World Autism Month Life as a Second Language — an excerpt from new book, Wired Our Own Way

On World Autism Month, author Naoise Dolan shares her contribution to a new book, Wired Your Own Way, an anthology showcasing the diversity of the Irish autistic experience.

Editor Niamh Garvey has put together this brilliant essay collection, which includes contributions from Adam Harris, Nuala O’Connor, Fiacre Ryan and Jen Wallace.

Naoise is the author of Exciting Times and The Happy Couple. Her novels offer a sharp, funny portrayal of contemporary relationships and explore class, gender dynamics and queerness…

WHEN I STARTED studying Japanese aged sixteen, I felt accommodated by the level of social explanation and betrayed that I’d never received it before. The textbook explained not only the literal meaning of new phrases but the subtle implicit cues.

To say you’re not in the mood for something, for instance, you can say it’s ‘ちょっと。。。’, i.e. ‘a bit …’

Irish people also communicate in this elliptical fashion. There are a million gaps where you’re supposed to know what to fill in. Nobody ever gave me a textbook. It would have been much simpler if they had.

I am, you see, autistic. I’m also smart. There is nothing I can’t understand once it has been clearly explained. Most of these explanations are ones I have had to provide for myself through trial and error.

In any given social situation, I try to be amenable and fair. When I get the response I want (acceptance, warmth), I repeat the behaviour that prompted it. When the feedback is less desirable (indifference, scorn) I try a different approach the next time. Once I have gone through this process, I can explain the pros and cons of different strategies much more lucidly than someone who’s never had to break it down. But it feels like I’m always the one doing the work. If only someone else could do it for me and present their findings in a manual.

Wired Our Own Way – An Anthology of Irish Autistic Voices is written by Naoise Dolan and edited by Niamh Garvey. New Island Books New Island Books

The closest thing available is etiquette books. These I find addictive: Where were you all my life? I wonder as I tear through the pages of each new one. But no text can prepare you for every possible scenario. When I’m forced to freestyle, all bets are off.

So I try to place myself in situations where others will give me the benefit of the doubt. For this reason, I love language-learning.

‘The norms’

Not all language textbooks explain social norms as clearly as that Japanese one did in my teens. Where the perceived cultural dissonance is smaller, it’s taken for granted that more will be implicitly understood; a French or Italian textbook will tell you the phrases with which you can ask for the bill, but not how to get the waiter’s attention.

(Incidentally, I once made an Italian friend laugh by asking if it would be sufficient to make ‘contatto degli occhi’ with the waiter. It turns out you have to say ‘contatto visivo’ for eye contact; ‘contatto degli occhi’ makes it sound like the pupils are physically touching. This is indeed how eye contact feels to me with people I don’t know well, but I force myself to do it so they won’t find me suspicious.)

Textbooks don’t solve everything, then. But one thing is always true: when you have a foreign accent, people know you’re making a conscious effort to learn rules that don’t come naturally to you. They bear that in mind. Sometimes they can still be cruel, especially if they’ve never learnt a foreign language themselves. But nobody has ever given me as hard a time for my social mistakes in foreign languages as they do for the ones I make in English.

Professionally, I write novels and various other bits and bobs. I’ve published two books and a respectable swathe of short stories, essays and articles. An Italian interviewer once asked me if writing was a hobby or therapy for me; ‘È il mio mestiere,’ I replied – it’s my job. For hobbies/therapy, I look elsewhere: I draw, play piano, learn languages.

I speak six languages – English, French, German, Irish, Italian and Spanish – though my abilities fluctuate depending on which of them I’ve been using most recently. I also know some Japanese, Cantonese and Mandarin from having studied them at certain points. Last year I started learning Russian, but got invited soon afterwards to two literary festivals in Romania and Slovakia – so now I have switched to Romanian and Slovak, at least until the festivals are behind me. I always learn at least the basic phrases before I go abroad. It’s not a monastic sacrifice, a tourist’s tithe; it’s half the fun of travel for me. I feel free speaking other languages in a way I never really do in English.

Know the rules

Since I have a native speaker’s accent in English – albeit one that’s hard to place, a bit of my parents’ rural Irish accents, a bit of Dublin, a bit of London – I am expected to know the rules. When I break them, people assume it’s out of malice. There’s more latitude when I speak a foreign language: my accent makes it clear that I’m trying my best. If I’m blunt, people assume it’s because I didn’t have the right vocabulary to be subtle.

I meet many people who tell me they’re scared of speaking foreign languages. They ask where I find my confidence. The honest answer is that I don’t — I’m just yet more terrified in English. I feel no shame when I say the wrong thing in Italian. That I’m speaking it at all is a miracle; it’s a language I taught myself in a few months without taking classes or living in the country. There is just as valid a contextual explanation for my social missteps in English – I’m autistic – but this one isn’t as widely understood.

In school, I loved grammar. Like most anglophones, I didn’t learn much of it in the classroom, but I devoured it in library books at home. I obsessed over punctuation and changing trends: the decline of the subjunctive, the gradual Americanisation of Irish and British English. Suddenly, the rules of communication could be explicitly studied and debated. For me, it was much less daunting to read hundreds of pages about grammar than to try to sound normal in the playground, where I spoke too formally and couldn’t understand slang. ‘Normal’ was a dialect with no visible governing structures. I couldn’t find a conjugation table for normal, nor a vocabulary list, nor a summary of scholars’ views. You were normal or you weren’t, and I wasn’t. Grammar, though, I could work on. Grammar, I could learn.

Learning how our language has mutated over history is therapeutic for me: there’s less shame in bungling modern communication once you realise how changeable it is. It’s not an innate and eternal truth; it’s just how we happen to do things right now. Take the trajectory of the second-person pronoun, which in today’s English is always ‘you’. We used to have more options: thou/thee for a single person, you/ye for plural. Over time, you/ye began doing double service as a singular formal pronoun, rather like ‘vous’ in French or the royal ‘we’; one person could be ‘you’ if they were important enough. Over time, it became impolite to call anyone ‘thou/thee’, and these forms – along with the case differentiation marked by ‘ye’ – disappeared almost entirely.

Dialects and regional language

Traces of these distinctions do remain. My grandmother, a lifelong Leitrimer, said ‘ye’ to indicate plural-you until she died in 2010. The Dublin English I grew up speaking made abundant use of the plural ‘youse’ and ‘yiz’, while the American ‘y’all’ does a similar job. Thou/thee still appear in some Lancashire and Black Country British dialects, and lines like ‘Thee shut thi mouth’ surface throughout Yorkshire writer Barry Hines’s 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave.

I love these traces, these clues that tell you not only who a person is but whom they feel close to. So much of social in- and out-groups are invisible to me: as a child and teenager, I was never sure when I was allowed to consider anyone my friend, let alone understand why X person wouldn’t talk to Y person. When I find a language-based snippet of evidence – ‘If they’re an Irish person who still says ye, maybe they identify with a community similar to my grandmother’s’ – it’s like donning goggles that allow me to momentarily see the lines of allegiance that everyone else does.

My interest in language is descriptive, not prescriptive. I have no desire to tell people how to talk: I just listen when they do, then ask myself why they said it the way they did. Still, I can’t help having a soft spot for history’s most prominent thou-defenders, the Quakers. They fought a losing battle to resist linguistic change because they disliked how formal ‘you’ calcified social rank. (There is nothing my autistic soul loves more than losing battles.) Now that we all ‘you’ each other, the pronoun no longer demarcates clout – but when thou was still in currency, the you/thou distinction reinforced the class system.

In a 1671 pamphlet, founding member of the Quakers George Fox described the usages of his time like this: ‘[F]or amongst the great and rich ones of the Earth, they will either thou or you one another if they be [equal] in degree, as they call it; but if a man of low degree in the Earth come to speak to any of them, then he must you the rich man, but the rich man will thou him.’ A decade earlier Fox had written a whole book arguing to ‘thou’ everyone: A Battle-Door for Teachers & Professors to Learn Singular & Plural; You to Many, and Thou to One: Singular One, Thou; Plural Many, You, published in 1660.

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Over the following few centuries, the Quakers remained thou-proponents. ‘Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?’ demands a Quaker in Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick. (Like many modern English-speakers, Melville’s narrator associates thee and thou not with plain speech but with a ‘stately dramatic … idiom’.) Even as late as the twenty-first century, an American Quaker Plain Speech manual last revised in 2003 says that the form is still in use but its conjugation has mutated with the times: ‘speakers have naturally become less “proficient” as the forms have begun to die out. Also, some Quakers now are less careful in distinguishing plural from singular, using “thee” even to more than one person.’ The manual later says that ‘[n]early all European languages share [an] association of plurality and deference’. (But not, incidentally, Irish, which makes a singular/plural distinction of tú/sibh but has no separate formal ‘you’.)

Much of thou’s decline has to do with social status becoming more fluid. The industrial revolution and the rise of the middle class brought greater uncertainty over which pronoun to use, and ‘you’ was the one less likely to give offence. When enough people are socially anxious, it can change an entire language.

Note from author

Language-learning feeds into my writing. I write mainly in English, but learning other languages deepens my understanding of the one I work in. The peculiarities of English are laid bare when you find out how other languages phrase things; you scrutinise each idiom, each cliché. There’s a loss of innocence, and with it an acquisition of power. English is no longer all-encompassing when you’ve read outside it, dreamt outside it, lived outside it.

As an exercise, I write the odd scrap of fiction in other languages, but I think it’s unlikely I’d ever publish any of it. I can be correct in other languages, but correctness isn’t enough; to write good fiction, I need to be able to break the rules. And contrary to all canned wisdom, knowing the rules isn’t enough to break them. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. You also need to know whether you’re breaking them in a way that works, and this requires a level of proficiency that goes far beyond mere communication.

The sort of English I’m interested in writing holds each sentence to tight account. I need to be happy that each word is not only adequate, but the best word I could possibly use. This scrutiny never ceases; I can’t stand to read anything I’ve published more than a month ago because the fresh eye always reveals more words I want to change, and now can’t. (For this reason, I dislike reading aloud from my work. My honest answer when asked if I’d like to do a reading at events is: ‘It will be unpleasant for me, but if people would really enjoy it, then on balance it’s worthwhile.’ But this frank cost/benefit analysis can sound to neurotypicals like a veiled way of saying that I hate them and their request, so I usually just say: ‘Yes, sure.’ They’re not really asking if I’d like to read, after all; they’re asking if I insuperably object to doing it, which I don’t.)

If I stopped making progress in English, stopped finding new and satisfying ways to break the rules, then I’d turn to other languages to feel that thrill of discovery. But for now, at least, I’m still finding new things I can do every time I sit down to write. Having other options makes me more convinced that English is a good fit and not just a default.

Still, I find other uses for the languages. I’ve done literary events conducted entirely in German and Italian and I’ll be doing one in Spanish this Halloween. I journal in whichever language I feel rustiest in – French at the moment – and I enjoy being able to keep up with new non-anglophone fiction. Even when I can’t read the original language, it’s often easier to find a book translated into German than into English; Germans read much more widely in translation than anglophones do, so learning German has given me a ticket to many other literary scenes.

I’ve had entire relationships, both professional and personal, that have only ever been conducted in a foreign language. These connections are special: I embody a different side of myself that people who only speak English are quite literally unable to understand. Each language comes with its own associated set of experiences. My personality is different in each of them, though somehow it’s all ultimately me.

The social manual I craved as a teenager doesn’t seem to be forthcoming anytime soon. But language-learning has given me something better: self-forgiveness. More often than not, when I speak a foreign language, my blunders are met with kindness. The odd time that I encounter impatience, I simply remind myself that how others treat me is a reflection of them, not me.

They’re being quite rude, I think, or Wow, that was weird – simple thoughts, but ones I have to remind myself how to think, because my reigning assumption throughout my childhood and adolescence was that any social discord was my fault. Now that’s changed. I’m proud of my accent and even of my mistakes; they show that my environment didn’t just hand me the language, that I’ve learnt it the hard way. And ultimately, when I’m the one doing the accommodating – when I’m playing on hard mode so that the other person can stay in easy mode – who cares if they can tell that their language isn’t natively mine? I carry over this new approach when I return to English.

Most neurotypicals have no idea how much effort I’m making, how well I’m doing, if you account for the fact that I have taught myself every last thing. Maybe they’ll never know how much work goes into it. But I know, and that’s enough.

Wired Our Own Way is out now. There’s also a Wired Our Own Way event at this year’s Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway tomorrow, with more festival dates in the pipeline.