When I Wondered Which Language My Gestalts Arrive In

Some of my oldest gestalts arrive in Glaswegian, others in Scots, others in English. That made me wonder whether language creates thought—or simply preserves the relationships and histories from which thought first emerged.

For several years now I have found myself arguing that language arrives later than most theories allow.

Not later in childhood.

Later to experience itself.

As an autistic gestalt processor, I have never recognised myself in accounts that describe language as the engine of thought. Nor have I found it convincing that the language available to me determines what I am capable of experiencing. My own life has repeatedly suggested something else. Experience comes first. Language follows, sometimes years or decades later, attempting to preserve what has already been lived.

Recently I found myself wondering about Scotland.

Not its history.

Its languages.

The question surprised me.

I realised that some of my oldest gestalts seemed to arrive in Glaswegian, whilst others felt unmistakably Scots. Still others appeared only in English.

Not because I had set out to learn three different linguistic systems.

Because I realised I had never asked where those gestalts had first taken root.

The answer proved rather more interesting than I expected.

Like many people, I had quietly imagined Scots as a single language with regional accents and local variations. The more I read, the less adequate that picture became. Scotland’s linguistic landscape is layered. Gàidhlig, Scots, and Scottish English each have their own histories, relationships and trajectories. Even within Scots, the distinction between spoken varieties such as Glaswegian and the literary tradition is more significant than I had appreciated.

That distinction stayed with me.

Glaswegian is, first and foremost, an oral language. It lives in conversation. It carries humour, argument, affection, irony and belonging through rhythm, intonation and timing as much as through vocabulary. Many of its expressions make immediate sense when heard aloud yet appear grammatically peculiar on the page.

One example caught my attention.

In Glasgow, people sometimes say I’m ur where Standard English would simply say I am. To English ears it sounds almost redundant—as though someone had said “I am are.” Nobody seems entirely certain where the construction originated. It has become part of the dialect without anyone being able to point confidently to its beginning.

What interested me was not its history.

It was what the phrase accomplishes.

The apparent redundancy does not feel empty. Spoken aloud, the doubled rhythm carries insistence. The language performs certainty before it explains it. The meaning is not contained solely within the words themselves but in the relationship between voice, timing and listener.

As a gestalt processor, that felt unexpectedly familiar.

Much of the language I acquired early in life arrived in precisely that form. Not as isolated vocabulary, nor as grammatical rules, but as complete relational events. Voices. Situations. Emotional climates. Ways of being with particular people. The language and the relationship were never separate.

That has become one of the central ideas running through my work.

Language does not create the experience.

It preserves access to it.

The more I read about Scotland’s languages, the more another pattern emerged. Literary Scots occupies a different place from Glaswegian. Over centuries—and especially through deliberate literary revival—it became a language capable of carrying philosophy, scholarship, political argument and poetry on the page. Not because Glaswegian was somehow incomplete, but because writing asks language to do different work.

Writing must survive separation.

It has to remain coherent after the speaker has gone, after the voice has disappeared, after intonation and gesture are no longer available to carry meaning. Every written tradition gradually develops ways of bearing that additional weight.

That observation reminded me of something I have spent years trying to describe in autistic language development.

Language becomes progressively more capable of carrying coherence away from the situations that first gave it life.

Perhaps that is why some of my oldest gestalts remain Glaswegian.

They were never learned from books.

They were learned from people.

Then I noticed something else.

Contemporary Scotland increasingly recognises Gàidhlig as one of its national languages, with public investment, education and official status. Scots occupies a more ambiguous position. Millions continue to speak it every day, yet many of those same speakers have been taught that they are merely speaking incorrect English rather than a language with its own history and internal coherence.

I found that strangely moving.

Not because the politics are simple.

Because the pattern felt familiar.

Again and again, throughout my own life, I have encountered realities that existed long before the surrounding culture possessed a satisfactory way to name them. My autistic architecture existed before I encountered the idea of gestalt language processing. My own understanding of myself existed before I had language capable of describing it publicly. The life arrived first. Recognition followed later.

Perhaps languages experience something similar.

Recognition does not create what already exists.

Sometimes it simply catches up.

I do not know whether there is anything uniquely autistic about noticing these kinds of patterns. Perhaps there is not. But I do wonder whether gestalt processors become unusually sensitive to language as a living ecology rather than merely a system of words. We often remember voices before dictionaries, intonation before grammar, relationship before definition.

If that is true, then perhaps the question is not which language I think in.

Perhaps it is which relationships each language has continued to preserve.

I find that oddly satisfying.

Not because it answers anything conclusively, but because it reminds me that language is more than vocabulary. It is history carried through people. It is culture remembered in rhythm. It is experience surviving long enough to become speakable.

Recognition did not create those realities.

It merely arrived late.

Now, enjoy a wee tune in Scots …