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Ulster Scots: Realities and Myths
by John M Kirk
From: Ulster Folk Life Vol 44 1998. (Published by Ulster Folk & Transport Museum, Cultra)
Development of Scots in Ulster
The development of Scots in Ulster reflects this pattern of convergence. A schema of these developments is presented in Figure 1. The scant, predominantly epistolary evidence from Scottish settlers during the immediate pre-plantation period reflects the fully-fledged national language of the time. As Robinson (1989) and Montgomery (1991) have shown, seventeenth century writing shows even more rapid anglicisation in writing in Ulster than in Scotland, no doubt because Scots in Ulster did not have an official or widely-accepted codified or standardised written form. If the criterion of nation state was lacking in Scotland, it was even more lacking in Ulster. As it developed in Ulster from the seventeenth century onwards, Scots never enjoyed the reinforcement of political autonomy which had given mainland Scots its earlier status as a language; it never performed in Ulster any of the legal, legislative or other institutional, formal or performative functions it had in Scotland; Ulster Scots has always co-existed with other varieties of English, including that variety derived in no small measure from Irish (now usually referred to as Hiberno-English) in a linguistic confluence which cannot be categorised in general as anything other than 'English'. As Montgomery and Gregg observe (1997: 569) 'the 'core' Ulster Scots speech territory has been mapped [see map 3 in the present article], but in certain social contexts and in towns Ulster Scots tends to give way to English today, the logical result of a process of status differentiation that began in the early seventeenth century'.
Whereas the Scots originally brought to Ulster has indeed developed over centuries of use and retention in the province (the development of Scots vowels and the retention of much Scots vocabulary are conspicuous features), these developments within Ulster Scots count as no more than differences within the overall English system - explainable through shared and contrasting social values which govern present-day linguistic change throughout these islands and beyond. They reflect in the province the relative predominance of Scottish speakers who have sought to establish vernacular linguae francae with other inhabitants of Ulster (particularly those of Irish or of English descent), so far as can be inferred from the demographic and other social records as well as from features in present-day speech. Nevertheless, as a dialect of Ulster, Scots has continued to be special, as evidenced by its corpus of nineteenth-century literature, its serious use for a while in mid-late eighteenth and nineteenth-century newspapers, its stylistic self-conscious and especially humorous uses continuing well into the twentieth century, its treatment in a recent dictionary by James Fenton (The Hamely Tongue: A Personal Record of Ulster Scots in Co. Antrim) and in a grammar by Philip Robinson (Ulster Scots: A Grammar of the Traditional Written and Spoken Language), both of which serve to confirm Ulster Scots as a rich and expressive dialect within English.
When Scots came to Ulster, its speakers must have been conscious of their
speech habits and considered them their own. Convergence and hybridisation
proceeded apace, the separate systems forming a single continuum, with the
result that the English spoken in Ulster today displays striking features
of Scots, throughout almost the entirety of the province, as shown by the
maps in the Appendix. At every level, Ulster Scots speech is not autonomous
from English - where there are differences, whether of form realisation,
system or, nowadays, very rarely structure, these are no more than of classic
dialectal status. As Montgomery and Gregg (1997: 546) observe, 'there is
today no absolute or altogether clear demarcation between Ulster Scots and
Ulster English in terms of linguistic structure and geography'. That different
social implications might be placed on different varieties and traditions
of this English dialect continuum throughout these islands does not alter
the fact that Ulster Scots is bound up with that continuum and subject to
all the influences characteristic of metropolitan English and shared, in
many instances, world-wide. Whatever special pleading might be made for
mainland Scots, its premises apply with much less force in Ulster. The choice
of Scots dialect within Scotland just as within Ulster serves to function
as a particular code or style of speaking within an overall contrastive
system, by which choice speakers then believe they are asserting or are
perceived to be asserting their sense of regional identity. |
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