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

as I wrote more and was moving among folk interested in poetry

then they became aware of that and I found they quite liked it

and that was really quite strange. I thought they would think it was awful queer.

so i wrote more and enjoyed doing that. And as time is going on

and i'm writing more and more, I would say [*] half and half

maybe more than half in Shetland dialect, or Shetlandic, and the rest in English.

And it's been translated into all kinds of languages. Which to me seems bizarre and strange.

I thought I might read this poem. It's mostly in English, because it's about the relationship between language and dialect.

I had been working away with a Nordic poet, an Icelandic poet, and his poem was all about a bird, the snipe, and the Icelandic word for the Snipe is "hrossagaukur" and the Shetland work for it is "hrossgauk"

And i had been working away with a Norwiegen poet, and his poem was called "hegre [hoyden?]" which is about the bird called the "heron." And the Shetland word for, for a heron is a hegrie, and I thought that was quite interesting.

Anyways, it starts off in English. It's a kind of a manifesto.

Spelling it out

It’s the way a cat fawns, a bird flaunts,
a dog recoils and whimpers;

it’s the way
a cricket chooses from his bag of chirpings
or a whale sends a long distance message.

It’s the way our fore-fathers moved
to the forest floor, and in the tonality
of their vocal chords said ‘I’ and ‘you’
in a thousand different ways;

The tenses that made sense of time past and time to come

picked up
the grammar of polemic and persuasion,
the lexicon of lewd and lovely,

the tenses that made sense
of time past and time to come.

It’s the borders, armies and classes
that cornered the limits of Language:

Patois or Pidgin; Colloquial or Kailyard;
Vernacular or Slang.

It’s the famous thesaurus that suggests
three meanings for dialect – other than
dialect and language –

speciality, unintelligibility and speech defect.

It’s the funding that flows from decisions;

it’s the boundaries and commissions
that decide that pub is kosher in Norwegian,
but only if pronounced püb;

dat Heron Heights an Hegrehøyden
is baith languages but Hegri-heichts is dialect,

dat Hrossagaukur an Snipe is language
but Horsegock is dialect.

Hit’s da passion we hadd whin we nön ta wirsels,
whin we bal soond fae wir bosie inta da heevens

whin we lay a wird o love apön een anidder
whin we dunna budder wi nairrow definition.