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My name is Christine De Luca,
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but that's my married name,
and my real name
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is Christine Pearson. I was born in
Bressay in Shetland,
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and then most of my life, my childhood,
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was spent in Waas
on the west side of Shetland,
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a group of islands at the
very north end of Scotland.
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Quite isolated from the mainland, really.
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Waas is called Walls.
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But it really means
'inlets of the sea' and it's one of these
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things that the army making the maps
got confused with,
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and they put down the word 'Walls'.
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So when you say "I come
from Walls," you feel as if it's
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sticking in your mouth,
because you come from Waas.
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Anyway, that had a fundamental
effect on me, being brought up in a
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peerie (tiny) crofting fishing community
all my childhood.
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When I came away to Edinburgh,
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where I live now and I've lived
for 50 years,
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I found Edinburgh really
quite awe-inspiring and quite scary.
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And of course I had to be careful how I
spoke, because I had to speak English.
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We learned to speak English at school,
of course. We had to be bilingual.
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And not be rude. But I did miss not being
able to speak in my own way.
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I think when I realised later on that the
chances of me going home was likely
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very slim, I thought... I found release
in writing, in Shetland dialect.
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It was a peerie (tiny) bit difficult
to write in the dialect,
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because we never learned
to read or write it.
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It was kind of mainly spoken.
There was a dictionary,
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there was ways of writing it, but we
never learned it formally, so we had to
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kind of... just manage ourselves.
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But anyway, I started writing subversively
in Shetland, in Shetland dialect. And then
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as I wrote more and was moving
among folk interested in poetry
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then they became aware of that
and I found they quite liked it
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and that was really quite strange.
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I thought they would
find it awful queer.
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So I wrote more and enjoyed doing that.
And as time is going on
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and I'm writing more and more,
I would say now about half and half
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maybe more than half in Shetland dialect,
or Shetlandic,
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and the rest in English.
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And it's been translated
into all kinds of languages.
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Which to me seems
bizarre and strange.
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I thought I might read this poem.
It's mostly in English,
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because it's about the relationship
between language and dialect.
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I had been working away with
a Nordic poet, an Icelandic poet,
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and his poem was
all about a bird, the snipe,
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and the Icelandic word for the Snipe
is "hrossagaukur"
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and the Shetland word for it
is "hrossgauk".
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And I had been working away
with a Norwegian poet,
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and his poem was called
"Hegrehøyden"
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which is about the bird
called the "heron".
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And the Shetland word for,
for the heron is a "hegrie",
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and I thought that was
quite interesting.
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Anyways, it starts off in English.
It's a kind of a manifesto.
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Spelling it out
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It’s the way a cat fawns, a bird flaunts,
a dog recoils and whimpers;
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it’s the way a cricket
chooses from his bag of chirpings
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or a whale sends a long distance message.
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It’s the way our fore-fathers moved
to the forest floor, and in the tonality
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of their vocal chords said ‘I’ and ‘you’
in a thousand different ways;
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picked up the grammar of polemic
and persuasion,
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the lexicon of lewd and lovely,
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the tenses that made sense
of time past and time to come.
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It’s the borders, armies and classes
that cornered the limits of Language:
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Patois or Pidgin; Colloquial or Kailyard;
Vernacular or Slang.
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It’s the famous thesaurus that suggests
three meanings for dialect –
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other than
dialect and language –
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speciality, unintelligibility,
and speech defect.
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It’s the funding that flows
from decisions;
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it’s the boundaries and commissions
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that decide that pub
is kosher in Norwegian,
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but only if pronounced püb;
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dat Heron Heights an Hegrehøyden
is baith languages
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but Hegri-heichts is dialect,
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that "Hrossagaukur" an "Snipe"
is language
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but "Hrossgauk" is dialect.
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Hit’s da passion we hadd
whin we nön ta wirsels,
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whin we bal soond fae
wir bosie inta da heevens
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whin we lay a wird o love apön een anidder
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whin we dunna budder
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wi nairrow definition.
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[ooof]
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A little bit of anger comes out there
an the end of that poem, I suppose.
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But that's true, I mean,
the politics of language and dialect
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is something I'm interested in,
and the status.
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And I think it's important that
we don't let bearers think
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that their mother tongue
is somehow debased language,
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that we lift them up
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and encourage them into bilingualism
where they're comfortable
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and they can when to expect when,
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why, and then a tither why
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and that's something
I'm very interested in.
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It's funny that I've just been made
Edinburgh's "Makar", or Poet Laureate,
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which I think is really,
quite astounding, really,
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given that I'm "kent owre" (known over)
as a Shetland writer.
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And that I am quite passionate about it.
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I suppose "I am bidden" (have dwelled)
here for fifty year,
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and I do write in English. But
I feel it gives me a bit of space
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to write and to help other folk
that's come into this city with
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minority cultures, and thought that,
maybe feel their language is
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subservient and not, say, good as.
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I hope I can maybe help them
feel good about their mother tongue.
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Maybe I should just read
another pretty poem,
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this one totally in dialect.
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It's called "Discontinuity"
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And it's just I suppose,
a kind of seize the day poem
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it's just about relationships.