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.

It was a peerie (tiny) 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
find it 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 now about 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 word for it
is "hrossgauk".

And I had been working away
with a Norwegian poet,

and his poem was called
"Hegrehøyden"

which is about the bird
called the "heron".

And the Shetland word for,
for the 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;

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,

that "Hrossagaukur" an "Snipe"
is language

but "Hrossgauk" 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.

[ooof]

A little bit of anger comes out there
an the end of that poem, I suppose.

But that's true, I mean,
the politics of language and dialect

is something I'm interested in,
and the status.

And I think it's important that
we don't let bearers think

that their mother tongue
is somehow debased language,

that we lift them up

and encourage them into bilingualism
where they're comfortable

and they can when to expect when,

why, and then a tither why

and that's something
I'm very interested in.

It's funny that I've just been made
Edinburgh's "Makar", or Poet Laureate,

which I think is really,
quite astounding, really,

given that I'm "kent owre" (known over)
as a Shetland writer.

And that I am quite passionate about it.

I suppose "I am bidden" (have dwelled)
here for fifty year,

and I do write in English. But
I feel it gives me a bit of space

to write and to help other folk
that's come into this city with

minority cultures, and thought that,
maybe feel their language is

subservient and not, say, good as.

I hope I can maybe help them
feel good about their mother tongue.

Maybe I should just read
another pretty poem,

this one totally in dialect.

It's called "Discontinuity"

And it's just I suppose,
a kind of seize the day poem

it's just about relationships.