WIKITONGUES: Christine speaking Shetlandic

My name is Christine De Luca, but that's
my married name, and my real name

is Christine Pearson. I was born in
Bressay in Shetland, and then most of

my life, my childhood, was spent in
Waas on the west side of Shetland,

a group of islands at the
very north end of Scotland.

Quite isolated from the mainland, really.

Waas is called Walls. But it really means
'inlets of the sea' and it's one of these

things that the army making the maps got
confused with, and they put down the word

'Walls'. So when you say "I come
from Walls," you feel as if it's

sticking in your mouth, because you come

from Waas. Anyway, that had a fundamental

effect on me, being brought up in a

peerie [tiny] crofting fishing community

all my childhood. When I came away to

Edinburgh, where I live now and I've lived

for 50 years, I found Edinburgh really

quite awe-inspiring and quite scary.

And of course I had to be careful how I
spoke, because I had to speak English.

We learned to speak English at school,
of course. We had to be bilingual.

And not be rude. But I did miss not being
able to speak in my own way.

I think when I realised later on that the
chances of me going home was likely

very slim, I thought... I found release
in writing, in Shetland dialect.

I was [*] a bit difficult to write in the
dialect, because we never learned

to read or write it. It was kind of
mainly spoken. There was a dictionary,

there was ways of writing it, but we
never learned it formally, so we had to

kind of... just manage ourselves.

But anyway, I started writing subversively
in Shetland. in Shetland dialect. And then