Episode 1 Minding Our Language

A couple of years ago,

I made a TV programme called Tim McGarry's Ulster Scots Journey.

People seemed to like it,

though for some reason it was disgracefully overlooked for a Bafta.

Discrimination!

In the programme, I examined the long

and close relationship between Scotland and Ulster.

And despite having what I thought was an impeccable Papist background,

I discovered that I had Ulster Scots ancestors

just a couple of generations back.

Yes, I'm proud to say that I am part Ulster Scot.

That's the little part of me that hates paying for things

and the part of me that, occasionally,

wants to do a bit of work.

Well, a mere two years later, I've decided to do that bit of work.

In this programme, I'm going to examine perhaps the most

controversial aspect of our Ulster Scots heritage -

the Ulster Scots language.

Some people may have a prejudice against Ulster Scots,

but it's also true that we use Ulster Scots words

and phrases without even thinking about them.

You're rather thouither-lookin' today, Tim.

He's no' as green as he's cabbage-lookin'.

Your body's as lazy as sheugh water.

She's a queer-eyed cooter on her.

That's like a sharp nose from the cutter of a plough.

She'd knock the eyes out of a flute... A hole, is that right?

-That's a new one on me now!

-You see, I'm a fluent speaker, as you know.

Your man's naething but a thaveless packel!

LAUGHTER

You know, it paints a picture!

Another clean shirt will dae 'im.

-Another clean shirt will dae 'im?

-Will do him.

He's that ill, one more clean shirt and he's ready for the next world.

But Ulster Scots also has another problem.

Many people simply don't believe that it's a language at all.

They see it as "merely" a dialect or just bad English

or English with a Rab C Nesbitt accent.

Well, I would say a lot of them folk

dinnae ken ocht ava aboot what they're talking about.

That's daft! It's nae English with Scots words thrown in.

I mean, if you looked at it properly from our point of view,

you could argue it's the same way -

"Aye, English is just Scots with a few English words thrown intae it."

And sometimes they don't even recognise it when they see it.

If you saw this sign, what language would you think this is?

Well, Heichbrae Airt means "the high hill"

and is the Ulster Scots version of Tullyard Way.

And the reason this sign isn't hanging where it should be

is because someone thought that Heichbrae Airt was Irish.

A majority of residents of Tullyard Way on the Loyalist Clonduff Estate

had backed the idea of having Ulster Scots signs in the first place.

Many of them supported a petition organised by local man Roy Adams.

Tullyard Way is an Irish name, as most of the streets round here are

and it was ironic that the people who took it down

were supporting Irish.

Now, you don't need me to "curry your yoghurt" to know that sometimes

language in this part of the world can become, well,

controversial or embroiled in our sectarian politics.

Despite the best efforts of many Irish language

and Ulster Scots speakers, both Irish and Ulster Scots

are often seen as belonging to one side or the other.

There is a perception that it only appeared in about 1998 and that,

you know, A, that it's made up or B, that it is basically Protestants

getting the same amount of money as the Irish speakers get.

How do you answer that?

That's really infuriating.

It is very antagonistic for those of us who work in this sector.

You know, Ulster Scots is a form of communication.

You could go to a hurling match between Dunloy and Lochgiel

and you'll hear some of the finest...

I wouldn't recommend that, by the way!

Well, you'll hear some of the finest Ulster Scots spoken naturally.

The fact is that,

although 99% of native speakers of Irish are Catholic,

or certainly historically would have been Catholic,

the degree of homogeneity

simply isn't there in the Ulster Scots community.

It's perhaps only two-thirds or three-quarters Protestant.

There is no doubt, in my view, that Ulster Scots would be best served

being promoted on the basis of arts, rather than history or politics.

Do you think more Unionists are slightly embarrassed?

There's a bit of a cultural cringe about Ulster Scots?

The most opposition I find when I go to different events

and talk about Ulster Scots,

the greatest opposition comes from Unionists.

It is spoken in a very widespread way

in places which aren't Protestant.

If you go up around parts of Antrim, North Antrim

and round into part of Londonderry, you will find people

who are perceived as not Protestant speaking a beautiful,

beautiful broad Ulster Scots. It's definitely not a divisive language.

So you don't have to be a Unionist to appreciate Ulster Scots?

Preferably not.

If you get beyond the political stereotype,

I think that these words and expressions and these books

live in the countryside regardless of your background,

regardless of your politics or your religion.

They are words that you can hear virtually everywhere.

Unity in a society doesn't come from uniformity,

it comes from understanding diversity.

No more than that I will say.

Seamus Heaney said that from the start

the tongue of Ulster Scots was in his ear.

Not literally, obviously. That would be disgusting!

So, where does Ulster Scots actually come from?

I'm going to stick my neck out here and guess...Scotland?

Basically, Ulster Scots is a version of the Scots language

that came to Ulster in the early 17th century.

But where did it all begin?

I need to find out.

So I'm going on a journey.

I don't really want to, but it's actually a criminal offence now

to make a TV documentary and not go on a journey. But I'm a home bird.

I'm only going somewhere if it reminds me of Belfast.

TRUMPETS SOUND

HE SIGHS

Call this a peace wall? HE SCOFFS

Hadrian's Wall was built by the Romans to keep out

the barbarians to the north.

73 miles long and 15 feet high, it ran from coast to coast.

Work started in 122 AD and was completed in just 14 years.

To put that in perspective, that's about the same time as it takes

the Housing Executive to fix your windaes.

Now, I know what you're thinking.

"Tim, this is all very interesting,

"but what's it got to do with the Scots language?"

Well, the Scots language, like most things in life,

starts with the Romans.

Because, although the wall has lasted nearly 2,000 years,

the Romans didn't last so long.

In 410 AD, the Roman legions left Britain.

It was a bit like the European referendum debate in reverse.

Instead of Britain leaving Europe, Europe left Britain.

Yes, we finally got rid of those Italian scroungers coming over here,

building walls and roads and baths and stuff...

Anyway, the point is, when the Romans left,

they opened the door to a new tidal wave of immigrants.

And these new ones were a lot worse. They were the English.

Or, as their ancestors were known, Saxons, Jutes and Angles.

Within 100 years, they had taken over most of England from the Romans.

One group carved out the kingdom of Northumbria.

And they brought with them their own language, Anglish or Englisk,

which originated in Denmark and the Low Countries.

The truth is it is a language and it's Northumbrian in its origins.

The Scots language, and to some extent English,

received English derived from Northumbrian.

So, is Scots merely a version of English or is it a distinct language?

Well, Scots language activists will tell you that Scots grew

and developed apart from its sister tongue, English,

to such an extent that a distinct language evolved.

As you know, I could talk to you for hours about orthography

and pluricentric languages

with significant asymmetric mutual intelligibility,

but I won't.

I'll get somebody else to do that.

A lot of people would say it's a dialect, it's a version of English,

it's too similar to English to deserve

the name of a language, unlike, say, Scots Gaelic.

Languages are related to one another so Norwegian and Danish,

for example, Estonian and Finnish, Irish and Scots Gaelic.

This is a normal thing with languages, so similarity

to another language doesn't stop a language being a language.

Of course it's a language.

One of the reasons I think people laugh at it

is that people think there's something intrinsically funny

about speaking a language which is indigenous to this country

and which is part of the Plantation.

I presume the planters spoke Scots, but it's also the language,

I presume, of the 1798 Rebellion.

So, it's a revolutionary language, it's a radical language

and certainly it's part of my make-up

and I say that as a Muilleoir,

but also someone that's very proud of this place

and proud to be an Ulster man.

In the case of Scots, it's a qualified "no"

in that it isn't currently a language,

but it may have been in the past and perhaps could be in the future

if the political will were there to make it so.

In the case of Ulster Scots, it's pretty much an unqualified "no",

because regardless of the functional relationship of Ulster Scots

with standard English, structurally it will always be a form of Scots.

Basque, Catalan, Flemish, Dutch, Friesian,

all the minority European languages

and we tend to think of languages as belonging to a nation state

and it doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.

The Ruthwell Cross is a masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon art,

dating from the eighth century.

It was described as the greatest achievement of its date

in the whole of Europe.

The Saxons were pagans,

but had been converted to Christianity by the seventh century.

Apart from the magnificent carvings,

what is also remarkable about this cross

are the runes cut into it.

These could be the oldest surviving text in early English

in the entire world.

What's even more surprising is that Ruthwell is in Scotland.

By the seventh century, the kingdom of Northumbria

was one of the most powerful in all of Anglo-Saxon Britain,

establishing itself in southeastern Scotland,

up as far as the Firth of Forth.

Meanwhile, the Scotti, or Irish, expanded from the west

into the north of Scotland,

and their Irish-Gaelic language quickly overcame the Pictish areas.

Northumbria became a beacon of learning, with its famous monastery

at Lindisfarne, which was also responsible for creating

some of our most precious works of art,

such as the imaginatively named Lindisfarne Gospels.

The trouble was that precious things also attracted the wrong sort.

Vikings.

The first Viking raid on England was in 793 AD on Lindisfarne.

Within a few years, they had come to dominate most of Northumbria.

Things changed in the year 1018, when the Battle of Carham

established King Malcolm II's rule over all of Scotland.

Scotland's borders now ran to the River Tweed,

and English-speaking Saxons living north of that border

were now part of Scotland.

But here, the Firth of Forth, or "Scots' Water"

became the unofficial border between Gaelic-speaking Scotland

and the Scots on this side of the river,

who spoke a Danish-influenced version of Anglo-Saxon.

Trapped within a mainly Gaelic-speaking country,

you'd have thought this Anglo-Saxon-speaking enclave

might have soon disappeared, but it didn't.

In fact, within 400 years,

most Lowland Scots were speaking this new language,

and the new language came to be known as Scots.

So, what happened?

Well, towns happened.

The Scottish kings, copying their Norman counterparts to the south,

started a process of urbanisation,

and these new institutions, or "burghs" such as Edinburgh,

used Anglo-Saxon terms like "craft, gild, toll, gate and wynd."

Soon, towns like Edinburgh were trading with the Dutch, Flemish

and Scandinavians whose language had more in common

with English than Gaelic.

But even Gaelic words were incorporated into

this evolving language, adopting words such as "clan, loch, ceilidh."

The language was also influenced by Latin and French.

And so this Scottish Saxon tongue began to diverge

from its southern English counterpart,

and it would soon come to be known as Scots.

# O flower of Scotland

# When will we see your like again? #

The Scottish kings weren't hostile to their English-speaking subjects,

but up until the 1300s,

Gaelic was still the prestige language of Scotland.

If you wanted to get on, you spoke Gaelic or French, for some reason.

But that all changed with the accession onto the throne

of this man, Robert the Bruce.

# Proud Edward's army

# And sent him homeward

# Tae think again... #

It was Robert the Bruce who finally confirmed

Scotland's independence from the English.

His triumph here at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314

also meant the continuation of the Scots language

and its separate development north of the border.

Perhaps more importantly, the Scottish Crown now passed

to three Lowland families -

the Bruces, then the Balliols, and finally, the Stuarts.

What that meant was that in the Highlands,

people continued to speak Gaelic,

but the new kings were Lowlanders, and their language was Scots.

Scotland's capital moved south from Perth to Edinburgh,

a long-standing Scots-speaking area.

From this time in the late 1300s

comes the first surviving literary text in Scots,

John Barbour's epic poem The Brus.

The Brus is so valuable they keep it under lock and key.

Imagine not trusting people from Northern Ireland.

It's spelt B-R-U-S, but it is about Robert the Bruce.

Robert the Bruce, yes.

It's very much about King Robert the Bruce

and his struggle for power within Scotland,

and his struggle for independence for Scotland as a whole.

It is one of only two manuscripts of one of the earliest examples

we have of substantial Scots writing,

substantial text written in early Scots.

It is already different from the English written at the time.

The country was at war with England when this was written.

The king had Anglophile leanings, and many Scots were against that.

This is why things like The Brus

and also the later epic The Wallace became very popular again.

So, there's a nationalist hue to it.

It's about Bannockburn and uniting Scotland,

it's about driving the English out, there's certainly that feel to it.

Yes, definitely.

If I was to put this under my arm and leave the library,

what would the fine be per day for this?

I don't know if you could put it like this,

you might lose your liberty!

Right, it's like that, hear that?

By the late 14th and early 15th century,

Scots had supplanted Gaelic and French

to become the language of the royal court.

In 1424, King James I of Scotland wrote The Kingis Quair,

"The King's Book".

He wrote it in Scots.

It was, in Scotland, the language of the court, in early modern Scotland.

The saying was you spoke Scots to your king, French to your lady,

and Gaelic to your God.

English didn't get a look in!

It was in the late Renaissance that Scots language enthusiasts

believe that written Scots reached its literary high watermark.

There was an explosion of creative activity,

with Stirling Castle at its epicentre.

Stirling Castle was the favoured hang-out of the Stuarts.

Writers such as Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas,

and David Lyndsay, through to Alexander Montgomerie,

made a group of outstanding writers

who are known collectively as the Makars.

The Makars were sort of court poets to the Scottish court

of the 15th and early 16th century.

The Makars brought Scots poetry to new heights,

drawing on such influences as Dante and Chaucer.

Sadly, however, much of their work was later lost or destroyed.

One of the greatest of these Makars was Blind Harry,

who wrote The Wallace, which takes as its subject

that other hero of Scottish independence, William Wallace.

And a bit like Mel Gibson's film, it is a wee bit inaccurate.

But also like Mel's film, it was hugely popular,

and it elevated Wallace to the status of national martyr.

And as we've seen,

John Barbour's The Brus glorified the struggles of Robert the Bruce.

So, it is clear to see that the early writers in Scots

identified themselves closely with the cause of Scottish freedom.

There's a slight irony here in that Ulster Scots

is perceived to come from a Unionist background.

Over here, is Scots part of the nationalist revival?

If you found someone in Scotland who was hostile to the Scots language,

who regarded it either as a historical anomaly,

or an artificial creation,

they would probably be of a Unionist disposition.

There are people quite capable of saying

the cultural argument for Scots, the existential argument for Scots,

but dinna ging along with the desire for independence.

To folk like me, that doesn't make sense.

The only way to save the Scots language is to be independent

and to be proud of it.

I dinna see how we can be proud of ourselves

if we're nae proud of ourselves. Put it that way.

Let me put the Unionist argument, then,

which is that this is cultural separatism.

This is a part of saying, "We're different from England,

"we deserve to be separate because we're culturally separate."

Scotland doesn't have to validate a national identity.

It's one of the strongest national identities in the world.

If the question in Scottish politics is, "Is Scotland a nation?"

then you'll get 98% of people saying yes.

You don't have to be a Scottish nationalist to believe

in nourishing and flourishing the Scottish culture and language.

But it would be the case, I suspect,

that most Scottish nationalists would think that was a good idea.

The Makar period is said to have reached its pinnacle

with Gavin Douglas's Eneados, his version of Virgil's Aeneid,

the first translation of an ancient text into an Anglic language.

It was published in the year 1513.

But that year was also a disastrous year for Scotland,

and the start of the decline of the Scots language.

In 1513, a Scottish army invaded England to aid France,

which was being attacked by Henry VIII.

Despite being outnumbered,

the English annihilated the Scottish army.

King James IV died on the battlefield.

He was the last monarch in the British Isles to do so.

The power vacuum in Scotland led to massive political instability,

which the Tudor monarchs were only too happy to exploit.

And then along came the Reformation.

In 1560, encouraged by Protestant England,

and spurred by the fiery preaching of John Knox,

the Church of Scotland broke with the Church of Rome.

Parliament abolished the Catholic Mass,

and the country officially became Calvinist.

Scotland, now newly Calvinist, needed a Bible.

There was no approved Scots version, so the Scottish Calvinists

used an English translation of the Geneva Bible.

The preachers probably had to paraphrase it into Scots

so that their congregations could understand why they would soon be

cast into the fiery depths of hell, but the text was in English.

This lays claim to being the house where John Knox lived.

Wouldn't have been much craic, living with John Knox, would it?

Apparently, Knox's daughter committed the terrible sin

of coming down late for breakfast one morning.

Knox pointed an accusing finger at her and shouted,

"Spawn of the devil!".

To which she replied, "Good morning, father."

Yes, "fun-loving" and "easy-going" aren't exactly phrases

we associate with 16th century Scottish Protestantism.

It was all a bit stern and hostile to artistic works.

Now, most Scots literature at the time

tended to be Catholic in content and artistic in nature,

which is why Knox described the Scots language as the "language of Popery."

Mind you, you'd have thought John Knox would have ended up

somewhere better than this.

I mean, buried in a car park?!

But, it wasn't all one-way traffic.

I mean, what did you do when you were 17?

King James VI of Scotland wrote a book, "Reulis and Cautelis".

"Rules and Cautions" - basically a guide to writing poetry in Scots.

Mind you, he was a king - probably got somebody to write it for him.

But, when King James VI of Scotland

became the King James I of England and Scotland,

he issued the new King James Bible,

which was, of course, in English.

The key thing was the union of crowns,

because it moved the court from Scotland,

where Scots was spoken, to London, where English was spoken.

Although the early court commentators of James I,

as he became, James VI to Scotland,

were complaining that they could not understand the Scots courtiers

who had come down to London, so obviously that was a crucial thing.

Yes, the royal court was now in London and its language was English.

Scots quickly became displaced as the language of government

and commerce and literature.

In our neck of the woods,

James is probably most famous for the Plantation.

Scots settlers poured into Ulster, but the indigenous population

would also affect how the Scots language developed in Ulster.

Ulster was the most Gaelic part of Ireland.

There was an awful lot of Gaelic still spoken here at that time,

and that was going to absorb into the everyday parlance

of the people that came here.

Also, you had existent Elizabethan English,

and hangovers of Norman French as well,

so all these things go into a melting pot,

and a lot of these different words and phrases

have got absorbed to make Ulster Scots

subtly different in pronunciation and vocabulary,

from modern-day Scots in different parts of Scotland.

-So there are bits of Irish in there as well?

-Aye.

If I said, "Haud yer wheesht",

"wheesht" or "whisht" is from a Gaelic derivative.

Also, "I was into clabber" -

"clabber" is from the Irish "clabair" for mud,

and that has been absorbed into Ulster Scots terminology.

There is a rule in local TV.

If you're making a documentary about history, culture,

art or literature, well, you will end up in the Linen Hall Library,

even if you don't want to. And the reason is simple -

the Linen Hall has everything.

Where's the largest collection of Ulster Scots literature?

No, it is not a trick question. It is here.

Scots language literature was being printed in Belfast,

and was being imported during the 1600s and 1700s.

The 17th century in Ulster was a turbulent time for those settlers.

There was a lot of instability,

so there's not as much written material available.

There's the Ulster Miscellany.

It contains a whole variety of poems and prose and riddles

and verse, and different things, nearly all anonymous.

At the back of it are nine poems,

which have come to be known as the Scotch Poems from Donegal.

# The English steel we could... #

By the end of the 17th century,

it was clear that Scots was under pressure.

In Scotland, Scots was commonly spoken by 70%

of the non-Gaelic speaking population.

However, the written and printed word was almost universally in English.

# A parcel o' rogues in a nation... #

On May 1, 1707, in this very hall, the Scots Parliament

voted itself out of existence and instead joined with England

and Wales to form the United Kingdom.

Parliament was now in London.

From the very outset, the new Scottish MPs were mocked

by their English counterparts for their use of the Scots language.

300 years on and Alex Salmond has exacted a little revenge.

In the House of Commons, you're not allowed to insult somebody

personally, so if you called somebody a thieving, slimy rogue,

you'd be upbraided by the speaker immediately.

If you call him a "sleekit scunner",

then it has two great virtues.

Firstly, you get off with it,

in terms of parliamentary protocol.

Secondly, it also has a great virtue in that the minister concerned

knows he is being insulted, he's just not quite sure to what extent.

The English translation of sleekit scunner would be "a slimy emetic,"

a walking emetic, and Hansard writers would send me down a note

saying, "What is 'sleekit'?"

I'd put "slimy, untrustworthy".

"What is 'scunner'?" "Sick-making, odious",

and send it back up again,

so they'd have the translation, and they'd put "Scots usage".

One expert in the Scots language writing about the significance

of 1707 stated that, to the extent that Scots is a provincial dialect,

it only became so once Scotland began to think of itself

as a province, rather than a nation.

After 1707, the Scottish elite turned to English.

In 1754, the Select Society - sounds a bit like the Bullingdon Club -

was formed in Edinburgh to promote the use of English.

Many at the head of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume

and Adam Smith, sought to eradicate the use of Scots from their writing.

Books were written designed to,

"Correct improprieties of Scots speech and writing."

These efforts drove Scots away from its position as a national language.

But the language clung on.

It continued to be spoken and written in regional varieties

in large parts of the country, but it was clearly under pressure.

What I love about Northern Ireland is that there will be people

watching this at home thinking, "Hmm, a fella from Sinn Fein

"and Alex Salmond support the Ulster Scots?

"Damn! I'll have to pretend to like it now!"

And there'll be other people thinking,

"Hmm, a fella from Sinn Fein and Alex Salmond?

"That has put me off my Ulster Scots."

But take the politics out of it.

You have got to admit that Scots has legitimate linguistic roots,

and a literature going back seven centuries to The Brus.

In the second part of Minding Our Language,

we'll take a close look at the Scots and Ulster Scots literature,

and we'll find out why Ballycarry needs an airport.

And, how Moneyreagh pre-dated Ashley Madison.