Oor Cultur

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.

On the face of it, tha’s an easy one. But, of course, few things with Northern Ireland are every simple as many have found over the years.

Going back several centuries the Scots returning to Ireland (more on that in a later post) during the plantation period of the late 1600s would have mainly spoken Scots as that was the language of lowland Scotland where most of them came from at that time. Therefore the original language would simply have been Scots.

However, just as the colonisation of America brought many new words into the English language though interaction with the people then occupying those areas that were to become America, so too the interaction with the people living in Ireland also brought new words and phrases into the Scots language. So, for example, farl is only used in Ulster Scots in connection with soda farl (a local form of bread) whereas the word isn’t used much in Scotland these days and has a wider meaning when it is.

That said, I was able to carry on a conversation in Scots a few years ago with someone from Glasgow and neither of us noticed any difference in the language that we were speaking to each other. So, for day to day use of the language there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of difference.

Where there is a difference that is currently growing is in the elaboration of the language. This is mainly down to its use in, for example, the Scottish parliament, where clearly they’ve needed to extend the language in some areas to cope with the 21st century thus we have wabsite for website. At present, there is no organisation in Northern Ireland that would use the language to the same degree of sophistication thus new words are primarily coming from Scotland at the moment.

Does that mean that Ulster Scots will eventually become simply Scots once more? Although at present the visible developments are mainly in Scotland, there are a number of initiatives in Northern Ireland that are similar to those early steps taken in Scotland some years ago and we should, in time, see the language used in a wider range of contexts as it is in Scotland today. When that point is reached I suspect that we’ll see more of a balance in development of the language between Scotland and Northern Ireland just as there’s a balance in the development of English between America and the UK today.

Tha’s a guid question. ‘Twill be aboot tha Ulster Scots (ur Ulster Scotch?) cultur. But wa is tha? Sure isnae it just Inglish spelled badly?

Well, tha’s a guid question an yin we’ll be lookin at. Ye see the problem is tha befor a coupla years back there wasne any Ulster Scots writin at all. I learn’d it at me granny’s knee but didnae larn tae spell it so ah hope y’all excuse my goes at spellin it

But it’ll not all be in Ulster Scots because for one thing there’s only around 100,000 of us that could claim to speak it even a little. Yet, there are millions who could claim to BE Ulster Scots or at least of Ulster Scots descent. Most of those are, of course, Americans who think they are Irish American yet are actually Ulster Scots American.

On the spelling front, since my granny spoke it to me but didn’t teach me to spell it (after all, it wasn’t a written language until very recently) my words won’t always be spelled in the same way as another Ulster Scots speaker would. That’s because Ulster Scots is very much at the stage of codification cum standardisation which basically means that I can make it up as I go along. In practice I suspect I’ll also need to extend the language a little too so, for example, I’m currently counting “blog” as an Ulster Scots word.