I’ve been thinking about sound a lot lately — the small, stubborn noises that stick to you: a vendor’s call at dawn, the rattle of a tram, a lullaby hummed in a kitchen you no longer own. For diasporic filmmakers, these vernacular sounds are not mere background; they are coordinates. They chart routes between place and memory, map claims to belonging, and sometimes insist on belonging where institutions and borders will not. In my work as a cultural researcher and writer I’ve returned again and again to films that do this delicately and insistently, where sound becomes a kind of cartography.

What do I mean by vernacular sound?

When I say vernacular sound I mean the everyday auditory markers that locate us socially and geographically: language inflections, market chatter, public announcements, street music, household rhythms (the clink of dishes, the hiss of a kettle). These sounds are often improvised, locally inflected, and materially rooted in place. They differ from composed scores or background ambience because they carry social context — dialect, age, gender, class, ritual — all encoded in waveform.

For diasporic filmmakers, vernacular sound is a tool and a home. It can stitch a narrative across time zones — a streetbird’s call in Lagos threaded to a kid’s game in East London. It can revive what was lost, and it can refuse the singularity of assimilation narratives by asserting plural, layered identities.

How do filmmakers translate vernacular sound into cinematic language?

There are a few recurring strategies I’ve noticed in films that use vernacular sound effectively:

  • Foregrounding, not scoring: Filmmakers bring local sounds forward in the mix, allowing dialogue and ambient noise to dominate instead of traditional musical scores. Think of a film in which the market’s bargaining is louder and more thematically charged than any orchestral swell.
  • Layered montage: Editing sound from multiple places creates sonic palimpsests — a grandmother’s recipe being recited over footage of a modern supermarket, for example. This layering creates simultaneous presences: past and present, home and abroad.
  • Rhythmic repetition: Repeating sonic motifs (a particular drum pattern, a phrase in a mother tongue) can anchor characters emotionally and mark narrative beats without exposition.
  • Translation as sonic act: Leaving words untranslated, subtitling, or using partial translation can preserve acoustic texture and the embodied qualities of speech that full translation often flattens.

    • Examples from recent cinema and documentary

    I often return to a handful of films and directors who make vernacular sound their investigative lens. They include both well-known names and smaller, boundary-pushing works.

  • Steve McQueen’s Hunger and Shame: McQueen sometimes uses diegetic sounds to force spectators into bodily proximity with his subjects — a technique diasporic filmmakers adapt by making local, everyday noises insist on being heard.
  • Mati Diop’s Atlantics: The film’s soundscape layers modern urban ambience with mourning songs and the ghostly rhythm of the sea, folding mythic memory into contemporary migration narratives.
  • Documentaries like The Last King of Scotland: (though fictionalized) or more truthful ethnographic work, where ambient dialects and public rhetoric shape power dynamics and belonging.

    • Beyond named auteurs, experimental shorts by diasporic filmmakers often use field recordings — street vendors, religious ceremonies, house parties — and manipulate them to evoke distance and attachment. Smaller works are often where the most radical sonic experiments happen: artists will resample a family cassette from the 1980s, layer it with found radio broadcasts, and build a narrative out of what remains audible.

    Why does vernacular sound matter for diasporic identity?

    Sound mediates memory. The acoustic signature of a neighbourhood can feel like a fingerprint you carry in your nervous system. For someone living away from their homeland, vernacular sound can be evidence and anchor: evidence that a place once existed in a particular way, and an anchor to a sense of belonging that official narratives might deny.

    Vernacular sounds also complicate the idea of home as fixed. In films, a single dialect can be spoken across continents; a wedding song heard in one city can reveal a network of migration and generational continuity. These sonic traces show how belonging is negotiated, borrowed and remade rather than inherited whole.

    How do ethical questions shape the use of vernacular sound?

    There are ethical stakes in recording and representing vernacular sound. Sounds are not neutral artifacts — they arise from communities, and using them can be extractive if not done with consent, context and reciprocity. Filmmakers from diasporic communities often navigate this by:

  • Collaborative practice: Working with community members as co-creators rather than subjects — inviting elders, musicians, or street vendors to shape how their sounds are recorded and framed.
  • Archival care: Preserving original recordings, giving back copies, and situating sounds within histories so they aren’t presented as exotic curiosities.
  • Transparency: Making clear when sound has been manipulated, layered or sampled so audiences understand how the sonic portrait was composed.

    • What does vernacular sound offer to audiences?

    For a viewer unfamiliar with a dialect or a city soundscape, vernacular sound can be a gentle schooling: it trains the ear to listen for micro-gestures of culture. For members of that diaspora, it can be a recognition, even a cure for homesickness. In both cases, the emotional logic of these sounds often bypasses literal meaning and works on a bodily level — a rhythm triggers a memory, a phrase’s cadence evokes a grandmother’s presence.

    Practical approaches I’ve seen on set

    Some pragmatic techniques that diasporic filmmakers use to capture authenticity:

  • Field recording kits: A Zoom H4n or a more modern Tascam portable recorder (or using a high-quality smartphone with an external lavalier) to capture spontaneous sounds without a full crew presence.
  • Soundwalks: Guided walks through a neighbourhood with a recorder, inviting community members to narrate and stop at sonically meaningful points.
  • Family audio archives: Mining old cassettes, answering-machine messages, or VHS tapes for domestic sounds — then remastering them to sit within film mixes.

    • When sound becomes narrative resistance

    One of the most powerful moves diasporic filmmakers make is using vernacular sound to resist erasure. In cities where official signage and civic audio are in a dominant language, the persistence of other tongues in buses, shops and mosques can be a form of soft rebellion. Films that foreground these sounds insist on multiplicity where monoculture is imposed.

    Sound can also be a site of political memory: protest chants, slogans, or radio broadcasts that once mobilised a movement become sonic fossils that filmmakers can reanimate to critique the present. By restoring these noises into filmic space, filmmakers restore their political weight.

    Listening closely to vernacular sound in diasporic cinema complicates how we think about home. It reminds me that belonging is not only declared or documented — it is acoustically inhabited. These sounds don’t just tell us where someone came from; they explain, in breath and rhythm, why they keep coming back in their work.