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Dictionary:
Scotch-I·rish (skŏch'ī'rĭsh) |
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Scotch-Irish, a term referring to a migrant group of Protestant settlers from Scotland to northern Ireland in the seventeenth century and their subsequent migration to the American colonies in the eighteenth century, is an Americanism, a term seldom heard in Ireland and the United Kingdom and seldom used by British historians. Although it was first used during the colonial period—alongside "Irish," "Ulster Irish," "Northern Irish," and "Irish Presbyterians"—to describe the Irish in America, it fell out of general use by the time of the early republic, only to be renewed after the mass migration of Irish Catholics to the United States (1846–1856) as a means of distinguishing Irish Americans in terms of religion, culture, and class.
From 1606 to the end of the seventeenth century, a large number of migrants, mostly from the lowlands of Scotland, settled in the province of Ulster, northern Ireland, where many of them became tenant farmers. Though the lands originated as a private venture for Scottish investors, James I placed them under royal authority, claiming the lands of the defeated Irish rebels for the crown in 1607 and backing the colonial scheme in a royal missive to the Scottish Privy Council in 1609. His aim was to pacify the Scottish borders, relieving the kingdom of "reivers" ("rustlers") and the dispossessed of the borderlands. What is more, he anticipated that the largely Presbyterian emigrants would provide a buffer zone against the Irish Catholics, to be God's bulldogs, as it were. His plan worked and the plantation flourished for much of the century. By 1620, as many as 50,000 lowland Scots had settled in the Ulster province, followed by another 50,000 by the beginning of the English civil wars (1640). Economic, religious, and political conditions in northern Ireland by the end of the century, however, brought the enterprise to a standstill, instigating yet another migration—this time to the New World.
The migration of the Scotch-Irish to the American colonies, sometimes called the "great migration" by American historians, took place approximately between the years 1717 and 1776 and was largely the result of high rents, low wages, and parliamentary regulation. Although small pockets of Scotch-Irish were already arriving in America during the seventeenth century, it was not until 1717, with the transplantation of 5,000 Ulstermen to Pennsylvania, that the "great migration" got underway, culminating in about 200,000 Scotch-Irishmen in America by the beginning of the Revolution. Most of them entered the colonies by way of Philadelphia and settled in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania. Others moved to the backcountry of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, where they built a buffer zone against the French and Indians as far north as western Pennsylvania and parts of New York. Smaller pockets also settled in New England and along the eastern seaboard, but their numbers were dwarfed by the migration en masse to the backcountry, where the Scotch-Irish became the dominant group and the vanguard of the frontier movement in the nineteenth century.
Culturally, the Scotch-Irish were known as independent frontiersmen who carried a rifle in one hand and the Bible in the other. As the councilman of Pittsburgh, Robert Garland, summarized their coming to America, "They were pioneers, frontiersmen, these Scotch-Irish: their general equipment consisted of a rifle, the Bible, and the Psalms of David." Most were Presbyterians, but some converted to other noncomformist religions, like Methodism and Baptism, and sided with the new side revival movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Presbyterians, the Scotch-Irish, though not with the same intensity as that of their puritan neighbors, promoted literacy and higher education—literacy, that is, in the sense of allowing one to read the scriptures, and higher education in the sense of supplying an educated ministry. Besides the dissenting academies, which were usually built in the back parts of America, the Scotch-Irish were involved in the founding of the colleges of New Jersey (now Princeton), Dickinson, Allegheny, and Hampden-Sydney, and the universities of Delaware, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina. Their support of literacy and education, however, had its limits. As God's frontiersmen, they applauded virility and physical strength more profusely. "Honor in this society," as one historian described it, "meant a pride of manhood in masculine courage, physical strength, and warrior virtue" (Fischer, p. 690). Considering the long history of warfare in the borderlands of Scotland and Ireland, physical strength and manly courage were not simply a matter of honor, but a means of survival, which the Scotch-Irish transplanted to the borderlands of America during the colonial period and to the conquest of the West in the nineteenth century.
The significance of the Scotch-Irish in North America might be summarized by their numbers at the end of the "great migration." Comprising no less than 10 to 15 percent of the population in the United States by 1776, they became ardent supporters of the American Revolution and were the backbone of Washington's army. Perhaps their fierce independence and family histories of parliamentary regulation between the years 1665 and 1680—as well as the Woolens Act of 1699 and the religious test of 1704—heightened their anti-British sentiment. Whatever the case, the Scotch-Irish were ardent supporters of the revolutionary cause from the very beginning. As the historian George Bancroft summarized their support in the early years of the war, "the first voice publicly raised in America to dissolve all connection with Great Britain came, not from the Puritans of New England, nor from the Dutch of New York, nor from the cavaliers from Virginia, but from the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians."
Notable Americans of Scotch-Irish descent include the composer Stephen C. Foster, the financier and statesman Andrew W. Mellon, the frontiersman Davy Crockett, the inventors Robert Fulton, Samuel Morse, and Cyrus McCormack, and the writers Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Of the U.S. presidents, those who can claim some sort of Scotch-Irish lineage are James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. That is to say, about 47 percent of U.S. presidents were of Scotch-Irish descent, and of 216 years of the presidency, 113 of those years were occupied by a president of Scotch-Irish descent.
Bibliography
Bailyn, Bernard. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. New York: Knopf, 1986.
———. Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1986.
Chepesiuk, Ronald. The Scotch-Irish: From the North of Ireland to the Making of America. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000.
Fischer, David H. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Garland, Robert. "The Scotch Irish in Western Pennsylvania," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 6 (1923): 65–105.
Glasgow, Maude. The Scotch-Irish in Northern Ireland and in the American Colonies. New York: Putnam, 1936.
Green, E. R. R., ed. Essays in Scotch-Irish History. London: Rout-ledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.
Jackson, Carlton. A Social History of the Scotch-Irish. Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1993.
Leyburn, James G. The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962.
Montgomery, Eric. The Scotch-Irish in America's History. Belfast: Ulster-Scot Historical Society, 1965.
| Wikipedia: Ulster Scots |
| Ulster Scots | ||
|---|---|---|
| Scotch | ||
| Spoken in | Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland | |
| Total speakers | Estimates range from 35,000 in Northern Ireland,[1] to a total of 100,000 including the Republic of Ireland.[2] | |
| Language family | Indo-European | |
| Writing system | Latin alphabet | |
| Official status | ||
| Official language in | None | |
| Regulated by | None: the Ulster-Scots Agency promotes usage. | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | sco | |
| ISO 639-3 | sco | |
Ulster Scots (or Ullans, a recent neologism merging "Ulster" and "Lallans"[3]) generally refers to the dialects of Scots[4][5] spoken in parts of Ulster.[6] Some definitions of Ulster Scots may also include Standard English spoken with an Ulster Scots accent[7][8] – where lexical items have been re-allocated to the phoneme classes that are nearest to the equivalent standard classes[9] – a situation equivalent to that of Lowland Scots and Scottish Standard English.[10] Ulster Scots has also been influenced by, and has itself influenced, Mid Ulster English. As a result of the competing influences of English and Scots source dialects, varieties can be characterised as 'more English' or 'more Scots'.[11]
Contents |
While once referred to as Scotch-Irish by several researchers, that has now been superseded by the term Ulster Scots[12]. Native Speakers usually refer to their vernacular as 'Scotch'[13] or the 'hamely tongue'[14]. Since the 1980s it has also been called 'Ullans', a portmanteau neologism popularized by the physician, amateur historian and politician Dr Ian Adamson[15], merging Ulster and Lallans - the Scots for Lowlands[16]- but also an acronym for "Ulster-Scots language in literature and native speech".[17] Occasionally the term Hiberno-Scots is used[18], although it is usually used for the Ethnic group[19] rather than the vernacular.
During the middle of the 20th century, the linguist R. J. Gregg established the geographical boundaries of Ulster's Scots-speaking areas based on information gathered from native speakers[20].
Ulster Scots is spoken in east Antrim, north Down, north-west County Londonderry, the Laggan area of Donegal, and also in the fishing villages of the Mourne coast.[21]
The 1999 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey found that 2% of Northern Ireland residents claimed to speak Ulster Scots, which would mean a total speech community of approximately 30,000 in the territory.[22] Other estimates range from 35,000 in Northern Ireland,[1] to an "optimistic" total of 100,000 including the Republic of Ireland.[2] Speaking at a seminar on 9 September 2004, Ian Sloan of the Northern Ireland Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL) accepted that the 1999 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey "did not significantly indicate that unionists or nationalists were relatively any more or less likely to speak Ulster Scots, although in absolute terms there were more unionists who spoke Ulster Scots than nationalists".
Scots, mainly Gaelic-speaking, had been settling in Ulster since the 15th century, but large numbers of Scots-speaking Lowlanders, some 200,000, arrived during the 17th century following the 1610 Plantation, with the peak reached during the 1690s.[23] In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one.[24]
Literature from shortly before the end of the unselfconscious tradition at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is almost identical with contemporary writing from Scotland.[25] W G Lyttle, writing in Paddy McQuillan's Trip Tae Glesco, uses the typically Scots forms kent and begood, now replaced in Ulster by the more mainstream Anglic forms knew, knowed or knawed and begun. Many of the modest contemporary differences between Scots as spoken in Scotland and Ulster may be due to dialect levelling and influence from Mid Ulster English brought about through relatively recent demographic change rather than direct contact with Irish, retention of older features or separate development.
Scots in Ulster has been influenced by contact with Mid Ulster English, Hiberno-English and Irish; the relationship has been two-way, with for example craic being a late 20th century gaelicisation. Mid Ulster English, the dialect of most people in Ulster, including those in the two main cities of Belfast and Derry, represents a cross-over area between Ulster Scots and Hiberno-English; it is currently encroaching on the Ulster Scots area, especially in the Belfast commuter belt, and may eventually consume it.
Enthusiasts such as Philip Robinson, author of "Ulster-Scots: A Grammar of the Traditional Written and Spoken Language"[26], the Ulster-Scots Language Society[27] and supporters of an Ulster-Scots Academy[28] are of the opinion that Ulster Scots is a language in its own right. That position has been criticised by the Ulster-Scots Agency, a BBC report stating: "[The Agency] accused the academy of wrongly promoting Ulster-Scots as a language distinct from Scots."[29]. A position reflected in many of the Academic responses to the "Public Consultation on Proposals for an Ulster-Scots Academy"[30] Aodán Mac Póilin has written that "The case for Ulster-Scots being a distinct language, made at a time when the status of Scots itself was insecure, is so bizarre that it is unlikely to have been a linguistic argument."[31]
Among academic linguists Ulster Scots, along with other varieties of Scots, is treated as a dialect of English, for example Raymond Hickey[32], or by others as a variety of the Scots language, for example Dr. Caroline Macafee, who writes "Ulster Scots is [...] clearly a dialect of Central Scots."[33] And "Ulster Scots is one dialect of Lowland Scots, now officially regarded as a language by the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages."[34]. The Northern Ireland Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure considers Ulster Scots to be "the local variety of the Scots language."[35] Using the criteria on Ausbau languages developed by the German linguist Heinz Kloss, Ulster Scots could qualify only as a Spielart or 'national dialect' of Scots (cf. British and American English), since it does not have the Mindestabstand, or 'minimum divergence' necessary to achieve language status through standardisation and codification. Of the four peripheral varieties of Scots - the others being Insular, Northern and Southern Scots - Ulster Scots is the only one whose traditional written form is commonly indistinguishable from the main Central Scots variety.[36]
Ulster Scots is defined in an Agreement between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of Ireland establishing implementation bodies done at Dublin on the 8th day of March 1999 in the following terms:
"Ullans" is to be understood as the variety of the Scots language traditionally found in parts of Northern Ireland and Donegal.
The North/South Co-operation (Implementation Bodies) Northern Ireland Order 1999,[37] which gave effect to the implementation bodies incorporated the text of the agreement in its Schedule 1.
The declaration made by the United Kingdom Government regarding the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages reads as follows:[38]
The United Kingdom declares, in accordance with Article 2, paragraph 1 of the Charter that it recognises that Scots and Ulster Scots meet the Charter's definition of a regional or minority language for the purposes of Part II of the Charter.
The definition from the North/South Co-operation (Implementation Bodies) Northern Ireland Order 1999 above was used in the 1 July 2005 Second Periodical Report by the United Kingdom to the Secretary General of the Council of Europe outlining how the UK meets its obligations under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.[39]
The Good Friday Agreement (which does not refer to Ulster Scots as a "language") also recognises Ulster Scots as "part of the cultural wealth of the island of Ireland", and the Implementation Agreement established the cross-border Ulster-Scots Agency (Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch). The legislative remit laid down for the agency by the North/South Co-operation (Implementation Bodies) Northern Ireland Order 1999 is: "the promotion of greater awareness and the use of Ullans and of Ulster-Scots cultural issues, both within Northern Ireland and throughout the island". The agency has adopted a mission statement: to promote the study, conservation, development and use of Ulster Scots as a living language; to encourage and develop the full range of its attendant culture; and to promote an understanding of the history of the Ulster-Scots people.
The Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) Act 2006[40] amended the Northern Ireland Act 1998 to insert a section (28D) entitled Strategies relating to Irish language and Ulster Scots language etc which inter alia laid on the Executive Committee a duty to "adopt a strategy setting out how it proposes to enhance and develop the Ulster Scots language, heritage and culture." This reflects the wording used in the St Andrews Agreement to refer to the enhancement and development of "the Ulster Scots language, heritage and culture"[41]
The earliest identified writing in Scots in Ulster dates from 1571: a letter from Agnes Campbell of County Tyrone to Elizabeth I on behalf of Turlough O'Neil, her husband. Although documents dating from the Plantation period show conservative Scots features, English forms started to predominate from the 1620s as Scots declined as a written medium.[42]
In Ulster Scots-speaking areas there was traditionally a considerable demand for the work of Scottish poets, often in locally printed editions. Alexander Montgomerie's The Cherrie and the Slae in 1700, shortly over a decade later an edition of poems by Sir David Lindsay, nine printings of Allan Ramsay's The Gentle shepherd between 1743 and 1793, and an edition of Robert Burns' poetry in 1787, the same year as the Edinburgh edition, followed by reprints in 1789, 1793 and 1800. Among other Scottish poets published in Ulster were James Hogg and Robert Tannahill.
This was complemented by Ulster rhyming weaver poetry, of which, some 60 to 70 volumes were published between 1750 and 1850, the peak being in the decades 1810 to 1840, although the first printed poetry (in the Habbie stanza form) by an Ulster Scots writer was published in a broadsheet in Strabane in 1735.[43] These weaver poets looked to Scotland for their cultural and literary models and were not simple imitators but clearly inheritors of the same literary tradition following the same poetic and orthographic practices; it is not always immediately possible to distinguish traditional Scots writing from Scotland and Ulster. Among the rhyming weavers were James Campbell (1758-1818), James Orr (1770-1816), Thomas Beggs (1749-1847), David Herbison (1800-1880), Hugh Porter (1780-1839) and Andrew McKenzie (1780-1839).
Scots was also used in the narrative by Ulster novelists such as W. G. Lyttle (1844-1896). Scots regularly appeared in Ulster newspaper columns, especially in Antrim and Down, in the form of pseudonymous social commentary employing a folksy first-person style.[42]
The poet Seamus Heaney indicates the importance of Ulster Scots to his own writing in his poem 'A Birl for Burns':
:From the start, Burns’ birl and rhythm,
- That tongue the Ulster Scots brought wi’ them
- And stick to still in County Antrim
- Was in my ear.
- From east of Bann it westered in
- On the Derry air.
- My neighbours toved and bummed and blowed,
- They happed themselves until it thowed,
- By slaps and stiles they thrawed and tholed
- And snedded thrissles,
- And when the rigs were braked and hoed
- They’d wet their whistles....
In 1992 the Ulster-Scots Language Society was formed for the protection and promotion of Ulster Scots, which some of its members viewed as a language in its own right, encouraging use in speech, writing and in all areas of life.
Within the terms of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages the British Government is obliged, among other things, to:
The Ulster-Scots Agency, funded by DCAL in conjunction with the Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, is responsible for promotion of greater awareness and use of Ullans and of Ulster-Scots cultural issues, both within Northern Ireland and throughout the island. The agency was established as a result of the Belfast Agreement of 1998.
In 2001 the Institute of Ulster Scots Studies was established at the University of Ulster[45]
An Ulster Scots Academy has been planned with the aim of conserving, developing, and teaching the language of Ulster-Scots in association with native speakers to the highest academic standards.[28].
By the early part of the 20th century the literary tradition was almost extinct.[46] Much revivalist Ulster Scots appearing in official translations has little in common with traditional Scots orthographic practices as described in Grant and Dixon’s 1921 Manual of Modern Scots, instead they represent attempts to develop Ulster Scots as an autonomous written variety whose “common denominator is to be as different to English, and occasionally Scots, as possible”. This hotchpotch of obsolete words, neologisms, redundant 16th and 17th century spelling conventions and “erratic spelling which sometimes reflects everyday Ulster Scots speech rather than the conventions of either modern or historic Scots”. The resulting pastiche “is also often incomprehensible to the native speaker.”[47]. In 2000 Dr John Kirk described the "net effect" of that "amalgam of traditional, surviving, revived, changed, and invented features" as "artificial dialect", further adding "It is certainly not a written version of the vestigial spoken dialect of rural county Antrim, as its activists frequently urge, perpetrating the fallacy that it’s wor ain leid. (Besides, the dialect revivalists claim not to be native speakers of the dialect themselves!). The colloquialness of this new dialect is deceptive for it is neither spoken nor innate. Traditional dialect speakers find it counter–intuitive and false [...]" [48]. Later, in 2005, Gavin Falconer questioned officialdom's complicity, writing: "The readiness of Northern Ireland officialdom to consign taxpayers’ money to a black hole of translations incomprehensible to ordinary users is worrying." [49]. Recently produced Education materials, have, on the other hand, been evaluated more positively.[50]
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| US History Encyclopedia. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ulster Scots". Read more |
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