Ulster-Scots writing in Irish newspapers 1800 to 1999
Exploring a little explored area of the written form
One of the common tropes in Twitter discussions about the Ulster-Scots variety of the the language, is that it was somehow invented by Unionists as part of the Good Friday Agreement negotiations in the 1990s. This trope is usually countered by invoking Robert Gregg’s academic study of Ulster-Scots speaking regions in starting the 1930s.
There has also been discussions about the 1911 census where a number of respondents in areas that today are associated with Ulster-Scots speaking, had written in they spoke “Irish”, only to have it crossed out and corrected to “English” by the census administrators, which suggests some kind of vagueness and uncertainty about the language which could be explained by the presence of Ulster-Scots.
Anyhoo, a few weeks ago I paid for a month-long subscription to the British Newspaper Archive, if you search for distinctly Scots words like “aiblins” or “wadna” and set the filters to only newspapers in Scotland, it brings up thousands of articles written in Scots, many of which are poetry which I can harvest for my Modern Scots poetry corpus.
However, one time I was having an explore and forgot to set the Scotland filter and the search came up with literally hundreds of newspaper articles from Ireland containing distinctly Scots words.
The timescale for these articles corresponds with a similar bloom of Scots newspaper writing in Scotland, 1800s to 1950s
We might note the sudden drop-off of Scots terms in the 1920s. I’m afraid I don’t know enough about Irish history or culture about what happened in that time period that could explain the linguistic change.
I had a go at searching for Scots / English word pairs which might give a clue about the relative proportions of Scots writing to English writing and how this changes over time.
If we assume that the word BAITH is used in Ulster-Scots writing with the same frequency as the word BOTH is used in English writing. The two words have the following frequencies between the years 1800 and 2000 in Irish newspapers
BAITH - 3,926 occurrences
BOTH - 9,016,201 occurrences
On average over the entire time period BOTH is 2,300 times more common than BAITH. However if we look at the period from 1930 onwards BOTH is 11,200 times more common, before 1930 BOTH is only 1,740 time more common.
We can plot this as a graph, which clearly shows the death of the spelling BAITH as used in Ulster-Scots writing in Irish newspapers in the 1920s.
We can verify this finding by checking other Scots / English word pairs - MAIST /MOST, ALANG / ALONG, MAIR / MORE, OORSELS / OURSELVES and AIBLINS / MAYBE. They generally show the same pattern, usage of around one in a thousand up until the 1920s, then falling off to less one in 10,000 after 1930.
By examining each article we can verify whether its a typo, OCR error or an actual in context use of Ulster-Scots.
Here we can see that the word WADNA is occurring in the dialog of some kind of short story.
The range of newspapers that show up in the search results is surprising. It could be interpreted as a list of the places where the language that we would now describe as Ulster-Scots was spoken and understood in each time period.
Taking WADNA as the search word, during the decade 1890 to 1899 it featured more than once in the following Irish newspapers:-
Ballymena Observer (28 occurrences)
Ballymena Weekly Telegraph (4 occurrences)
Ballymony Free Press (8 occurrences)
Belfast News-Letter (7)
Belfast Weekly Telegraph (3)
Bray and South Dublin Herald (3)
Carrickfergus Advertiser (4)
Coleraine Chronicle (9)
Cork Constitution (2)
Cork Daily Herald (2)
Derry Journal (2)
Dublin Daily Express (5)
Dublin Evening Mail (2)
Irelands Saturday Night (3)
Irish Emerald (8)
Irish Independent (2)
Irish News and Belfast Morning News (4)
Irish times (10)
Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner (3)
Kerry Reporter (2)
Kilrish Herald and Kilkee Gazette (3)
Larne Reporter and Northern Counties Advertiser (3)
Larne Times (2)
Lurgan Mail (2)
Lurgan Times (2)
Newry Reporter (3)
Newry Telegraph (5)
North Down Herald (2)
Northern Constitution (3)
Northern Whig (3)
Portadown News (3)
Tyrone Constitution (2)
Tyrone Courier (3)
Ulster Echo (12)
Ulster Gazette (2)
Waterford Chronicle (2)
Weekly Irish Times (5)
Witness (Belfast) (5)
A more thorough inspection reveals that quite a large proportion of the results from searching for Scots words are just OCR errors, perhaps as much as 50%. This still leaves a substantial amount of Scots text printed in Irish newspapers amongst English text.
If at some point in the next few years a more authoritative corpus of Scots writing is put together, the British Newspaper Archive of Irish newspapers could be plundered for a few hundred thousand words of out of copyright text, tied to a precise time and region.