Episode 1 Languages of Ulster

The way we speak is who we are.

It tells us how we got to be where we are, what our history is,

what our culture is, where we're from.

This is a story of richness and heritage,

a celebration of the diversity of our speech.

The Concise Ulster Dictionary is a unique collection

that reveals who we are through how we talk.

It will be our guide

as we learn about those who have preserved our languages,

uncover the sources that have influenced how we speak today,

and celebrate those who turn words into art.

It's a bit like DNA.

You know, people like to have their DNA tested -

they probably have a good idea of what the main threads are,

but there might be some surprises, as well.

It's something that we should take a great delight in, a great pride in,

and seek to hang on to.

The Concise Ulster Dictionary is one of the books

I take off my book shelf most often.

It's one of those great volumes

that, if you're having a conversation

and you hear an unusual word, the odds are,

if it isn't Scots and it isn't English,

it's going to be an Ulster word, and you'll find it in the CUD.

Over 15,000 words are on these pages -

a significant collection,

providing an insight into how we speak in Ulster,

a sense of place, our relationship with the land and each other.

It is probably the most comprehensive record we have

of Ulster vernacular speech.

It draws from the three language groupings

that are present in Northern Ireland -

that is, Northern Hiberno-English, Ulster Scots,

and also, you get loan words from Irish.

So, there are not kind of hard and fast boundaries

between those three language groupings.

It tends to be fuzzy - but it's all the richer for that.

Published in 1996,

this dictionary was the next step of a journey

that had begun decades earlier.

In 1951, the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club

began a project for an Ulster dialect dictionary,

and this involved not only bringing together

previously published wordlists,

scattered wordlists from various parts of the province,

but collecting new words on an organised basis.

Its president, actor and author Richard Hayward,

along with his nephew Brendan Adams,

were particularly interested in collecting folklore and dialect.

They sent out questionnaires

that had originated with the linguistic survey of Scotland.

Schools, you know, young farmers -

all the people who might be expected to have a reasonable grounding

in Ulster dialect.

There was a linguistic survey of Scotland

that was going on in the 1950s.

There was a survey of English dialects

which was contemporary with that.

I think there was a feeling

of "last chance to see", as it were.

The world had changed so completely after the Second World War,

they were conscious of some of these old practices and old habits,

and with them, the old ways of thinking, were passing away,

and so they wanted to compile a record before it was too late -

and if they hadn't done that,

we might never know what many of these old words were.

This one in front of me is trying to elicit names

for the uncut top of a bog,

an earwig,

the words for toppling over,

what people say instead of "one",

and the thing into which you run the water to wash clothes or dishes.

One of them, here, in the letter E, is,

"Would you even yourself to that?"

It means, "Would you lower yourself?"

It's quite an insulting thing to say.

You also get the names for the last pig in a litter, say.

The jorry, who's the last wee runt, really, to be born,

and they were reckoned to be under the protection of, for instance,

St Anthony, who was the patron saint of swineherds,

so, it's all just part of the folklore surrounding the language.

In 1959, this collection was deposited

for the recently established Ulster Folk Museum.

Over the years, the Ulster Dialect Archive

continued to acquire additional wordlists and glossaries.

In 1989, the decision was taken

to combine all the information that had been gathered

and produce an Ulster dialect dictionary aimed at schoolchildren.

This seemed like a tremendous opportunity,

given the recognition that there were different linguistic sources

for Ulster dialect.

There was Lowland Scots,

particularly in the areas where Ulster Scots was still spoken,

there was Elizabethan -

or some people call it Elizabethan or Shakespearean English

in Mid Ulster and South Ulster,

and, of course, in the Gaeltacht areas

of Glens of Antrim, Sperrins, Donegal -

there were Irish influences, Irish Gaelic influences.

So, with those sort of three linguistic mixes in Ulster dialect,

this idea of education for mutual understanding

and presenting of these wordlists, which covered all of those aspects,

was seen as a great educational tool.

We used the Oxford English Dictionary as the arbiter.

If the Oxford said it was standard English,

then, in the space of a one-volume dictionary, it had to be excluded.

So, the dictionary isn't a picture of the whole of the language,

it's the whole of the language

that's in addition to standard English.

I think the illustrations were a definite plus.

Quite a bit of it's to do with rural craft, flora and fauna,

agricultural implements -

it's a wee bit difficult just explaining what bit you mean,

and, you know, we then had the opportunity,

because of these illustrations, to make it very clear.

One thing that I'd never seen,

and wouldn't have known what it was, was a breadstick, and you also...

That's what's called a calque, or a loan translation.

The word is madgie-aran in Irish,

and you also get madgie-aran in the dictionary,

and that's quite a simple wooden prop

for drying an oatcake in front of an open fire.

So, yeah, a picture paints a thousand words,

and - see what these things look like.

The joy of the dictionary, the Concise Ulster Dictionary,

is that anybody at any level,

whether it's at school or at home, you can look up a word -

now, there may be a lot of words in it you've never heard of or seen,

but the word that you're looking for,

you'll find it, and that's the joy of it.

"I'm livin' in Drumlister

"An' I'm gettin' very oul'

"I have to wear an Indian bag

"To save me from the coul'."

Here in Sixmilecross in County Tyrone,

they gather to celebrate the life of a local hero -

the Reverend WF Marshall.

This Presbyterian minister, playwright and broadcaster

is perhaps best known for his poetry.

What I liked about WF Marshall was his use of the local dialect.

The Reverend WF Marshall.

Who doesn't know the Reverend WF Marshall?

Well, you shouldn't be here if you don't -

but I was just thinking, you know, about the different things that...

WF Marshall probably means as much to people at Sixmilecross

as Robert Burns means to the people of Ayrshire.

Marshall's most famous work

pays tribute to the area of his formative years.

"The deil a man in this townlan'

"Wos claner raired nor me,

"But I'm livin' in Drumlister

"In clabber to the knee."

It sounds beautiful. You pick apart what's going on there -

what's "clabber"?

Dirt.

Where does that come from? That's an Irish word, clabber, OK?

-What's "deil"?

-The deil is the devil.

So, that the Scots pronunciation of the English devil, deil -

but it made its way into Ulster, as well, with the Scots settlers,

and it survived up until recently.

What about "claner raired"?

I mean, that's the sort of thing I heard growing up all the time -

we were raired, you know, about the farm in Tyrone.

Claner - why "claner", why not "cleaner"?

Well, these are pronunciations that go back to 17th-century English,

survived in English dialects into the 20th century,

almost gone from English, now, too.

So, you can see that WF Marshall was doing something really interesting.

He wasn't just writing poems,

he was telling us about life in Tyrone,

but he was also capturing the linguistic essence

of the Tyrone dialect.

He writes about the hills and about the valleys

and about the townlands and so on -

a real deep love of the countryside,

and, you know, for him, as I think it is for me, as well,

a deep connection between that love of the countryside

and a love of the way people speak in the countryside.

"The dialect is no longer begging at the back door,"

wrote Marshall in 1929 -

an appreciation that led him to compile his own collection of words.

He was working on the dictionary when he went to answer the door,

and his little Labrador pup took the opportunity, as doggies do,

of grabbing the manuscript for his dictionary

and giving it a jolly good guzzle, and...

..the story went around that Marshall had come back

to discover the dictionary in bits around his study floor

and had binned the lot.

In fact, the dictionary survived.

For many years, it has been held for safekeeping

at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum.

He hasn't just given the word and its meaning,

but he's got sources going right through from Shakespeare in 1592

to Paradise Lost, Milton's Paradise Lost in 1667.

If I can read this right, it says, "One whose drouth

"Yet scarce allay'd, still eyes the current stream."

I was aware that I'd never seen it before, though.

It's sort of a unique collection, isn't it?

It's fantastic, I feel privileged to look through them.

There's so much information, you'd need hours and hours of study

to get to grips with what's in them, you know?

So, it's an amazing resource

that thankfully survived the ravages of the dog.

It gives the real understanding of Marshall the linguist

behind the poetry, as well, you know?

It's not just a list of words. He's done a study, here.

He's showing how much knowledge he has

about the history of the language.

There's a nice word, "collogue".

It almost sounds like it might be an Irish word,

the long "ogue" at the end,

but it's not - it comes from colloquium.

"It means primarily to hold an intimate conversation...

"often with a sense of intrigue

"or something being planned or arranged," OK?

From the Latin, colloquium. You know? So, it's all in there.

And then he goes on,

and gives other evidence of the uses of the word and so on.

A really nice bit of information, there.

So, really what you've got here isn't just a dictionary -

or, at least, it's not a dictionary in the term of a quick list of words

with their meanings and origins,

he tells us about the words, how they're used,

how they fit into the linguistic system,

how they fit into Tyrone historically, and so on.

There are words in here I haven't...

Some of them I don't know, others I do know,

others I haven't heard in a long time, others that are still used.

You know, there's the word "cutty", for a girl, for example,

still used in Tyrone today.

Well, it's quite fascinating, really,

if you think about the work that went into this.

I mean, this is dense, page after page after page,

this man was clearly, through his life, fascinated by the dialect.

He made it his life's work, almost.

I mean, why did he do this? Because he loved it.

That's why he did it.

He wanted to record the stuff, he was surrounded by it,

he fell in love with the dialect,

he wanted to write down things that he'd heard,

and you can see that very plainly in this work.

Nearly 60 years after his death,

a new bust is unveiled to celebrate Marshall's legacy.

His connection with Sixmilecross as strong as ever.

A man who championed its people, its landscape, its dialect.

One of the important things that Marshall did

was he raised Tyrone dialect

from just being that thing that people didn't think too much of

to being something that people saw,

actually, you can write in this, you can express interesting things

and useful and meaningful things in this dialect.

Here A stan,

On the hoovin hairt o Antrim, luckin bak

A wee at thon far ither hills,

The dreamy, cloody hills o owl Scotia,

Owl foont

O iver-hantin echas, hard yit an clear

In word an sang, in fiel an hoose an pew:

A' that noo an lang wer ain.

I think if anybody wants to have an example,

either in spoken form or recorded form of a collection of words

or idioms, of the language, as well, Jim Fenton is unquestionably

the best proponent of that today for Ulster Scots.

Where Slaimish is, or Sliabh Mis, if you want its Irish name,

it's there, a landmark,

and I have always thought of it as very much, from my school days,

associating it with St Patrick, with all sorts of things, you know?

So, I think if I wanted a symbol, if I'm going to use that word,

for County Antrim countryside,

it would be Slaimish I would think of.

I was trying to portray the whole language.

I wanted something that would give the feel, the soul, of Ulster Scots,

and what it means to the people,

and that's the whole idea of my poetry,

is to get the feel of the land and my feel about the land,

and as a native of this land, to get that down on paper.

So, when I recite it or read it, or somebody else does,

I would hope that what I have experienced, they would experience.

Here A stan, bak luckin tae nearder hichts,

Tae this waitin lan aroon me,

Whar yince a hirdin weetchil stud loast

A wee atween dreams an sa,

Or dreamin sa,

Streetchin braid afore him, anither ree,

Anither flock braid-gethered, thranger far.

Whar nicht-wantherin Orr dreamed yit, for a'

The bitter wakkenin o ninety-echt:

This lan that cried tha dreamer bak,

for this is hame.

Fascinated by local words and speech,

Fenton set about collecting a personal record

of Ulster Scots in County Antrim.

It was a passion that would become the seminal work The Hamely Tongue.

He went across the county and he interviewed all of these people,

and asked them - he had a checklist of words,

and he added to them as he found out words from them.

So, he was able to include in The Hamely Tongue

words that were common throughout the whole area.

I wasn't setting out on a career as a poet or anything like that at all.

It was only later on I tried, in The Hamely Tongue,

not to write just a lexicon, a dictionary, or anything like that,

I wanted a full picture, a portrait, in all its richness

and variety, of Ulster Scots, and I only thought you could,

to get the essence of that, to get the soul of it,

you would do that in poetry as well as you could,

to the best of your ability,

which is why I started to write poetry then.

To understand his poetry, you really do need to use The Hamely Tongue.

I mean, even a fluent Ulster Scots Speaker would have difficulty

with the literature of Jim Fenton's poetry -

because it is literature,

and it has all of these levels of meaning and subtleties and so on,

and you have to be aware that a single word

can have different connotations and so on

to understand, fully, the literature.

When I was young, I wandered the bogs

that run from above Dunloy to Glarryford.

Eight miles, ten miles of bogland, odd break of fields in between.

At night-time I would sit there

and as the darkness gathered round me,

and the lights began to come on to the countryside

it transformed the world and transformed my feelings,

and eventually, out of that, came the poem.

Dailygan simply means daylight going.

Dusk, the end of the day.

My day, as well, that I'd had, that was coming to an end, you know,

it was all that.

Dailygan.

An noo the lichts ower Brochanor mak blak the brae behin;

The sallies, hoovin saft an grey,

come cloodin, getherin in;

The wattr, glancing ower its dark,

babs lippin, whusperin by; the boag's dark-sweelin, quait,

aroon the tummock whar a lie.

The peat's quait low, the week's saft licht

Mak blak the ootby noo; the prootas plowt;

the neeps' sweet steam cloods roon hir sweetin broo;

Bae qua an boag, ower queelrod wa, thon licht's a gleekin ee

Frae whar A come an whar A'll gae

but cannie stie or lee.

ARCHIVE RECORDING OF MAN SPEAKING IRISH

The voice of Brian Mac Amhlaoibh,

a native Irish speaker from County Antrim,

recounting the parable of the prodigal son.

HE SPEAKS IN IRISH

He was recorded in 1931

as part of a project to capture spoken Irish

across the island of Ireland.

Wilhelm Doegen was a German scholar.

He had made something of a name for himself,

particularly during the First World War,

recording languages from around the world.

He had a real passion for recording languages and dialects,

and he gained access to the POW camps

and he had an abundance of speakers from all over the world,

and the authorities here in Ireland

decided to invite him to make recordings of native Irish speakers.

WOMAN SPEAKS IN IRISH

Native Irish speakers from six counties in Ulster

were recorded by Doegen's assistant in Letterkenny

and at Queen's University in Belfast.

SHE SPEAKS IN IRISH

The importance of Doegen and his work in the early 1930s

is really immense, because Doegen came here at a time

where the language was spoken in areas where it is no longer spoken.

In other words, he had encounters with the last native speakers

in many places in the island of Ireland.

SHE SPEAKS IN IRISH

It tells us a lot about the nature of Ulster Irish -

but he was able to prove, he was able to provide a body of evidence

for some of the things scholars had wondered about -

ie, was the speech in Ulster uniform?

Was the Irish... Can we speak about a variety known as Ulster Irish,

or are there varieties within Ulster that are different?

The answer to that was yes.

I suppose the main feature that stands out

is the fact that the - particularly East Ulster -

shares so many features that you find in Scottish Gaelic.

You talk about Antrim and Rathlin, Gaelic speakers,

they would probably have been able to converse with people

from Arran and Kintyre.

This archive, these recordings,

give a good indication that that was the case,

because there's loads of examples of grammar and idiom

and pronunciation and stress that are shared with Scots Gaelic.

WOMAN SINGS IN IRISH

We listened to Aine Ni Mhuireadhaigh from Donegal, she is 17 years old,

so, one of the very youngest of the recordings,

and she was singing, there, a song called Tiocfaidh An Samhradh,

a song that tells of a brokenhearted sailor

who lost his love to another man.

SHE SINGS IN IRISH

To be able to connect with somebody who spoke this language

previously in a given place, and spoke at any particular way,

with their own local colour,

different from the recognisable dialects nowadays -

akin to them, of course, but different -

to have that experience, to be able to hear about with your own ears,

as opposed to relying on some secondary source for it,

you know, a reference in a book or a discussion in an academic paper,

to be able to actually hear that speech, this is a human being,

a living person, from our place, from a different time

and speaking a different language,

to be able to hear that was really special.

SHE SINGS IN IRISH

The Reverend WF Marshall

talked about the rose, the shamrock and the thistle,

and that, in some ways, captures the essence

of the language we have nowadays -

this lovely blend, which makes our language so unique.

Are you interested in finding out more about languages in Ulster?

Go to...

..and follow the links to the Open University,

where you can watch further content

about this rich and diverse heritage.