An Introduction to Dis Quiet by Viveka Velupillai.

Dis Quiet, written by Bruce Eunson, tells the story of the unpublished diaries of Jose Fernandes from Lisbon. After his death the diaries were found and published. Samuel Laurence, a Shetland man, reads the English translation of the diaries and sets out to translate the diaries to his own language, the Shetland dialect, and to reset them to his own home. As the translation progresses the endeavour subtly shifts to giving Samuel Laurence’s journey its own voice. The musings of Jose Fernandes and Samuel Laurence, two men from different places and different times, whose worlds would on some levels have had very little, yet on other levels much, in common, and whose lives touched only by chance through the written word by one and the reading eye of the other, start to blend and interweave until they form a unique new tapestry, a new inseparable whole.

Samuel Laurence is played with great sensitivity by Bruce Eunson and Ria Moncrieff. The seamless transition from one to the other captures this fluidity of the voices in the film, from Portugal to Shetland, from one world set in one time to another world in another time, from Jose Fernandes to Samuel Laurence, even though we only hear the former’s voice through that of the latter’s.

The fact that the poetic amalgamation of voices and worlds is in this film represented in the Shetland dialect makes it a linguistically fascinating and appealing film on several levels. First of all, the Shetland dialect is a unique and complex language variety in its own right, and any piece of art in it or about it is an enrichment. Secondly, the history of the dialect itself represents a blend of worlds, where over the centuries cultures and their languages have met and interacted to form a new, unique identity with its own unique language variety. To me a language is the breath of its culture, an essential part of both an individual and collective self. In a world where languages are vanishing at an alarming rate – currently, the estimate is that on average one language goes extinct every ten days, and with it a host of cultural and collective memory – it is vital to give space to the pluralism that we still have. Finally, but in fact foremost, the Shetland dialect is quite simply an enchanting language to listen to and is the only language that can fully capture the soul of both the exquisite images and sense of place in this film. The use of English for the intertitles accentuates the symbiosis between these two languages in the bilingual society that Shetland is.

Dis Quiet is a hauntingly beautiful film. The music, composed by Loudon Bruce, is beautiful on its own. In the film it lifts the story, and together with the voices of the two poets and the images of Samuel Laurence’s Shetland, forges a new, unique whole.

About the author

Viveka Velupillai is an Honorary Professor at the Department of English, Justus Liebig University Giessen. Her areas of research include linguistic typology, contact languages, as well as historical linguistics. She is one of the project managers for the Database of Early Pidgin and Creole Texts (DEPiCT), and is currently also working on an apparent time study on the Shetland dialect.

In June 2016 Bruce Eunson discussed the language of Shetland and the film Dis Quiet at a lecture in Giessen. He has kindly allowed us to share his lecture notes below. Our thanks go to Bruce Eunson and Viveka Velupillai for help in creating this feature.