0.2 The history of Ulster-Scots: background, origins and development

For 1000 years, almost since the watershed between the prehistoric and historic eras, Germanic, Celtic and Romance languages have interfaced around the land fringe of the Irish Sea Basin. Ulster-Scots is one of the direct descendants of the west Germanic element as far as north-east Ireland is concerned.

The earliest uses of west and north Germanic languages among the people of east Ulster are obscure. At the end of the prehistoric period, during the 4^th and 5^th centuries, the inhabitants of east Ulster (the Ulaid) had been a linguistic and ethnic confederacy, but were wholly Gaelic speaking by the 7^th century. Some late 19^th century historians asserted that Frisians had settled not only on the east coast of Scotland in the 4^th and 5^th centuries (the firth of Forth was known as the ‘Frisian Sea’), but that they has also travelled around the north of Scotland and established settlements near Dumfries (supposedly the ‘Fort of the Frisians’) in south west Scotland. However, this interpretation is now rejected by Celtic scholars, and along with it the assumption that they had settled at the same time on the Co Down coast (for example at Ballyferris). There is some evidence that the Anglian and Northumbrian (Old English or ‘Anglo-Saxon’) Early Christian settlements of the 9^th and 10^th centuries around Whithorn in south-west Scotland were in contact with the Ulaid, but we cannot be sure of any significant or lasting effect.

The earliest conclusive evidence for the extensive use of forms of a Germanic language by people living in East Ulster comes during the period following the Viking raids of the 8^th century. During the period between 850 and 1200 AD an extensive body of personal name, place name, archaeological and documentary evidence confirms an Old Norse linguistic presence. Of course, this Germanic influence interfaced with Gaelic (and probably intermixed with it). However, a tenuous Germanic linguistic presence remained in parts of east Ulster up to the time of the Norman settlements of the Middle Ages, when influences from Latin, Norman-French and northern Middle English (including Older Scots) were introduced.

The end of the 14^th century witnessed a late-medieval Gaelicisation of the ruling class, and the re-establishment of Gaelic as the vernacular tongue in many parts of east Ulster. Throughout this period, however, the local forms of Middle English continued to be the vernacular in reduced areas of south-east Antrim and east Down. So it is that Ulster-Scots in east Ulster may trace some of its earliest Germanic linguistic precedents to Old Norse in the 8^th and 10^th centuries, rather than to Old English or Anglian of the 6^th to 7^th centuries, as is the case with Lallans in Scotland.

From the late 1500s, vanguard ‘plantations’ of immigrants from western Scotland to north Antrim and from northern England to Down, heralded an enormous movement of lowland Scots across east and north Ulster during the 17^th century. These settlers brought their language with them, and Ulster-Scots, as spoken today, is dominated by the Scots forms introduced during this Plantation period. At that time in Scotland, Scots was taught as a written language, quite distinct from English, and used for legal and business purposes. Consequently, a considerable body of Ulster-Scots documentary material survives from the early decades of the 1600s.

From about 1650 onwards in Ulster, Scots written forms were generally discarded in favour of English and the language survived only in spoken form until the literary revival of the late 18^th century. During this period and throughout the first decades of the 19^th century scores of Ulster-Scots vernacular poets – some of them preceding Robert Burns – published volumes of their works. This later written language, however, was ‘intentional’, or self conscious Scots, and differed considerably in its orthography from the unselfconscious Scots forms of the 17^th century.

The language survives today largely as a spoken tongue, widely perceived as ‘ignorant dialect’ even by many Ulster-Scots themselves. It remains the preserve of ‘performances’ in recitations, local drama, poetry, song, etc for many bilingual speakers and it is notoriously difficult for professionals and academics to elicit. Most Ulster-Scots today have some difficulty with the ‘braid Scotch’ literature of the 18^th century, partly because of the erosion of vocabulary, and partly because of loss of contact with the poetic tradition. However, most can manage easily the written dialogue of the ‘kail-yard’ novels which became a literary fashion from about 1850 and which continued until the 1950s.