Episode 2 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 our 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 onto.

Heard ye no tell o' Stumpy's Brae?

Sit doon, sit doon, young freen'

I'll mak your flesh tae creep the day

An' yer hair tae stan' on enn.

Young man it's hard to strive wi' sin...

The Legend of Stumpy's Brae, a gruesome, dark tale

about a farmer and his wife who have fallen upon hard times.

When a tinker calls

with what they believe to be a large fortune in his sack,

they see the opportunity to increase their fortune.

Erm, unfortunately this means murdering the tinker

and burying him.

However, it doesn't go as smoothly as planned.

They wish to bury him in his own sack, but he's too tall,

so the solution they have is to hack his legs off

and put them in the sack separately beside him.

Then, when they bury him, Stumpy comes back on his stumps, er,

to wreak revenge upon the family,

so, yeah, it's quite a dark sort of tale of revenge.

It had stricken nine, just nine o' the clock

The hour when the man lay dead

There came to the outer door a knock

And a heavy, heavy tread.

The auld man's heid swam roun' and roun'

The woman's blood 'gan freeze

For it was no' a natural sound

But like some ane stumping o'er the ground

On the banes o' his twa bare knees.

The story was recorded by Cecil Frances Alexander,

the wife of the Bishop of Derry and Raphoe.

It was a distinct departure from her more famous works.

# All things bright and beautiful

# All creatures great and small

# All things wise and wonderful

# The Lord God made them all

# Each little flower that opens... #

To the question, erm, who made the world,

as a child might reasonably ask,

she wrote the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful.

# He made their tiny wings

# All things bright and beautiful

# All creatures great and small

# All things wise and wonderful

# The Lord God made them all... #

It was just one of her many famous hymns,

first published in 1848

as part of a collection to teach children the Christian faith -

and a world away from The Legend of Stumpy's Brae.

# ..brightens up the sky

# All things bright... #

And through the door, like a sough of air

And stump, stump, round the twa

Wi' his bloody head, and his knee banes bare

They'd maist ha'e died of awe!

She just devolved her gift for word sculpting, I think,

and applied it to the more secular side of things.

But, I mean, she did a very good job of it.

Cecil Frances Alexander was a great tender of the poor,

and she raised a lot of money for various charities in the area,

and probably it was whilst working amongst the poor people of the area

that she encountered this poem orally.

The fact that it is in the local dialect,

in the Ulster Scots language,

immediately places you in a certain location.

We know we're in rural Ulster,

we know we're talking to people of a certain social status.

That's fantastic, that's what the language does,

it immediately sets a context without needing anything else.

This was the voice of her parishioners,

this was the voice of the people she worked with,

and very much her own poems would have been much more Anglicised

and would have been her voice,

but I always think perhaps that she wanted to record

the voice of the people that she spent so much time with,

and this may have been a way of doing that.

Gin ye meet ane there as daylight flees

Stumpin' aboot on the banes o' his knees

It'll jist be Stumpy himsel'.

The County Donegal town of Raphoe.

It was close to here that the poet Sarah Leech was born in 1809.

It was a life that began in difficult circumstances.

She was, er, quite physically ill.

She span every hour that God sent,

because that's, erm, because her father had died young

and he'd left a large family to support,

and this was all she had to do to keep herself going.

She had to leave school very young, and was self-taught,

and she was sort of isolated,

she was confined to this little cabin,

she had no money, you know, she had no status,

she had no standing in the world,

she seems to have had no hopes of ever marrying.

So, in a way, she was in such a low strata

that no-one really cared what she said or did -

and that's quite a powerful place to come from if you're a writer,

because you can write exactly what you like, and she did.

Nae mair I tune my rustic reed

O'er hill and dale whare lambkins feed

For I maun deck in mourning weed

And sigh alane

While tears pour forth like amber bead

Since Kate is gane.

She's got that fierceness and that complete lack of culpability

that only teenagers can have. You know, they don't think...

They think they're the first people to ever feel or think this way,

they want to express it, they have no fear, erm, of repercussions

in society because it doesn't quite matter when you're 19.

So she's got a lot of that energy

and that fearlessness that teenagers have when they write.

And her poetry provides an insight into the languages of the area.

Mostly she sticks to Ulster Scots in one poem

and, you know, sort of standard English in the other,

but it gives her this extraordinarily wide range

because she's choosing from two very, very different universes.

She's choosing from a Victorian English standardised

lady in the drawing room, erm, sort of,

All Things Bright and Beautiful,

erm, you know, Mrs Alexander, who also wrote then,

that standardised sort of thing.

Then she has this Ulster Scots,

which is the language of the hearth, which is uncensored, unfettered.

Sarah gives us an insight

into what life was like in Ulster, in Donegal at the time.

You know the reality of what went on in people's hearts.

You know, you could have the very clean, clear version

of who-did-this and who-did-that, and what date they'd done it on,

but with Sarah Leech, I think she gives us a...

You know, like being in someone's house

and hearing them speak their most private thoughts.

How to her mither Kate will bawl

To purchase her a scarlet shawl

In hopes she may some gull enthral

Who gapes for riches

But six months wed she proves a brawl

And wears the breeches.

Her Address to Bachelors is sort of a warning

to the men she sees around her.

She's sort of standing back and looking at them and saying

"Beware" because it's quite a grotesque picture

she paints of these women who are, you know, dressed up, painted,

you know, shrouded in veils,

enticing these gullible men into marriage,

and once they're married a switch is flung

and the women become very, erm, aggressive.

From a spinster teenager, it's quite contentious stuff.

Her only collection of work was published in 1826.

Sarah died just a few years later in her early 20s,

her collection of poetry largely overlooked ever since.

Her politics and religion are very closely connected,

and I think this also may be a reason why

she's not as widely read as she should be.

She was a fervent supporter of the Brunswick Clubs of the time,

which were set up, erm, to oppose Catholic emancipation,

and her original book is dedicated to these men, the Brunswick Society.

So right there is cutting her off from a huge amount of readers

who would find that a little bit too much to stomach.

Keep these examples in your view

For happiness is doom'd to few

But hark! The clock is striking two

And time goes rinning

So I'm obliged to bid adieu

And join my spinning.

I think inevitably she has been neglected

because she has not been seen as central,

and I refer to that both in terms of geographic marginality,

because Donegal is not recognised

as the heartland of the Ulster Scots speaking area,

yet it was, simply because the very earliest Ulster Scots poetry

comes from the Laggan district of Donegal.

So it played a vital part

in the development of the Ulster Scots literary tradition,

and so it's important that we recuperate the work

of people like Sarah Leech.

I hadn't really heard of Archibald McIlroy

till I happened to be looking through an old copy

of the Ulster Journal of Archaeology

for something entirely different, and I opened it at the back,

and here were a double page spread of press reviews

for, I think, When Lint Was In The Bell

or one of the books, and I thought, you know, from the North of England,

from Australia, from Canada, Irish papers, Scottish papers...

Why haven't I heard of this man before?

Archibald McIlroy from Ballyclare was an author

whose novels and short stories about life in rural Ulster

were hugely popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He created an affectionate portrait of rural communities

observed from within,

a style of writing that became known as the kaleyard tradition.

Using Ulster Scots in the dialogue reflected the language of his youth.

"It's wonnerful,"

Mrs Glen continued in a distinctly disappointed tone of voice,

"that oot o' they letters ye canna even find oot where his folk lives."

"Does he never leave ony o' them lyin' aboot?"

When you first lift one of his books

in which there's a fair bit of the language reproduced,

you have to read it slowly,

you have to start using your tongue and reading it aloud

so that you understand what actually is being said.

And it's fascinating to just study that and see how he did it.

He writes the narrative in English

but some of the dialogue in Ulster Scots,

though he says himself that he has to water it down,

and he uses the term "water it down" literally cos he said,

"Like certain other products of the countryside,

"it has to be watered down

"in order to be imbibed by those not familiar with it."

What does he mean?

Erm, so we may well be losing some of the richness

and density of the Ulster Scots that he could have written,

but for the benefit of the average reader,

he made it simple, more simple.

A couple of phrases and words early on in the reading...

"Backed." I didn't... quite sure what "backed" was,

but the Concise Ulster Dictionary helps us out there.

It means "addressing a letter", and it comes from the days

when you wrote the letter on one side, folded it up and sealed it,

so that it then became a sort of package in its own right,

and you addressed it on one of the blanks,

which was the back of the letter you'd written on,

and the term persisted even into the days of envelopes,

that you could "back a letter".

And also, erm, he uses the phrase "oul fashioned"

where I think in an Ulster Scots context you would normally

have used the term "oul farrant".

And this may be McIlroy, as he always did, as these writers did,

diluting the Ulster Scots to make it accessible to a wider audience.

"I happened tae come across yin,"

answered Becky hesitatingly, as if not wishing to reveal

under what circumstances it came into her hands.

"But no' an address was on't ava'."

McIlroy was born into a farming family in 1859.

A rural existence,

its people, land and language the inspiration for his work.

From an early age he was out in the fields, helping with the haymaking,

for example, probably helping to feed the hens round the yard,

lift a few eggs in the mornings, er, fresh,

either for family use or to be sold, as well.

He refers to that, he says the old folk in those days

didn't coddle their youngsters.

They believed in hard work in addition to oatmeal porridge

and the shorter catechism!

Which conjures up a lovely picture

of the culture of Presbyterian life of the times.

In talking about the Ulster Scots dialect that he was brought up with,

McIlroy says this...

"We in Ulster are very proud of our unique dialect.

"We may at times be a little embarrassed

"to express ourselves in it before the ignorant.

"We think in it, however, and when we are excited,

"it oozes from us like water from the rock.

"We have a supreme contempt for poor creatures who have nothing

"to fall back on but the pure English tongue."

I think he's rather mocking himself and his community, there,

I think, but there's no doubt about it that he...

To have those two, I think

he feels enriched by having that extra linguistic dimension.

"Are they sealed?"

"A bonnie wee red seal wi' a naked infant on't wearing wings."

"Oh, that's Cupid," said Mrs Glen,

she having seen the same on her daughter's Valentines,

"and it means love."

By 1912, McIlroy had published seven books,

and, now living in Canada,

his works had found international acclaim -

but his life came to a tragic end when, in 1915,

he boarded the Lusitania,

which was sunk off the coast of Cork by a German U-boat.

There's always this story that recurs

that at the bottom of the ocean, in the wreck of the Lusitania,

there's another novel by Archibald McIlroy.

I don't think so, but it makes a very nice story -

but a tragic end for him.

This is a humorous quote from The Humour of Druid's Island,

and, er, it's about the minister and Tammy,

and Tammy used to do a bit of work around the manse,

and two other men are talking about Tammy,

and they're saying,

"After he left the manse, he kept up an intimacy with a servant lass,

"and yin dark nicht, as the minister was startin' awa for a meetin',

"he met Tammy comin' up the avenue wi' a lantern in his hand.

" 'Why, Tammy,' says he,

" 'do you need a lantern when you go a-courtin'?'

" 'When I was young and goin' after the mistress,

" 'I never carried a lantern.'

" 'No, I would say not,' said Tammy, 'judging by the mistress!'"

Well, Micky, me boy, I hope you're no worse this morning.

Not worse, sir, nor indeed am I anything better either,

but much the same way.

Sure it's I that knows very well that my time here is but short.

Well, Mick, me boy...

The Carleton Players read from an adaptation

of The Party Fight And The Funeral by William Carleton.

Look up, me boy, to God at once, and pitch the priests

and their craft to Ould Nick, where they'll all go at the long-run.

I believe you're not too fond of the priests, Mr Johnston.

In a classic portrait of life at the time, a tenant farmer

visits a dying farm labourer.

Why, man, they're a set of the most gluttonous, black-looking

hypocrites that ever walked on neat's leather,

and ought to be hunted out of the country...

You have a very rich and a very colourful language, er,

filled with, er...

..strange and wonderful scenes, and to me,

when I listen to it and read it, you know, there's such a lilt

and a great rhythm to the writing that it's almost, to me,

like as if I'm listening to a beautiful piece of music.

The Clogher Valley, County Tyrone - Carleton country.

It was here that the writer was born in 1794.

His most famous work, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry,

was published in 1830.

It's a collection of stories and sketches of life in Ireland,

people and their language.

Carleton came from an Irish speaking background,

and that Irish loan word aspect

comes through in his writing, so he would have used the forms of address

with the vocative particle,

-like, you know...

-SHE SPEAKS IRISH

..in the dialogue.

So, from that aspect it is very useful

to the, erm, student of dialect

to have a look at Carleton's writing,

because the Irish loan words are there to a much greater extent

than they are in most other writing.

Mother, come home, and let me lay my head upon your breast,

a ghraidh mo chridhe.

I think it'll be the last time

we lived lonely, avourneen, wid none but ourselves...

Irish would have been spoken in many parts of Tyrone.

It would have been spoken side-by-side with English,

with Ulster Scots,

the different dialects all existed side-by-side and intermingled,

and most people were probably bilingual

and could switch from one language to another

depending on the situation,

depending on who they were talking to.

You have, if you like, the official, authorial English,

which is quite Latinate,

quite, what we might call, quite swanky, quite formal,

and then on the other hand what you have is dialect.

Now, it's not pure dialect, it's a bit edited,

but he represents a different voice,

so you have a kind of tension,

often a comic tension, between these two sorts of...

And what those two languages represent are two cultures,

two ways of seeing, two ways of being, almost.

A strange man that I never seen before came last night and tould me,

if I'd see you,

to say that you would get a visit from the boys this night,

and to take care of yourself.

Give me the hand, Mick.

In spite of the priests, by the light of day,

you're an honest fellow.

You get the whole range of Irish words there,

words that are still common,

like "uisce beatha" and "duidin" and "spalpeen" -

but then there's also words that have very special meanings.

Erm, there's the word "griosach",

for instance, I think that word is still to be heard in Tyrone.

In English it's the word for the embers of the fire, the griosach

is what you would stir in the morning to get the fire lit again.

Of course, that word lasted as long as people had open fires,

but now that open fires are gone,

then that's a word that's going to disappear, as well.

Carleton was a prolific writer, celebrated in Dublin and London.

His work not only provides an insight into life in Tyrone,

but crucially, a record of the rich linguistic diversity of the area.

He reveals a world that is of course already changing,

particularly after the 1840s,

and the kind of cataclysmic changes that the famine brought about,

including changes in terms of language.

When the National School system is established,

the language of the National Schools is English, not Irish,

whereas in the head schools there would have been Irish, Greek, Latin,

as well as a range of subjects like mathematics, surveying and so on.

So English starts to become the curriculum language,

the standard language.

It was probably just a brief period of 20, 30, 40 years

before the famine when everything was in flux,

and the three languages were all playing off each other,

and then the famine wiped so much of that out,

and education wiped so much of that out,

and, you know, the latter half of the 19th century

then became a much duller place linguistically.

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.