Speaking rich and resonant

On Malcolm McLaren's album Duck Rock, one of the "listeners" chatting with the DJ between tracks says "I love the way you talk, man", and she's right, and I love the way she says it too. Then more recently, finally getting round to watching "The Wire" on DVD, I'm finding myself spell-bound by the way the black characters speak. Okay, it's all scripted, but the delivery and the swing really work.

The contrast is striking. The sad fact is that somehow, richness and resonance seems to have been bled out of the language we all use. There's the professional speak of educated people, finely tuned to communicate technical expertise; there are all the regional speakers saying the same words as everyone else but with a cute regional accent; there are all the wannabe young and wannabe cool types talking cod street, cod black ("wicked innit").

It says a lot when Tony Blair is held up as an example of a great speaker. Lord help us!!

I'm hearing a lot of people using language functionally - aiming to move a thought from A to B. And I'm hearing a lot of people using language to create an impression. But I'm not hearing many people at all using language with love of its richness and resonance. I hear very few people who I can just listen to for the pleasure of how they speak - for the craic.

There was one back in the early 1980s - the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Dries van Agt. He wasn't a fiery orator; his style was a subtle mix of old and new words, big and small, serious and humorous, occasionally laced with proverbs and sayings. And in the early 2000s we took yoga lessons with Philippe Barbier, aka Ajita, a French-speaking Belgian who had learned Dutch and spoke it brilliantly. With both van Agt and Ajita, it was a deep pleasure just to listen to them weaving thoughts and words together.