#next person to tell me welsh doesn’t have any vowels better catch these hands

[elen-benfelen]

I don’t think I’ve ever been so comforted and haunted by a song as I have with Butchered Tongue by Hozier. It’s so incredibly, terribly beautiful. It took me a while to be able to listen to it without instantly sobbing my eyes out. Took me even longer to put words to my feelings towards it. The grief it portrays, of losing one’s culture and language. Yet also the comfort of finding others in common. The horror yet unity of realising that the scar of colonisation wraps around such a large chunk of the world.

It’s the cruelty of punishing those who dare to speak their own language, dare to dress and dance in the ways of their people.

To me, this song is hiraeth.

It’s grief and love and longing and hope all in one. There is no English word equivalent. Hiraeth can be used to describe that feeling when you can’t speak your grandparent’s language. When you no longer know the steps to a dance once performed often. That feeling of longing when you’re far from home. When you can’t return home. In this case, home can be a country, or it could be your old home or someone you once had in your life. Yet it can also be the hope that you might have those things again one day. That you might find someone to teach you the steps your body calls for or the words missing from your tongue. To me, Butchered Tongue encapsulates every corner of hiraeth. Both the hopeful and the hopeless kind. Because not every language has someone left who knows how to speak it, how to teach it. Yet there are those who do and still they must fight their rights and for respect from uncaring people. There’s a love in this song for minority and indigenous languages across the world. I listen to this song and I ache, not just for my own ancestors, but for those across the world whose fight is much harder than ours is. Whose governments still refuse to acknowledge them as human beings.

People need to stop viewing colonising languages as some kind of main character languages that are better and more intelligent than every other language. Fed up of folks mocking minoritised languages and calling them worthless.

Tell me again how funny you think my language is. Please. I might just laugh this time.