‘Disagreeably Scottish’? By Carol Baraniuk The writers preparing the Ordnance Survey Memoirs for County Antrim during the 1830s were unhindered by constraints of political correctness as their commentary on local speech characteristics reveals: ‘Their accent, idioms and phraseology are strictly and disagreeably Scottish, partaking only of the broad and coarse accent and dialect of the Southern counties of Scotland.’1 Such a judgement, of course, bears the hallmark of official writing in what was a period of imperial expansion and consolidation within Ireland and throughout the globe. A further, this time self-congratulatory, official evaluation made in the 1880s shows the desired end of such a process: ‘Owing to the spread of well-managed schools the Scotch accent and the dialect words are passing away’.2 As this article will demonstrate, however, officialdom may have been deluding itself with regard to the permanence of any ‘success’ achieved. Writers from within Ulster’s rural communities3 confirm the findings of government employees regarding their ‘Scotch’ character. The poet James Orr (1770-1816) affords the reader a glimpse of ordinary people grappling with issues such as decorum and register as they switch between their natural vernacular tongue and the English required in a formal setting. In his great poem The Irish Cottier’s Death and Burial, Orr records the arrival of the minister to attend a death-bed. The house is already full of the Cottier’s friends and neighbours who, in order to converse with the minister, attempt: To quat braid Scotch, a task that foils their art; For while they join his converse, vain though shy, They monie a lang learn’d word misca’ and misapply.4 The marginalisation, indeed stigmatisation, of the Scots vernacular evident in those quotations will be familiar to Scots speakers from whatever region, but in the late eighteenth century many among the Ulster population embraced the Scottish aspect of their identity with pride. Samuel Thomson, Orr’s friend and fellow poet, enthusiastically expressed his consciousness of hybridity: I love my native land no doubt, Attached to her through thick and thin, But though I’m Irish all without, I’m every item Scotch within.5 A dynamic, co-operative relationship between Ulster and Scotland has existed since prehistoric times, due in particular to the close proximity of the north-east of the Province and the Dumfries and Galloway region. Without doubt, however, the greatest influx of Scots settlers into Ulster occurred during the plantations (both private6 and government sponsored) of the seventeenth century. The Scots planters brought with them fiercely independent spirits and an appropriately robust, expressive language: the Central Scots of the western Lowlands. For the most part these were ‘economic migrants’, in search of land and greater prosperity. Later in the same century, however, their numbers were
14
the drouth
further swollen by asylum-seeking Covenanters, fleeing persecution under Charles II. By the mid-twentieth century, the Scots-speaking population was concentrated in four main ‘heartlands’ within the historic province of Ulster: east Donegal, north-east Derry; north-east Down and the Ards Peninsula, and most of county Antrim. By this time, as imperial certainties faded and regional voices asserted their right to be heard, the likely disappearance of ‘the Scotch accent and the dialect words’ began to be viewed as a matter of urgent concern, rather than a reason for quiet congratulation. Thus, the middle and later decades of the twentieth century saw detailed and significant research into Ulster speech and its origins. This is evident from the papers published in Ulster Dialects: An Introductory Symposium (1964), which recorded the findings of a generation of remarkable and influential scholars such as Brendan Adams, John Braidwood and Robert Gregg. These men had in common their meticulous approach to scholarship, respect for the locality they studied and their own close personal relationships with both region and language. Braidwood, originally from Renfrewshire and possessing an MA from Glasgow University, was, at the time of the symposium, Senior Lecturer in English Language at Queen’s University, Belfast. In a paper discussing the persistence of Elizabethan English in Ulster he notes the dominant nature of Scots within the Province: ‘It seems to be a fact that the Ulster English dialects have suffered more encroachment from Scots than the reverse.’7 It was Robert Gregg, however, a native of Larne and eventually Head of the Linguistics Department at the University of British Columbia, whose work focused very specifically on the development of Scots in Ulster. He reported on detailed research with native speakers that enabled him to identify and map those areas of Ulster where Scots language was employed at greatest density. His findings confirm Braidwood’s with regard to the influence of Scots on Ulster dialects in general: ‘The Lowland Scots dialects have […] been preserved in the areas of intensive Scottish settlement. That typically Scots lexical items (as distinct from the full-blown historicalphonological system) are found everywhere in Ulster reflects the fact that many small groups of Lowlanders pushed far beyond the limits of the homogeneously Scots-settled areas and in time assimilated to the surrounding […] speech, but not before bequeathing many expressive items to the vocabulary of their neighbours.’8 Gregg’s painstaking work identified linguistic variations occurring between localities within the Scots-speaking areas, particularly at the phonological and lexical levels. The language of these districts fell into two categories: ScotchIrish Urban speech, and Scotch-Irish rural dialects. Brendan Adams, Dialect Archivist of the Ulster Folk Museum who had been exploring the diversity of Ulster speech since the 1940s, uses the term Ulster-Scots for these speech types,