This paper analyzes how the dialect of Heaney’s hometown Derry and its landscape establish the roots of his poetic utterance. Although Heaney continued to expand the range of his poetic utterance and take new models for it, many of Heaney``s early poems are enlivened by a language as it is really used by people in his local region. Heaney himself has an active interest in the phonetic and linguistic study of Ulster dialects and the sound of the place-names. He has the consistent belief that the local words and speech rhythms of the place-names are closely related to the features of the landscape. The dialects and place-names in his early poems are not yet the subject of the poems. They are important because they give him a moment of sinking into the most primitive and forgotten of the common community, so they are fundamental to his attempts to find images and symbols adequate to his predicament. The vision which they have given Heaney while he grows up into a poet includes not only the natural features but the signs of human history within it.