Authentic Ulster-Scots linguist Jim Fenton – a profile by Ian Malcolm

The language of the moss, with its tummocks and doags.  The language of the bleach green, with its pookins and stricks…that, for retired schoolmaster Jim Fenton, is Ulster-Scots.  It’s not the language of Big Mac and fries.  It’s not the language of CDs and bytes.  It’s not the language of boom and bust.

It’s the language of the family…the…fowk…the fields.

Back in 1995, when it was first published, Jim had no idea that The Hamley Tongue, his dictionary of Ulster-Scots, would become so popular that he’d soon be working on a second, expanded, edition.  The second edition was published last year.

It would be fair to say that Jim’s is one of the most respected voices in the world of Ulster-Scots and his collection of poetry, Thonner and Thon, has brought a new dimension of the language.

It all started around 40 years ago when Jim, who was reared in the townlands of Ballinaloob and Drumadarragh, between Dunloy and Loughgiel, in Co. Antrim realised that his father and mother were using words that he rarely used.

He began noting them down…and that’s how the The Hamely Tongue was born.  Now, Jim Fenton is busier than ever, discovering “new” words every day.

It’s like pushing a spade into the bog’ slicing through time to reveal layer after layer of linguistic history, each seam richer than the one before.  The moss could easily be a microcosm of Ulster-Scots itself.

“You had the flax crop and the heavy horse; you had the peat-cutting, all features of my growing up during and just after the war.  These skills, like hay-making, potato-planting and harvesting were all becoming far more mechanised,” he said.

“With the disappearance of the ‘old ways’, quite a lot of the language associated with them become redundant.”

Flax-growing and production, for example, had its own vocabulary but once the flaxen field and the scutchers disappeared, the words drained away through the lint-dam of history.  Yet some of the old words live on, albeit in a figurative form.

The moss – or peat bog – had a language of its own.

“In a peat bank there were little bits of fibre called cat, which we used to dry and smoke for cigarettes.  Sometimes you got a clump f roots and grasses which you’d see standing in a swamp: we called them tummocks,” said Jim.

“In the peat-cutting itself, you had a draining channel called a fit-ga.  If you put the spade straight into the bank, that was called breestin.  If you stood sideways to the bank, that was called standing, coming almost certainly from the Scots word stank, meaning dark, black pool.

“If you stood on top of the bank, cutting straight down, that was called untherfittin (under-footing) or, around Slemish, trinketin.”

Those words might have gone from everyday usage, but they live on in The Hamely Tongue.

Looking to the future, Jim recognises that, important though Ulster-Scots and Irish might be  in cultural terms, it is impossible to get by in the modern world with a “minority language” alone.

“Yes, have it; cherish it; enjoy it; read it and write it if you can.  But realise that it will not have the range, or the structure, to deal with the modern, hi-tech world.

“Ulster-Scots is, in its broadest sense, almost the sole language of a large number of people in Co. Antrim, whether you’re in Loughgiel or Armoy, Buckna or Aughafatten.  They’ll talk their own way,” he says.

“But if they go to school to talk to the principal, or to see the doctor, they’ll speak standard English.”

Over the centuries, say Jim, Ulster-Scots has borrowed from Irish and Irish has borrowed from Ulster-Scots.  It’s a two-way process that has produced something everyone can be proud of.

The “outside world”, however, is impatient with minority languages and to make a cultural stand is to impede progress.

Says Jim:  “The global village is becoming more and more a reality and it’s difficult for smaller languages to survive unless they are seen to be functional and useful.”

One of the difficulties, as Jim sees it, is that Ulster-Scots has rarely been written since the days of the weaver poets.

Jim, now in his early seventies, is clearly proud of his heritage.  His parents spoke “nothing but broad Ulster-Scots”.  Yet even in his childhood Ulster-Scots was something that operated at different levels, sliding to and fro along that scale from language to dialect.

“At Knockahollet School we had to speak English in the classroom.  But the moment we stepped out of that door we reverted immediately to the broad local tongue,” he says.

“My father was fairly well-known as a lay-preacher.  He could go in to preach, say in Buckna: standing outside the church before or after the service they’d be speaking broad Ulster-Scots but in the church he’d preach to them in standard English.

“Once the situation became in any way formal, standard English would take over.”

People moving from the country to work in the big towns, like Ballymena, for example, would even over-compensate to the point of “poshness”, for fear that their rural “broadness” might be laughed at.

Today, though, many understand that that once-embarrassing broadness equates to a richness of speech which carries with it a texture and depth that has long-been overlooked and neglected.

The outside world brings its own pressures, with population movement and the transformation of villages into towns diluting the local tongue with the unstoppable tide of standard English.

To re-create, restore or even extend the language is not what Jim Fenton is about: that must be left to others.  His mission is a simple one: to record and preserve, rather than polish and refine.

The rough-diamond beauty of a way of speech that has its own elegance and resonance will forever live on in Jim Fenton’s Hamely Tongue.