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 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 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 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.