Ethnic Identity
Previously as we talked of British people you’ve got to know that there’re 4 main nations in Britain: the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish. Though the long centuries of contact between these people has brought a limit to their significant differences, national loyalties can be strong among the people in Britain whose ancestors were not English. For people living in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the way that ethnic identity expresses itself varies.
E.g. People in Scotland have constant reminders of their distinctiveness:
* Several important aspects of public life are organized separately and differently from the rest of Britain – education, law, and religion.
* The Scottish way of speaking English is very distinctive. A modern form of the dialect known as Scots is spoken in everyday life by most of the working classes in the lowlands.
* There’re many symbols of Scottishness which are well-known throughout Britain:
a) the kilt – a skirt with a tartan pattern worn by men,
b) the bagpipes (волынка) are regarded as distinctively Scottish musical instrument,
c) the prefix “Mac” or “Mc” in surnames ( e.g. MacCall, McDonald).
But a genuinely Scottish Gaelic sense of cultural identity is, in modern times, felt only by a few tens of thousands of people in some of western isles of Scotland. They speak Scottish Gaelic (which they call “Gallic”) as a first language.
The people of Wales don’t have many reminders of their Welshness. The organization of public life is identical to that in England. Nor are there as many well-known symbols of Welshness. However, there is one single highly important symbol of Welsh identity – the Welsh language. Everybody in Wales can speak English, but for 20 % of the population the mother tongue is Welsh. There are traditional Festivals of Welsh Poetry, which date to the medieval period. All children in Wales learn the language at school, there’re many local papers in Welsh, there is a Welsh television channel and nearly all public sign are written both in Welsh and English.
The question of identity in Northern Ireland is a much more complicated issue. Here ethnicity, family, politics and religion are all inter-related. Northern Ireland is a polarized society where people are divided into two groups. Those whose ancestors were from Lowland Scotland and England are Protestant and want Northern Ireland to remain in the UK, and those whose ancestors were native Irish are Catholic and want Northern Ireland to become part of the Irish Republic. So there are two communities, and their lives are entirely segregated. They live in different housing estates, listen to different radio and TV programmes, register with different doctors, read different
newspapers, their children go to different schools. In this atmosphere marrying a member of the other community is traditionally regarded with horror. But the extremes of the attitudes are gradually softening.
Perhaps because of the long tradition of clear separation British people, although many of them feel proud to be British, are not normally actively patriotic. They often feel uncomfortable when in conversation with somebody from another country they’re associated with Britain or the British government. They are individualistic and don’t like to feel that they are personally representing the country. The modern British are not really chauvinistic. Open hostility to people from other countries is very rare. If there is any chauvinism at all, it is expressed through ignorance: most British people know remarkably little about Europe and who lives there. The popular image of Europe seems to be that it is something to do with the French. The British continue to be very bad about learning other people’s languages, but not because they refuse to do it, but because they’re lazy (they say themselves). These days there is a greater openness to foreign influences. However, along with this openness goes a sense of vulnerability, so that patriotism often takes a defensive form. For instance, there are worries about the loss of British identity in the European Union. This is perhaps why the British cling to certain distinctive ways of doing this, such as driving on the left and using different system of measurement.
ritain.
