Raman Mundair – Scots Dialect
They took nae pains their speech to balance,
Or rules to gie; 0
But spak their thoughts in plain, braid lallans,
Like you or me.
Robert Burns in Epistle To William Simson
The first detail that I often absorb about any place is the sound of its language. Although I'm not musical, I like to think I have a musical ear. I find myself drinking in lilts and cadences, turns of phrase, similes and metaphors like a thirsty Punjabi downing whisky. I was born in Punjab, in the North of India, and grew up in a wee village outside the industrial town of Phagwara. Within range of my infant ear I could hear the colourful gaggle of village girls taking the cows to the byre, the Gurbani prayer of the priest in the Gurdwara, the Metropoli speech of my well-to-do Aunts and a tender, simple lullaby from my Mother's tongue – every sound stimulus delivered in a different dialect that perfectly encapsulated a specific time and space. A multiplicity of moments in a single soundscape.
I should declare from the outset that as a poet, writer and playwright, I suspect that I'm predisposed to an appreciation of sound, language, and specifically, dialect. I love music, but I also love the sound of people in conversation; I love the natural poetry that lives in dialect. The instinctive music and truth that inhabits natural speech. Eavesdropping on folk loose in conversation from Phagwara to Shetland (via Manchester and Glasgow), I have delighted in the pleasure of the musicality of language, experiencing first hand how dialect paints life in vivid and precise forms that reveal worlds within worlds.
When I was wee I migrated from India to Manchester. I arrived at my inner city Primary School with Punjabi, Hindi, Bollywood film songs and unconfident smattering of English. In 1970s Manchester I was just plain asking for trouble. I quickly realised my mistake and after carefully watching countless episodes of Coronation Street I found my way through and managed to survive the vicious hierarchies of school. The intimacy of regional accent and the dialect of a place gave me access to that world. In other words, I may look out of place to you but, when I opened my gob, you knew I belonged. In time my dialect became more specific – my language evolved to hold all the detail of my experience – incorporating Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu alongside Mancunian, Loughborough-isms, English, Scots and Shetland Dialect. Dialect brings amongst many things, texture, to my writing. The idea of language as home, as belonging, interests me. Even now my accent wanders. My speech and my writer's voice trails all the journeys I've made, all the spaces I've sojourned in, all the places I feel are home. I like that I'm difficult to place – Is she Indian? Is she British? Is she Mancunian? Is she Scottish? Is she a Shetlander? I am, of course, all these things and more. I like the fact that I can attune my ear to the local and the specific. That I can appreciate it, absorb it, re-form and re-create it and reflect it back with a fond kiss.
Writing in dialect is of course a political act too – it has the potential to challenge the mainstream. It demands to be heard as different but equal. It announces: "Read me as one of yours, not as other", "Read me as proud of being North of the Watford gap." Every language, every dialect form has its own value. Lallans poets, like Fergusson, Burns and MacDiarmid, made a conscious choice to write in dialect. They skilfully exploit the music inherent in it and place their language and their experiences of everyday Scottish life at the centre. Burns with his warm, poetic voice addresses the common man, entertains and educates him, uplifts and encourages him.
'A Choreographer's Cartography,' my latest poetry collection, includes poems written in Shetland dialect. 'Stories fae da Shoormal' are a series of poems inspired by photographs from the Shetland Archive of unknown people – ghost people in a wild landscape. I imagined their stories, their voices seeping through the sepia and collecting in me. Their tales emerged in a tongue that echoed the terrain. Shetland dialect is rich with what linguist Gunnel Melcher refers to as 'emotive adjectives' – words, often Scandanavian or Norn in origin, that are endearing and create detailed images. I love that – the fact that dialect fits the place perfectly. This and the images that the Shetland dialect evokes, the lyricism of its sound, is a rich source for the making of poems. Poems that ask to be read aloud. Burns and other dialect poets have taught us the pleasures of dialect poetry: how reading or singing the poems out aloud brings with it enjoyment and satisfaction in the beauty of a well-constructed verse. Dialect is a music, dialect is a poem, dialect is a statement. It is rarely mainstream. It takes work to interpret – the dialect poet is asking the reader to engage and to listen keenly to an intimate voice.
The legacy of Burns continues in the work of Scottish dialect poets today. There is wonderful poetry being produced in Scottish dialects. Shetland in particular has a flourishing dialect scene. Shetland poet, Magnus Williamson's recent poems communicate his love for dialect alongside a love for the sentiment of the great Chinese poets. Williamson says that he chooses dialect "because I feel at home in it . . . [and because of] – how it embodies a place." I imagine these are the very same reasons why Burns chose dialect.
Dialect poetry has the potential to compact emotion, place and time and capture the way language develops as communities change. The tongue can be a photograph. The spoken word is home. All of this and more is why I choose dialect, why I subvert and re-create language, re-brand and renovate the local and traditional into something alive and current that plays in your mouth. Scotland today – dynamic, culturally rich, ever changing and full of possibility – what better way to capture the complexities of these transformations than through the detail and subtlety of dialect poetry?
(acknowledgements: Special thanks to Magnus Williamson)
