The history of the English language starts with the settlement in Britain of Jutes, Saxons and Angles in the 5th and 6th centuries and these population groupings came from respectively Jutland, Schleswig and Halstein, although the Belgae before them may have been Germanic-speaking with Gallo-Brittonic/British Celtic overlords. The Jutes settled mainly in Kent, Southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, while Saxons occupied the rest of England south of the Thames as well as modern Middlesex and Essex. The Angles, who also settled in what is now modern Friesland in the Netherlands, eventually took the remainder of England as far north as the Firth of Forth, including the area of the future Edinburgh, and the Anglian speaking region developed into two speech groups.
To the north of the river, Northumbrian was spoken and to the south, Southumbrian or Mercian. There were thus four dialects, Northumbria, Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish. One result of the Norman Conquest of 1066 was the placing of all four old English dialects on a more or less equal level. The Old Northumbrian dialect became divided into Scots and Northern by the end of the 13th century. In its roots and origins Scots was closest perhaps to Frisian and thus is grouped today, together with Received Pronunciation or standard English, along with Frisian in the language grouping known as Coastal Germanic. This forms with the Dutch and German or land Germanic the group known as West Germanic. In fact, the Anglo-Saxon Boniface was so well understood in Friesland in 754 that it became dangerous for him to stay there. The Frisian heritage is also apparent in the name of Dumfries, which is thought to mean “The Fort of the Frisians.
It must be stated that Received Pronunciation English is not intrinsically superior to other varieties of English but has for purely historical reasons achieved more extensive usage than the others. This may have been fostered by the establishment of public schools such as Winchester, Eton, Harrow and Rugby and its use as the standard English in ancient universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, and Trinity College, Dublin. Irish pronunciation generally has been conservative and is clearer and more easily intelligible than many other dialects. Ulster English in fact preserves many older words than have since gone out of use in England. It has been stated that more of Shakespeare’s words are used at the present time in Armagh than in Warwickshire itself.
Overall there has been a widespread generalisation of Ulster English (Northern Hiberno-English) throughout Ulster including Belfast. The source of this Ulster language is a mixture of English dialects in the narrower sense and of Lallans or Scots. John Braidwood in his classical study Ulster and Elizabethan English has pointed out that the English contribution, historical and linguistic, should not be minimised. Brendan Adams (1977) delineated a border between Ulster English and the Southern speech as running between two parallel lines from Bundoran to Dundalk and from Sligo to Drogheda. As with Gaelic, south of a similar line dialects are quite homogeneous while north of it Scottish influences have led to more complex regional variations.
There remains however an area in which among the rural population an Ulster Scots language is still spoken. This may be indeed a purer form of Lallans than that spoken in Scotland itself. The language area begins at Whitehead and its borders run south-westwards, approximately a mile distant from the shoreline north of Glengormley down to Dundrod. The line then runs north to the east of Antrim and swings round north of Antrim town to the Long Mountain, progressing then to just south of Rasharkin and then swinging north-west across the Lower Bann nearer Kilrea to continue in a more or less straight line to the shores of Lough Foyle. On the other side of the Belfast Lough it begins at Groomsport running along the Holywood Hills through the Dundonald gap to Gilnahirk and south-westwards through Carryduff and Boardmills to gradually turn round to run eastwards to Strangford Lough, north of Killyleagh. It then commences again at the Saltwater Bridge north of Ardkeen in the Ards Peninsula and runs along this to Cloughey. As well as this large area in Northern Ireland there is the Laggan area of Donegal, the boundary of which begins a mile or two north of Muff and runs across to Lough Swilly then across the Fanad Peninsula through Carrowkeel, Milford, Termon amd round to the Foyle near Clonleigh.
From approximately 1770 onwards, this Ulster Scots, or as I term it Ulster Lallans or Ullans, was cultivated by local poets popularised by John Hewitt as the “Rhyming Weavers”, who flourished mainly in Mid Antrim, East Antrim and North Down. Educated in both Latin and Greek, they achieved a higher level of culture than any section of the peasantry in Western Europe. They were not merely writing an imitation of Robert Burns but belonged to a tradition which went back to Allen Ramsey and beyond in Scotland. The greatest period of their activity was roughly the century between 1770 and 1870 but the tradition continues even until today in Co. Antrim. Unfortunately the literature of the people has not been fully developed by the urban elite, although an Ulster Dialect Archive has been established at Cultra Manor, the headquarters of the Ulster Folk Museum.
Brendan Adams exemplified the two different types of Northern speech by reproducing a few lines of the well known poem by W.F.Marshall entitled Me and Me Da. Part of the original poem in the Ulster English Language spoken in Co. Tyrone is as follows:
I mind the day she went away,
I hid wan Struken hour,
An cursed the wasp from Cullentra
That made me da so sour.
But cryin cures no trouble,
To Bridget I went back
An faced hor for it that night week,
Beside hor own toarf-staack.
Transposed into the Ulster – Scots language of Co. Antrim this reads:
A mine the day she went awaa,
A hud yin stricken oor,
An cursed the wasp fae Cullentraa
Thaat made ma daa sae soor.
But craayin cures nae trabble,
Tae Bradget A went beck
An Faced harr for it that nicht week,
Beside harr ain turf-steck.
There are many parts of Ulster where people are still bilingual in two varieties of the English language. They use Ulster Scots (Ullans) while speaking among themselves and the approximation of the regional standard of Ulster English, in talking to strangers. (Adams, 1977). Neither Ulster Scots nor Ulster English are “foreign” since the original dialects were modified in the mouths of the local Gaelic speakers who acquired them and eventually, after a bilingual period, lost their native tongue. These modified dialects were then gradually adopted by the Scottish and English settlers themselves, since the Irish constituted the majority population.
The dialect of Belfast is a variety of Ulster English, so that the people of the Shankill Road speak English which is almost a literal translation of Gaelic. In rural areas Ulster Scots is learned through day by day conversation and communication by a process of natural bilingualism, but is then treated as an inferior dialect by the urban elite. R.J. Gregg included in Scotch-Irish Urban Speech in Ulster that local Scotch-Irish urban versions of modified standard English “are spoken nowadays not only by the townsfolk, but by educated country dwellers as well. For this very reason they are obviously destined to expand, for with uninterrupted recession of the rural dialects, the regional modified standard language is spreading out from the towns and rapidly encroaching upon the surrounding countryside.”
To be continued