Oor Cultur

Just picked this up from the Scots Language Centre…

Yorkisland Arts and Heritage Association, in Northern Ireland, is calling for singers, instrumentalists, poets and story tellers under the age of 25 to perform through the medium of the Scots dialect of Ulster. Entrants can perform either solo or in a group of up to four. Entry to the competition, called Ulster-Scots Talent, is free and will provide winning performers the chance to perform in the media. The competition will take place during 28-31 August 2009 and those interested should contact yorkisland@hotmail.com

That’s a sign that I saw in the St Patrick’s Centre in Downpatrick at the weekend as part of their trilingual Irish/English/Ulster Scots signage policy.

The first thought that came to mind on seeing it was “isn’t that ridiculous looking?”. If I were a Welsh speaker on seeing an equivalent sign with Welsh in it I’m sure that their first thought would be more like “at last” but then Welsh is a whole lot more supported within Wales than Ulster Scots currently is in Northern Ireland.

My second thought was: well, yes it does look ridiculous, but you know it shouldn’t. The problem with Ulster Scots is that the vast majority of us only every heard it from our grannies, never learned to spell it and, until quite recently, didn’t even think of it as a separate language. So, whilst it may well look ridiculous to me at the moment that’s because I’ve really never had the chance to see it written and at last that is starting to change.

One big plus point that we have is that there are still native speakers of the language around so it’s “just” the matter of writing it all down that needs to be covered. That’ll not be easy but at least the prononciation will remain authentic rather than needing to be guessed as happens in the case of some languages that need to rebuild a pool of native speakers as would need to be done for Manx (the last native speaker died in 1974) or Cornish or for that matter. Although Cornish is now spoken as a native language by a small number of people they didn’t learn it from their parents as the last of the continuous line of native speakers died out in the 1700s.

Sure, it’ll take a while before we don’t look at a sign like that and think that it looks ridiculous but at least we’ve made a small start down that route. Perhaps yin day ah’ll nay ha a problem wi writin tha blog in it too.

No, and in fact Northern Ireland is the only place where you will hear people say that they are British when you ask their nationality. Everywhere else in the UK people will tend to say that their nationality is English, Scottish or Welsh despite the fact that none of those nationalities has existed for over 200 years.

However, you will find people in Northern Ireland who say they’re Irish as around 40% of the population is Irish. The rest are mainly made up of the descendants of the lowland Scots who returned to Ireland in the 1600s and they will say they’re British.
OK, so 60% of the population would say they’re British and the other 40% would say they’re Irish then? By and large that’s true these days but interestingly my granny and people of her generation (essentially those born prior to the 1930s) would have said that she was Irish. The difference is that she would have been saying it in the same sense that someone from Edinburgh would say they’re Scottish ie with the understanding that she was saying that whilst she was British, she happened to have been born in Ireland.

Now you might think that as the 1600s are quite a long time ago that there’d have been considerable intermarriage between the two sets of occupants and in most parts of the world where similar settlement took place that’s indeed what happened. However, in the case of Northern Ireland the returning Scots were almost entirely Protestant whilst those that were there already were almost entirely Catholic. Combine large independent settlements with religious rules making it difficult for intermarriage to occur and what happened in practice was that there was very little intermarriage so that even over 300 years later most people have ancestors that were exclusively from one side or the other.

Interestingly the emigrants going to America went in much the same proportion as the nationalities that now exist in Northern Ireland. Consequently, something of the order of 60% of those that would consider themselves “Irish Americans” are really “Ulster Scots Americans”. How can you tell which you are? Thanks to the lack of intermarriage it’s generally quite easy to do: if your ancestors came from Ireland but you have a Scottish surname then it’s almost certain that you are Ulster Scots descent since the Scots were generally concentrated in the province of Ulster.