return to their native languages as they age, one created by listeners and hegemonic cultures through an inability to understand. Culture is lost, stories are no longer told, and our very humanity silenced.

Paper long abstract:

How can speaking create silence? Language usually connotes communication, but this paper explores a voicelessness that is created out of a return to native language as people age.

It is well known that dementia sufferers lose more recent memories first, falling further and further back into the remembered past and into their native tongue. Thus, older generations in Scotland leave behind English, the language of empire and domestic hegemony, and return to their mother tongues of Gaelic and Scots as monoglot speakers. The voiced become voiceless in the anglicised linguistic environments that surround them. They lose their ability to communicate their story, their experience and, at times, even their most basic needs.

History is partly told by unvoicing the defeated, actively suppressing memories we wish to overlook in creating our own reality. But silence is not just the absence of sound; it can be created by listeners through the absence of hearing, of understanding. So, I want to talk about the silencing not of the speakers and storytellers, but of the silence created by the hegemonic culture surrounding them.

This is how silence is truly created: no one wants to - or can - hear. And thus culture is lost, stories are no longer told, experience is no longer valued, and culture is no longer passed on. Silence becomes not the absence of sound, but the loss of interaction and communication, the loss of our identity as homo narans, the loss of our humanity itself.