The Ulster-Scots Language Paradox

In which I wade in without concern for my own safety

The other week, the Northern Ireland Executive announced that it is “seeking to appoint a Commissioner for the Ulster Scots and the Ulster British Tradition”. Further news reports then clarified that applicants don’t need to be fluent in the language.

This is somewhat worrying, but the news reports did bring attention to a wee detail about Ulster-Scots in Northern Ireland.

The Scots Language and its varieties

Five years ago when I started my involvement in Scots, I didn’t have much a deep knowledge, I’d read Burns, and picked up the patter from living in Glasgow.

Initial research suggested that it wasn’t “standardised”, there were a handful of recognised regional varieties and an even broader range of regional accents. In putting together my three million word corpus of 21st century Scots writing, I classified texts into six dialects - Central, Doric, Orkney, Shetland , Southern / Borders and Ulster-Scots.

After five years, the proportions of texts and writers in the corpus are as follows:-

Central - 2,048,526 words (62.2%) - 326 writers
Doric - 664,759 words (20.2%) - 133 writers
Ulster - 218,860 words (6.6%) - 45 writers
Shetland - 168,284 words (5.1%) - 40 writers
Orkney - 99,255 words (3%) - 37 writers
Southern - 96,135 words (2.9%) - 17 writers

The 2022 Scottish census reported that 1.2 million people could write Scots, so the number above represent just a sample, they are those people lucky enough to have their work published.

In addition to compiling this corpus and tagging the texts, I’ve done heaps of analysis on it, including this piece that looked at how similar different writers to each other and how distinct the regional dialects really are.

The Two Ulster-Scots orthographies

From reading heaps of Scots writing, and Ulster-Scots writing, it appears there is a weird thing about Ulster-Scots.

If we collect together the writings of a dozen or so established Ulster-Scots writers - Angeline King, Charlie Gillen, Stephen Dornan, Roy Ferguson, Wilson Burgess, etc. we can see that they all use the same orthography, the way they spell common words are pretty similar.

The amount of variation in spellings between most Ulster-Scots writers is no different from the amount of variation we see between Scottish Scots writers - there’s no standardised spellings, but there are conventional spellings that are pretty similar to the Ulster Weaver poets of two hundred years ago, which in turn were very similar to Robert Burns.

However, Ulster-Scots writing is difficult to find. Novels and poetry gets published, sells a few hundred copies to people who are interested in such things and rarely touched the mainstream media.

Most of the Ulster-Scots writing that is seen by the mainstream media is in government documents - for example the Ulster-Scots Commissioner Candidate Information Booklet (as discussed by Slugger O’Toole here), the Ulster-Scots translation of the 2021 census (as discussed by Ian James Parsley here and on Reddit here).

The Ulster-Scots orthograph used in these documents is very different to that used by most Ulster-Scots writers, and it appears to be the work of a single person, in the Ulster-Scots Agency’s translation office.

Analysis

Lets call these two varieties of Ulster-Scots - Authentic (for that used by writers who put their names to their work) and Government (for that used by the Ulster-Scots Agency’s translation office).

In some respects its unfair to compare these two varieties, the sorts of words and the register of text used in a census or a government report is likely to be very different to a novel about lassies in Larne or poems about hillside or children’s books about potato farming.

But there are specific words that all registers ought to have in common. One that stands out to me is SAEN, used in the government documents to mean the same as SEEN in English.

At this point we have to accept that in Scottish Scots writing, about 40% to 50% of word spellings are shared with standard English. Scots and English are both descended from a shared ancestor and here in the 21st century the vast majority of Scots speakers and writers also speak and write English fluently. Shared spellings exist and make up this proportion on average when we look at hundreds of Scots writers.

If we look at frequency of the word SAEN in my corpus, we can see that it is only used in Ulster-Scots, by three writers (one of whom uses it to mean SOON)

Conversely if we look at the word SEEN in the corpus, we can see it is used by hundreds of writers in Scotland and sixteen of the Ulster-Scots writers. Arguably SEEN is the conventional spelling, and SAEN is just something weird.

The word OFFAICE occurs in Ulster-Scots government reports, used for OFFICE. We can see that Ian Crozier, head of the Ulster-Scots Agency is the only person to use this spelling in my corpus.

OFFICE on the other hand is widely used by many Scots writers.

ECTUAL is another weird spelling only used by Ian Crozier.

Whereas Scots writers tend to use ACTUAL

Whilst many words used in Government Ulster-Scots share spellings with Authentic Ulster-Scots, there is a sizable proportion that aren’t used by any other writer, and that’s weird.

We might hope that the staff of the translation office are experienced and well-read, fully literate in Ulster-Scots, with their own favourite writers and perhaps published collections of their own writing, prose and poetry, published in their own name. But no evidence of this exists. They are nameless people who write as if they were taking the piss.

Ian Crozier’s ability in the Ulster-Scots language

According to his LinkedIn page Ian Crozier has been the Chief Executive of the Ulster-Scots Agency for more than thirteen years.

In the coverage of the Ulster-Scots Commissioner job he admits to not being fluent in the language. And so we assume when the translation office churns out reports in his name, he can’t actually read it himself and just signs it off.

This perhaps explains why Ulster-Scots writing that comes out of the agency is such garbage. In the words of the old adage, there’s some asshole signing his name to stupid writing.

The Census

With my Scots language activism, I depend on the census results as being an accurate reflection of reality, the combined efforts of millions of people’s individual opinions and personal understandings of the terms, reports that in Scotland there are 2.5 million people who understand spoken Scots, 1.6 million who can read or speak it, and 1.2 million who consider themselves able to write it.

Some small proportion of these people might be lying, or misleading the census for their own reasons, but no more so than for any other census question.

Similarly, in the 2021 Northern Ireland census 190,613 people (10.38% of the population) reported they could understand spoken Ulster-Scots, 26,570 people (1.45% of the population) stated they can speak it, and 20,930 people (1.14% of the population) stated that they can write it.

These aren’t huge proportions of the population, but they are taxpayers and voters - they exist.

When the Ulster-Scots Agency or Northern Ireland Executive publish something written in Government Ulster-Scots, it is held up by opponents of the language as being garbage. Its difficult for supporters of the language to disagree because it is not like Authentic Ulster-Scots as used by normal speakers and writers, but those people don’t get promoted as much as government documents.

Libraries

Recently I’ve been wading through the library catalogue websites of regional Scottish public libraries, collating data about the numbers of Scots books they hold in stock.

Considering that 30% of the population speak Scots, the library stock of 0.06% is pitiful, its a clear demonstration of the language being oppressed, and Scots-speaking households own tax money being used to oppress it.

But at least on the library websites it is possible to search for Scots books.

“Scots” is listed as one of the many languages available to search on, it is treated as an entirely normal language, like “French”, “German”, “Urdu”.

Conversely on the Northern Ireland library service catalogue, “Ulster-Scots” is not listed as a normal language, although “Scots” is.

This isn’t to say that libraries in Northern Ireland don’t have any books written in Ulster Scots, merely that they are fatally difficult to search for.

Here we see that Wilson Burgess’s poetry collection “Ah Jist Wunner” is listed with the language code “uls”, its not possible to select this code from the language search option.

Despite the Ulster-Scots Agency being on the case for thirteen years or more, Ulster-Scots isn’t recognised by the Northern Ireland library service.

Conclusions and summary

The official Government Ulster-Scots orthography is written by a single person employed by the Ulster-Scots Agency and it looks nothing like the Authentic Ulster-Scots orthography used by the majority of Ulster-Scots writers.

The Ulster-Scots agency aren’t literate in Ulster-Scots enough to notice this.

Their neglect the language over the last thirteen years extends to not enabling Ulster-Scots to be recognised in the Northern Ireland library service.

The lack of requirement for the new Ulster-Scots Commissioner to be fluent in Ulster-Scots is a continuance of this neglect.

Post-script

In order to back up this article, I have put the Ulster-Scots Commissioner Candidate Information Booklet through a word frequency utility, and I’m working through validating every single word, examining which word spellings look dodgy and comparing those spellings with usage in my Corpus of 21st Century Scots.

Out of the top 100 most frequently used words in the information booklet, about 20 are weird spellings that aren’t used by substantial numbers of other Scots and Ulster-Scots writers.

Some of the word spellings are only showing up as being used by a single Ulster-Scots writer - Ian Crozier.

The common convention in politics is that named elected (or appointed) officials are treated as the authors of their various documents. If an MP submits a Bill or a statement, it is treated as if they wrote it themselves, even if it was an office intern or some lobbyist who wrote it.

So here we have the situation where Ian Crozier freely admits that he isn’t literate in Ulster-Scots, and yet he is the named author of pieces written in Ulster-Scots that use words that no other Ulster-Scots writer has ever used.

And these words and spellings are then held up as being typical Ulster-Scots writing, and ridiculed by opponents of the language.

The specific word-spellings in question are ECTUAL, INTHERVIEW, INTHEREST, OFFAICE, PENEL, AP, APT, MAIDE, QUHAT, SAEN.

There are probably more, but I’m going through this line by line - the results will probably be in a new Substack article at another time.