Unrelated Incidents’ by Tom Leonard and Search for my Tongue by Sujata Bhatt :: English Literature

What does the way a person speaks tell us about the person? ‘Unrelated Incidents’ by Tom Leonard and ‘Search for my Tongue’ by Sujata Bhatt are two poems that give people an incite into how a person is perceived by others, by the way that they speak. ‘Unrelated Incidents’ is about how the BBC newsreaders all talking in Standard English and will not have a Scottish person reading the news because the viewers will not understand there accent, Tom Leonard views this as discrimination and shows his dislike to this attitude in his poem. ‘Search for my Tongue’ is about Sujata Bhatt’s personal experiences with learning another language and having to speak in a foreign tongue and forgetting about the mother tongue which is the original language. When Sujata thinks that she has finally lost her mother tongue she starts to hear it again in her dreams. The layout of the poem ‘Unrelated Incidents’ is set out in an unusual way because of the poem talking about the BBC newsreaders. When the newsreaders reads out the news they read it off of autocue and this is how the poem is set out. When first looking at ‘Unrelated Incidents’ it is difficult to read because of the spellings of the words. The poem is written phonetically and not in Standard English. Tom Leonard says in line 27-30 ‘this is me token yir right way a spellin.’ Leonard also uses colloquial which is slang he uses it in the last line with ‘belt up’ he does this to mock the way the news is read because of the poem being written as if it were the six clock news. This is different to ‘Search for my Tongue’ because Sujata Bhatt for 15 lines writes in English but then from line 16-29 writes in Gujarati which is her mother language, beneath this it also tells the reader how to read this language (which is spelt phonetically). The lines written in Gujarati is actually the first part of the poem written again and when you read it the first part sounds harsh and not very nice to read but when you read it for a second time in Gujarati it flows and is nice to read. In ‘Unrelated Incidents’ and ‘Search for my Tongue’ they either are cross or upset with themselves or with others around them. In the poem ‘Unrelated Incidents’ the Scottish man is angry for being rejected by the BBC just because of the way that he talks and because of his accent and in ‘Search for my Tongue’ she is upset with herself for not