Known for his raw storytelling, ‘Trainspotting’ author Irvine Welsh is turning his attention to a pressing concern: the survival of language and culture in the technological age.
The Call for Language Preservation
This concern took center stage at the U.K.’s inaugural festival, Voiced: The Festival for Endangered Languages, a celebration spotlighting at-risk global and local languages through readings, performances, and workshops.
Welsh’s Warning
On Thursday night, Welsh captivated the audience by reading from his latest book, Men in Love, written in his native Edinburgh dialect. In a panel titled “The Art of Language,” which included poet Raymond Antrobus and Welsh singer Talulah, Welsh passionately called attention to how technology threatens linguistic and cultural richness.
“If language is divorced from culture, it becomes a weapon of imperialism, it becomes a weapon of control, it becomes a weapon of commerce,” Welsh argued.
Irvine Welsh
He voiced fears that language is being reduced to mere instructions — stripped of its cultural essence by global technology and power structures. The internet, he explained, despite its promise of open exchange, has diverted from community-focused, meaningful discourse.
“The internet’s been a massive tool in this, because the internet not only decontextualizes knowledge that it gives us. It asks things from us from the state, corporations, and from power sources,” Welsh declared.
Irvine Welsh
The Solution? Get Out and Read
Welsh humorously proposed a simple remedy: “People should just get out more and read more.” Lifting spirits with this quip, he stressed the critical role of literature in fostering empathy and understanding, especially among the youth.
He referred to the popular series Adolescence as a symptom of declining empathy and a trend towards decontextualized knowledge among young men. “It’s largely because of not reading… People should be reading books, they should be reading stories, they should be reading novels, because these are exercises in empathy,” he emphasized.
A Caution Against Modern ‘Multiculturalism’
While many hail multiculturalism, Welsh warns that what we often see now is pure globalization.
“We do have to be very judicious in the use of technology and remember what technology is set up to do. It’s set up to sell us things. … And then when we run out of money, it’s set up to control us through algorithms and through reducing us to stimulus-response machines on low-frequency instruction. So we have to really get back into communities.”
Irvine Welsh
Language: The Pillar of Culture
In his press notes, Welsh reiterated that language is integral to cultural preservation. His stark message: without language, culture dissolves, leaving us as “androids of the tech age, slaves to algorithms, ready to obey instructions which are reduced only to symbols.”
The “Voiced” festival continues its mission of language celebration through Saturday.
Reporting based on the original article; quotes reproduced verbatim.
