Some dismiss Ulster- Scots as a dialect, but Stormont is spending more on it than on Irish
FROM THE comfortable vantage point of the red armchair in the corner, Sally Young’s lounge in Greyabbey, Co Down, looks unassumingly normal. There’s little to suggest that the living room, with its piano, tidy fireplace and family photographs, is in fact a living museum.
That’s until three voices start to fill the air. Sally and her friends Will McAvoy and Wullie Cromie, known locally as the twa Wullies, are soon in full flow, reminiscing about weans in hippins and complaining about the langblether.
The friends are used to receiving large audiences for their casual chats. In recent months, television crews from Dublin and France have filmed them and researchers have recorded their conversations for academic study.
The reason for all the attention is that Sally, Wullie and Will are Ulster-Scots speakers; rare living examples of a linguistic and cultural identity that’s going through a revival in the North and not without controversy.
“The way we talk is the way our folks have been talking for hundreds of years,” says Cromie, from nearby Newtownards.
“If I was to hold a conversation in standard English even for just 10 minutes, I would start stumbling for words.”
Situated midway down the Ards Peninsula, the thin strip of land that snakes its way along Belfast Lough and the Irish Sea from Bangor, Greyabbey is an Ulster-Scots heartland.
During the plantations of Ulster, the peninsula’s abundance of natural inlets made it a choice landing site for the mostly Protestant workers from the Scottish Lowlands who arrived to populate the land.
When the Scots-speaking migrants mixed with the locals, a unique tongue was formed. Centuries later, the population of this most easterly part of Co Down has retained its unique vernacular.
“You really can’t teach anyone to speak Ulster-Scots,” says Cromie. “Unless your ear is in tune with the language, you’ll never get it.”
Statistics vary on the number of Ulster-Scots speakers in the North today. A survey in 2005 found that just under 7 per cent of the population (about 113,000 people) claimed to speak it.
The Ulster-Scots Language Society claims that 100,000 people understand Ulster-Scots or use Ulster-Scots words every day.
Most native speakers of the hamely tongue, as Ulster-Scots is also known, live in Co Antrim, the Ards area of Co Down and eastern parts of Co Derry. There are an estimated 20,000 speakers in the Republic, concentrated in the Laggan area of Donegal and in Monaghan.
Apart from its idiosyncratic vocabulary (“wean” for child, “hippin” for nappy), the tone and rhythm of Ulster-Scots can provide difficulties for the untuned ear.
The guttural pronunciation, which is almost Germanic in its harshness, can be challenging, while most phrases tend to be decorated with a flurry of adjectives aimed haphazardly at nouns.
“Instead of a standard English phrase like ‘it’s a nice day’, we would say ‘it’s a brave nice day the day’,” explains Young. “Ulster-Scots is more descriptive. You can pack a whole lot into it.”
The three friends haven’t always been able to talk so freely. Their schoolteachers frowned upon the use of Ulster-Scots in the classroom and imposed standard English with rigour.
“In school they would have taken your head off for speaking Ulster-Scots,” says Young. “They thought it was uncouth and that you’d never get anywhere if you spoke it.
“You were made to feel like a second-class citizen.”
Today, the situation has reversed, with several primary schools in the North teaching classes in Ulster-Scots.
The turnaround is just one example of how after centuries beneath the cultural radar, Ulster-Scots is emerging as an emboldened identity in the North.
The development of Ulster-Scots is being overseen by Tha Boord o’ Ulster-Scotch (the Ulster-Scots Agency), a result of the Good Friday agreement, which, after lobbying from unionist politicians, granted Ulster-Scots “parity of esteem” with Irish.
The St Andrews Agreement of 2006 also requires the Northern Ireland Executive to “develop the Ulster-Scots language, heritage and culture” and in Brussels Ulster-Scots is recognised under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
For its supporters, the arrival of Ulster-Scots in the cultural mainstream has afforded long-overdue recognition to a language and way of life that was ignored and even scorned in the past.
Such arguments have fallen on sympathetic ears in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Edwin Poots, the DUP Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure, announced last month that his department will spend more on Ulster-Scots than on Irish over the next three years.
A £9.4 million (€11.9m) Ulster-Scots Academy, a university-level body for language development and research into Ulster-Scots, is also set to launch later this year.
Outside the classroom, BBC Northern Ireland has said it will increase its output of Ulster-Scots radio and television programmes.
BUT FOR THE sceptics, and there are many, Ulster-Scots’ status as a language is shaky at best. On a sliding scale of derision, Ulster-Scots is habitually dismissed as a dialect, a dressed-up Ballymena accent or a DIY language for Orangemen.
“For a lot of the most vehement critics of Ulster-Scots, the closest they get to rural Ulster is the car park at Marks and Spencer,” says Mark Thompson, chairman of the Ulster-Scots Agency. “If they were to go a bit further, they’d discover a whole world of heritage.”
Thompson, a graphic designer from Ballyhalbert in Co Down, has chaired the agency since 2005. He believes the organisation’s role is to put people back in touch with a forgotten past.
“The job of the Stormont government was to try to make everyone think they were British – more British than the English,” he says. “They deliberately left out Scotland. Identity in Northern Ireland has been bipolar – you were either British or Irish. The Scottish chapter in our history has never been truly explored.”
While most of the media coverage of Ulster-Scots concentrates on the language vs dialect debate, much of the Ulster-Scots Agency’s own work is carried out in other areas such as music, dance and literature. It’s a strategy that has received a lukewarm reception from some Ulster-Scots speakers.
“For us, the tongue is the thing that holds it together,” says Cromie. Indeed, native speakers such as Cromie have raised eyebrows at some of the linguistic inventions emanating from the agency’s sister body, the Ulster-Scots Language Society.
As a vernacular rooted in rural life and with a tendency for retrospection, Ulster-Scots lacks equivalents for certain modern words used in standard English. Cue the neologism langblether, meaning telephone (lang for long and blether for talk).
“Somebody decided to create these words that didn’t make sense,” says Cromie. “We had to tell them to stop making words up.”
On stage in the assembly hall of Limavady High School in Co Derry, the band “Ulster Scots” presents a different face of the cultural renaissance.
The seven-member band, heralded as one of the leading Ulster-Scots musical groups in the North, is in town to play the Danny Boy Festival.
The group’s set, played with four fiddles, two accordions, a snare drum and a guitar, includes O Flower of Scotland and Make your way to Stornoway.
The group’s lively performance soon has a room full of feet tapping in unison but at times, it’s hard to spot the “Ulster” in their Ulster-Scots repertoire. “We try to cater for everybody and offend nobody,” says Kenny Mitchell, the group’s chief accordionist.
Mitchell, from outside Ballymena, says he has noticed an increased appetite for Ulster-Scots music in recent years, but he’s quick to dismiss any political motivations for the upsurge in interest.
“People want to look back to where they came from,” he says. “But I think politicians are milking it. They’re using [Ulster-Scots] as a political football. That puts people off.”
Buoyed by the revival of Ulster-Scots in the North, the attention of the Ulster-Scots lobby is now turning to the Ulster-Scots diaspora in the United States. It is estimated that about 27 million Americans can trace their ancestry back to Ulster-Scots immigrants. Among these are descendants of some 250,000 Northern Presbyterians who crossed the Atlantic during the 18th century.
The recent success of a book published by US Senator James Webb, Born fighting: how the Scots-Irish shaped America, has sparked popular interest in emigration to the New World from Ulster and, according to Thompson, has presented Northern Ireland with a fresh crop of potential tourists.
“There’s a growing awareness in the US of Scots-Irish heritage,” says Thompson. “It’s a lucrative market and we need to make sure that we create the events that tourists are looking for.” Recent promotional campaigns from Ulster-Scots groups seem intent on capturing American interest.
The latest promotional literature stakes Ulster-Scots claims to iconic Americans such as Woodrow Wilson, Davy Crockett and Neil Armstrong.
The lofty ambitions of the Ulster-Scots movement are perhaps best captured in the motto of the Ulster-Scots Heritage Council: “Mined in Scotland, Forged in Ulster, Exported Worldwide”.
It signals the confidence of this revived, rural identity but the phrase also points unwittingly to the most frequent criticism levelled at Ulster-Scots. Mining, forging and exporting suggest a carefully-made product.
“We’re not doing this to manufacture a sense of identity,” says Thompson. “It’s about giving recognition to something that has been going on at a low level for centuries.”
Back in Greyabbey, Young and Cromie have lofty ambitions of their own. They’re currently translating the Bible into Ulster-Scots. After working about one day a week for the past year, they’ve finished the Gospel of Luke and have two chapters of Mark left to complete.
“People ask me, ‘who on Earth would want a Bible in Ulster-Scots?’” says Young.
“We’re doing this for ourselves,” answers Cromie. “We’re not trying to impress anyone.”