Oor Cultur

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Culture, Language, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.