The Language That Carries Us: Part Two – When the Word Is Spoken

If Part One belongs to language held in the body, this second movement belongs to the moment when breath becomes sound. In oral cultures, speech is never neutral. Words are not simply descriptive. They are acts. They intervene in the world they enter. This is why, within Irish tradition, language was never treated casually, and why silence was understood not as absence, but as restraint and discernment. To speak was to step into relationship and to accept consequence, not only for oneself, but for the wider field of kinship and place.

Stories, songs, prayers, charms, laments, and invocations were not expressions of personal interiority alone. They were relational gestures, spoken at particular moments, in particular places, by those recognised as having the right to speak. The power of the word lay not in volume or performance, but in rightness – right timing, right ground, right authority. Words spoken without that grounding were understood to be unstable and potentially harmful, not because they were immoral, but because they were unmoored.

This understanding arises directly from Ireland’s relationship with land. The Irish language itself is a land-language, shaped through long intimacy with weather, sea, soil, sound, and survival. It carries an extraordinary precision of perception. There are words that distinguish not simply rain from wind, but the quality of rain carried on a particular wind, the sound of the sea under specific conditions, the nature of ground as it shifts between states. These distinctions are not poetic flourishes. They are perceptual tools, developed through lives that depended on accurate reading of the world in order to endure.

To speak Irish is to speak in relationship with place. The language resists abstraction and generalisation. It attends to difference. Its lyricism is observational rather than decorative. Meaning is not inflated; it is honed. This precision shapes how reality is perceived. When a language teaches its speakers to notice finely, to name exactly what is present rather than gesturing vaguely toward an idea, it trains a particular quality of attention. The psyche becomes more attuned, more responsive, more grounded in lived conditions rather than conceptual overlays.

When such precision is lost, the effects are not merely linguistic. Perception itself begins to dull. Vocabulary collapses into convenience. Nuance gives way to approximation. What cannot be named accurately is no longer perceived clearly, and what is not perceived clearly cannot be responded to with care. This is not only an Irish concern. It is happening globally, as languages are simplified, standardised, and shaped increasingly by speed, repetition, and mass mediation rather than by land, labour, and relationship.

Within Irish tradition, this loss has always been understood as dangerous. Language shapes reality. To speak imprecisely is not neutral; it alters how the world is encountered. This is why spoken language followed deeper literacies of listening. A person learned when not to speak before learning how to name. Words were released sparingly, because they were understood to carry weight. Silence was not emptiness, but containment.

Stories were not entertainment. They were oral teaching. They carried moral structure, social memory, and cosmological understanding without instruction or explanation. A myth did not explain itself; it shaped perception through repetition, allowing meaning to settle over time. Storytelling trained people to recognise patterns of consequence, not through argument, but through lived resonance. Songs functioned in a similar way. Lullabies regulated the nervous system. Work songs coordinated bodies in labour. Keening allowed grief to move through a community without becoming trapped or silenced. Blessings strengthened households and relationships. Each form had its place. Each had its limits. None were interchangeable. The power of these forms lay not in expression, but in containment. Songs and spoken forms were vessels. They held what could not be spoken plainly. This is why they were inherited rather than constantly invented. They had already proven themselves capable of carrying what they were asked to hold.

Sean-nós singing offers a clear example of how verbal and non-verbal language remain inseparable within Irish tradition. The voice carries the song, but it does not act alone. Those familiar with sean-nós will recognise the winding of the hand that often accompanies the singing – a gesture so ordinary within the tradition that it is rarely remarked upon, yet essential to how the song is carried. This movement is not decorative. It establishes connection. As the voice unfolds the song, the hand traces its rhythm, drawing the listener into relationship. Meaning is not projected outward alone, but circulates between singer and hearer, shaped by breath, gesture, and attention. Like set dancing, sean-nós encodes connection rather than spectacle. The song is not performed at an audience, but spoken with them. Even when the word is sung, the body remains engaged in the act of transmission.

When we look beyond Ireland, we find resonant understandings across other Indigenous cultures. In Amazonian traditions, icaros are sung as medicine rather than music. Elsewhere, chants, invocations, and spell-songs function as navigational tools for psyche and body alike. These forms arise from deep relationship with land, lineage, and cosmology. Removed from that ground, they lose coherence. They are not techniques to be borrowed or extracted, but practices held within responsibility and consent.

This is where contemporary fascination with verbal practices such as spell work, incantation, invocation, affirmation, and mantra often falters. Detached from the preparatory literacies of listening, restraint, and accountability, words are treated as tools to be deployed rather than responsibilities to be carried. Language is spoken quickly, repeated habitually, and circulated as slogan or formula, without sustained attention to what is actually being set in motion.

A simple example can be heard in the now ubiquitous phrase “go with the flow.” Spoken casually, it sounds benign, even wise, yet it often carries a subtle disempowerment. To go with a flow implies being carried by a current one has not chosen, yielding agency to momentum rather than inhabiting it. In older land-based understandings of language, the distinction would matter. One does not simply move with a river; one knows where one is standing in relation to it. To be the flow is a different state entirely – embodied, responsive, and present – yet contemporary speech rarely pauses long enough to notice the difference.

This is not a critique of any single phrase, but an illustration of how language, when untethered from attention and consequence, begins to thin. Speech becomes performative rather than relational, aimed at producing a feeling rather than sustaining responsibility. In such conditions, words lose their grounding. What was once a means of orienting the self within land, body, and relationship becomes sound without depth, assertion without containment. Language does not transform; it fragments.

In Irish tradition, this danger was well understood. Not everyone was permitted to speak everything. Certain words belonged to certain roles. To name something was to enter into responsibility with it.

Poetry occupied a liminal space between speech and song. It allowed complexity to remain intact. It resisted simplification. A poem did not resolve; it held. This is why poetry endures in times of rupture, when ordinary language collapses under the weight of experience. It allows coherence to remain without forcing closure.

All of this rests on an ethic of care. Verbal language, when held within oral tradition, is never about expression alone. It is about what words will do once released, who they will touch, and what they will alter. Silence remains its guardian, ensuring that speech does not outrun listening.

To speak from within oral tradition is to accept consequence. Words travel. They have power and lodge in bodies. They shape memory and relationship. Once spoken, a word cannot be recalled, only answered.

Where Part One of this essay attended to language before speech – the preparatory ground of body, rhythm, movement, craft, and form, this second part attends to language released into the world. Together, they form a complete ecology of communication, moving from orientation, through expression, and back into silence.

This is not a call to speak more, but to speak more carefully. When speech arises from deep literacy, it does not seek attention. It seeks truth. And when it has done its work, it knows how to fall silent again.

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© 2026 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.

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