Episode 2 Minding Our Language

In the first part of Minding Our Language,

we looked at the historical roots of the Scots language

and how it made it over here to Ulster.

In this programme, we'll be concentrating

on the rich and varied catalogue of Scots and Ulster Scots literature.

But first - I know the programme's only started,

but I reckon you need to be insulted.

One area where the Ulster Scots language excels itself

is in the insult.

It has it down to a fine art.

Your buddy's as lazy as sheugh water.

He's yin slate aff and the other's slidin'.

Now, you might say you don't know any Ulster Scots,

but if I was to call you a "sleekit gulpin",

or a "carnaptious skitter", or a "bletherin' pachle",

you'd be upset.

Maybe it's not very good at positive affirmation.

A lot of the terminology is negative.

In fact, Ulster Scots has so many words,

I can give you over 25 insults beginning with the letter G.

SHOUTING

A lot of the terms are derogatory,

but at the same time, they're colourful.

If you're talking about a "sleekit auld targe" for a woman,

it'd be very hard to capture or convey that in English.

It's hard to be as effective in English.

English has got a much more stilted vocabulary

for really offending somebody.

BARMAN:

At the start of 18th century,

it looked like Scots in its written form

was in terminal decline.

But then, something remarkable happened.

And it all started with this man.

Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany, in the year 1728,

was a collection of rural folk poetry and works by Ramsay himself,

which did much to spark a revival of interest in the language.

And it featured a poem from William Starrett,

a man from Strabane.

He sent this verse epistle to Allan Ramsay,

who responded to him,

and both of those poems

are in Allan Ramsay's book.

William Starrett's Ulster Scots

is very dense, very musical, very lilting

and very definitely not English.

Ramsay's work encouraged the likes of Robert Fergusson.

Fergusson loved Edinburgh, and his poetry was gritty and urban.

"Auld Reekie", which is the "wale o'ilka toun",

which means "the best town in the world" -

it's the choicest town, "wale" is choice.

"Wale o'ilka toun" - choice of every town.

It's a celebration of Edinburgh itsel'.

Everything about it is worth celebrating

and "auld reekie" means the smoke -

this really is an approach like James Joyce.

He celebrates a'thing - everything.

Now, Fergusson in turn was hugely influential

on Scotland's most famous son.

No, not Billy Connolly.

No, not Mel Gibson.

Robbie Burns.

We're in the Robert Burns Room.

This is the Robert Burns committee room

in the Scots Parliament.

Is there a room in Scotland not named after Robert Burns?

Well, I tried to find them when I was First Minister

and change that, of course.

Robbie Burns is everywhere in Scotland -

even the hotel we booked here in Stirling.

Burns stayed here in the year 1786.

He was upset at the rundown nature of Stirling Castle,

and so scratched a poem on the second floor window of his hotel bedroom.

The poem bemoaned the loss of the Stewart line

and insulted the Hanovers, who had taken over the British Crown,

describing them as an "idiot race".

"Who know them best despise them most."

Realising that this could be quite offensive to some

and possibly dangerous to himself, Burns came back to the hotel

a couple of months later and smashed the window.

By the way, please don't try that at the Europa.

Now, I'd like to say that our crack team of researchers

working on this programme knew about this story

before they booked the hotel.

But I can't.

No...it was the only hotel in Stirling that would have us.

Now, some people are a bit sniffy about Burns

and all that wearing of kilts and addressing haggises,

but Burns is worth more than a second look.

He's celebrated globally. He's a hero in Canada and Russia.

There are Burns societies all over America.

Bob Dylan claimed inspiration from him.

And if that's not a good enough reason to read him,

well, Jeremy Paxman hates him.

He started writing about 13, 14.

He was really taken by one of the girls who was helping him

on the harvest, Nelly Kilpatrick,

and he thought he'd try his luck

and he wrote a song for her called Handsome Nell.

-Right.

-So that was his first attempt, really,

at what he calls "the sin of rhyme".

"My love is like a red, red rose

"That's newly sprung in June

"And I will love thee still, my dear

"Till all the seas gang dry."

Very romantic.

But to be honest, Robbie used to say that to all the girls.

Not to be crude about it, but when it came to his love life,

Robbie Burns had a wee touch of the Russell Brands.

In his lifetime, Burns was known as the Ploughman Poet,

which makes him sound like a kind of rapping Poldark.

Mind you, Robbie took his shirt off even more often than Poldark.

He had lots of relationships with different women.

He fathered at least 13 different children.

-13?!

-Yeah.

-By how many different women?

-Five, that we know of.

Initially, Burns published to raise money to go to the West Indies.

He thought one last roll of the dice would be worth a punt.

And it worked.

The Belfast Newsletter was the first paper in Ireland

to print extracts of his work,

and the first edition of Burns' poetry printed outside Scotland

was printed here in Belfast.

Burns, interestingly, didn't profit from that,

so it was...

-You mean the Belfast people kept the money?

-They did.

-That wouldn't be like us.

-It was in the days before copyright.

Now, when Burns wrote in Scots, he often had a glossary

at the back of his books translating the Scots words into English.

In Ulster, however, the glossary remained...well, unread, unthumbed.

Why? Well, because everyone here perfectly understood

every single Scots word.

If you look at Tam O'Shanter,

for example, Burns' masterpiece,

entirely written in Scots, and right in the middle

of this rollicking, Scots-written ghost story,

there's a couple of stanzas in English -

"But pleasures are like poppies spread..."

He puts that couple of stanzas in, just to demonstrate,

"Listen, if I'd wanted to write in English, I could have done.

"I just didn't."

But besides the romanticism,

the descriptions of rural life and the love poems,

there was one other key aspect of Burns' later life.

MUSIC: Flower of Scotland by the Corries

Scots Wha Hae is ostensibly about Bannockburn,

but its firebrand language is also about so much more.

Scots language was the language

of the dispossessed and the marginalised,

and through Burns, it was now clearly identifying itself

with the cause of Scottish nationalism.

Burns' increasingly nationalist and revolutionary stance

lost him many friends in the establishment.

He was an advocate of the French Revolution in the early days,

until they threatened Britain with invasion.

He followed the American Revolution as well,

the Wars of Independence, very keenly.

I think Burns was an agitator, really, but he had to watch himself,

because towards the end of his life, he worked for the Crown -

he was an excise man, or a taxman.

He had to balance his political views

with the need to make a living.

And as the government clamped down,

well, even the People's Poet got a wee bit scared.

Scots Wha Hae was published anonymously.

-And Jeremy Paxman hated him.

-Um...Jeremy Paxman said

that...he was a purveyor of "sentimental doggerel."

I wouldn't have minded that opinion,

but it was in the preface to a Chambers dictionary,

so it was a bit naughty of Chambers to do that, I think.

-So, he's not welcome here.

-Yeah, I'd love to show him around.

-THEY LAUGH Just charge him double!

-Exactly!

There were poets in Ulster writing in Ulster Scots

before Burns burst on the scene,

but there is no doubt he took things to a different level

and popularised poetry.

He was a massive influence on the Rhyming Weaver poets

of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The Rhyming Weavers were a new breed of Ulster Scots writer.

Many of them were self-taught, they were politically radical -

some of them were involved in the 1798 Rebellion.

Their poetry drew on the landscape that surrounded them,

but was also irreverent and deeply egalitarian.

Of course, in those days, the poet was a bit of a star,

someone to look up to,

and the Rhyming Weavers were kind of like the X Factor stars of the 1800s.

Except, of course, that the Rhyming Weavers wrote their own stuff

and were quite good.

Mind you, some of the stuff they wrote might surprise you.

Every walk of human life is contained in the poems,

if you look deep enough to get them.

Robert Huddleston certainly dealt

with the earthiness of human life.

He has written one particular poem, The Clergyman And The Schoolmaster,

and yes, it does deal with some very untoward goings-on.

Two wives and the two husbands, the clergyman and schoolmaster,

had no families, no children, they'd...failed.

But after a few of these encounters in the bar,

all of a sudden, the children where blossoming,

and he suggests that if you are having problems in the farmyard

with your hens and your roosters, perhaps just a little bit of...

-Mixing and matching.

-..animal husbandry is required, yes.

So, yes - long before Ashley Madison,

Robert Huddleston told us that adultery was alive and well,

here in Moneyreagh.

Yes - Moneyreagh.

The Bangkok of County Down.

Not many people about today.

Must be all "indoors".

Francis Boyle lampoons this very fancy doctor

who comes to Donaghadee

and pretends to be very wealthy and respectable,

but it turns out that what he's doing in Donaghadee

is he's taking care of the ladies of the night who are there,

attracted by the sailors who are in the town.

It's kind of like the ancient version of a Twitter mob.

If you want to lampoon somebody and Twitter didn't exist,

the local poet was the man that you went to.

Forget statues and awards -

you know you've made it when you've got a pub named after you.

In 1951, the great poet John Hewitt

got a Masters in Arts at Queen's University

when he wrote a paper on the Weaver poets of Antrim and Down.

The remarkable thing is,

when he submitted his paper to the academics and professors,

they genuinely thought he'd made the whole thing up.

None of them had heard of these Ulster Scots poets.

So, they made him take them down to the Linen Hall library,

take them to Central library,

take them to the newspapers collections

and actually prove that these existed.

So they thought he literally was spoofing his load

and had made all this up.

As is often thought nowadays as well.

James Orr was one of the finest writers in Ulster Scots

that there ever was.

Orr was a member of the United Irishmen.

He was an on-the-run.

He was also a Freemason and a self-taught poet

of extraordinary ability and humanity.

He produces pieces that are, um...

..very, very finely crafted,

as finely crafted as anything you'll find,

you know, in the best of English or Irish literature.

But he never lost his radical principles.

He is very, very clear about the dignity of the ordinary person

and that really comes through

in the Irish Cottier's Death and Burial.

Earlier on, we visited

the multi-million-pound Robert Burns museum.

Burns' birthplace cottage has been beautifully restored.

And this is what James Orr gets.

Not so much as a blue plaque on the outside.

I mean, come on - even Daniel O'Donnell

has got his own museum.

We should be shouting

Orr's reputation from the rooftops.

A writer of his calibre,

who has produced work that reflects a period that is key,

absolutely key, to Irish history, the Rebellion-Union period,

and gives us a unique, Northern, Presbyterian perspective on it,

it amazes me that he's not on the exam syllabus.

Everyone watching this programme has heard of Seamus Heaney.

But hands up who has actually read lots of his poetry?

And no, I don't just mean that you know that line

"when hope and history rhyme".

Who has read lots of him?

Don't worry - I'm the same. Most of us are.

Most of us don't actually read an awful lot of poetry.

But, thanks to this programme,

I've actually read quite a lot of James Orr.

And do you know what? He's bloody good.

He's funny, he's political, he's clever,

he's a brilliant observer of human life,

of people and their foibles and flaws.

Orr had a couple of flaws himself.

Because he didn't have a wife to come home to

and a happy family,

he was inclined to seek company at an inn

and just got too fond of the drink

and of the company of drinkers as a result of that,

and he seems to regret the amount of time

that he has to spend with people like that.

-He wouldn't be the first to do that, now.

-No.

Carol said to me, "Tim, whatever you do,

"please do not call James Orr

"the George Best of Ulster Scots poetry."

So I won't.

All I will say is that when Ballycarry finally gets

the airport it so desperately needs,

there is only one contender for the name.

Burns' poetry led to a temporary resurgence in the Scots language.

But Burns died in 1796 and by the early 1800s,

the language was suffering neglect and marginalisation.

The Walter Scott Memorial is the biggest monument to any writer

anywhere in the world - though, to be fair,

Jeffrey Archer's not dead yet.

Now, Walter Scott spoke in broad Scots,

but he wrote in English.

The only time he ever wrote in Scots

was when he wrote for rural or working-class characters,

and that really sums up the position of Scots in 19th-century Scotland.

A man who speaks Scots in everyday life writes in English

because that is the only way to get published.

By the middle of the 19th century,

Scots and Ulster Scots was being actively discouraged in schools.

The Education Acts in Ireland and Scotland

confirmed that English was to be the medium of all education -

all books and all lessons were from now on to be in English.

A certain snobbery that came in with the education system

suggested that Ulster Scots was just bad English,

and so for that reason, people were writing in English instead.

If I used a Scots word in polite company,

my mother would tell me off.

So I might say, "I'm going oot",

and she would say, "No, you're going out."

So she'd tell me off about that.

She thought if you spoke Scots, you'll never get at a decent job,

like running the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum.

-Little did she know!

-THEY LAUGH

By 1940, the Scottish Education Department stated

Scots "is not a language of educated people anywhere

"and could not be described as a suitable medium

"of education or culture."

It meant that school wasn't much fun for the average Scots speaker.

People were made fun of, at school, particularly.

They didn't have their culture or their language respected

and it was very, very damaging for people.

People came out the other end feeling...unhappy...

..uncertain about their culture and uncertain about their speech.

It was... It shut people up. It shut people up.

Yeah, I think anybody who grew up in the country

would have that sort of experience.

Um...

My mum tells me about kids

who were literally chased around the classroom

with the teacher with a cane because they weren't speaking properly.

It was the same as the proscription of Gaelic.

It wisna quite as savage

and it would depend on individual teachers -

and, of course, a lot of the teachers spoke Scots.

They were fae these towns and a' the rest of it.

But there was this idea - "No, no, you have to learn to speak English

"to get on in the world."

There was nae concept of bilingualism.

People's culture, which stretched back centuries,

their language culture, stretching back centuries,

treated with utter contempt.

Given the hostility of the establishment

to Scots and Ulster Scots,

it isn't surprising that the literature went into decline.

Scots literature is almost on its knees

because naebody is using the Scots language

to tackle big subjects.

The people that followed Burns,

they followed the kind of countryside,

the couthy side, the wee Scotland.

There's a lovely poem -

"Wee, a nice wee word

"And Scots, too - it maks you proud."

You ken? I mean, and that's, "Oh, God," you know...

But suddenly, everything changed.

In 1926, Hugh MacDiarmid wrote a poem called

A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle.

Come on - who hasn't done that?

A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle

begins wi' an attack

on the Burns cult -

the way that this incredibly revolutionary-living poet

has been turned into a kind of mummified house god.

I was opposed to certain ideas that were current at that time,

promulgated by the Burns...

..Club of London and I decided,

in consonance with my own character,

to take a very different

angle of approach.

MacDiarmid's real name was Christopher Murray Grieve.

He was a Communist

and a founder member of the Scottish National Party.

He was probably also the greatest Scottish poet of the 20th century

and he wrote in Scots.

A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle was like a childbirth in church.

The shock that suddenly...

"But, this is nae just a wee dialect.

"This is a language. This is a modern language."

Almost single-handedly, he dragged the Scots language

from its folksy, rural cul-de-sac and put it centre stage.

I certainly wouldn't be writing the kind of poetry I have written

if I weren't a Scottish nationalist and a Communist.

However, even the genius of MacDiarmid couldn't prevent

the decline of the Scots language.

As television dominates,

as the world becomes...becomes interrelated,

then it is increasingly difficult to defend accents, languages,

against that power of uniformity.

Interestingly enough, Burns thought that in the late 18th century,

so the fact that we are still going strong in the 21st century

is probably a compliment to the robustness of Scots.

In the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, all the parties agreed

that Ulster Scots was part of the cultural wealth

of the island of Ireland

and the UK government has formally recognised

both Scots and Ulster Scots as languages

under the European Charter on Regional and Minority Languages.

Yet, controversy still remains as to the actual status of Ulster Scots

and efforts to protect and promote the language

have led to criticisms and problems.

I can see why people have been...

..uncertain about some of the production of material

that has come out of some of the agencies that support Ulster Scots,

because I've seen them,

and I'm kind of looking at them thinking,

"I don't know what any of this means."

Maybe it's because I'm not from that community,

but I suspect people in the community

are maybe looking at this stuff and wondering the same stuff.

I remember getting a phone call from a neighbour

that got his single farm payment documentation

from the Department of Agriculture through the letterbox, and there was

reams and reams of it in Ulster Scots.

And this guy was an Ulster Scot and enthusiastic about the language,

but in typical canny Scots fashion,

in a time of financial austerity,

he saw this as being a needless waste of money,

cos, sure, everybody knows and understands English.

What Ulster Scots does attract,

or the notion of Ulster Scots as a language,

is a kind of payroll vote from certain sectors.

One of those sectors is Unionist politicians

and in a way, it's a kind of shibboleth.

When people who speak the language see these documents

and they read these words, they think,

"Well, that doesn't have anything to do with me.

"What's that about? Why are they doing this?

"Who are they doing it for?" Now, these are sensible

and perfectly reasonable questions for people to ask.

Why shouldn't they? It's their money being spent.

So, is it a language that needs laws and bilingual translations?

Or does it just need a wee bit of encouragement in education?

Well, you'd have to be a politician to decide that, and...apparently,

they're a bit busy at the moment.

We need to stop the bickering over language.

One of the things that amazes me is that we are still not

teaching children in schools Ulster Scots.

We don't have the textbooks

and we don't have a GCSE in Ulster Scots,

so that's the stuff to focus on.

I've no problem with people translating stuff and putting it in ads,

but that is not how you revive a language.

Mark, there are people who are sceptical about Ulster Scots.

Give them a few ideas of where they would really enjoy

Ulster Scots literature.

Definitely have a look for Ballads of Down,

by George Francis Savage-Armstrong - great stuff.

And have a look at things by John Clifford

or by WG Lyttle or Archibald McIlroy.

Somebody like Charlie Gillen, talking about whenever

all the farmers knew the names of individual cattle

right through to buying a second-hand computer

or commentating about the rituals of courtship.

This doesn't involve Tinder, then? This is kind of...

Tinder? That's something you light the fire wi'.

I'd like to see an Ulster Scots version of that!

All languages are different. As somebody once said,

a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy.

Who knows if they'll get an army and navy in there?

But as we've seen, Scots was the language of the monarchy

and the government of Scotland,

and while it certainly was similar to English,

it was also distinct as well -

the same way Norwegian is similar to, but distinct from, Swedish.

Speaking to a number of Scots language activists,

certainly there is an underlying nationalist agenda.

They spoke about respect, esteem, about culture being valued.

They say Scots was the way their grannies and their cousins spoke

and it doesn't deserve to be mocked or derided.

They don't speak that way just to get a grant.

So, what implications does that have for the Ulster Scots?

What would you say to people in Northern Ireland who say,

"Look, Ulster Scots, I don't need it, it's not part of my life,

"why should we bother paying money for it, for instance?"

I would say to these folk,

do you really want your bairns and your grandchildren

to lose a' this heritage?

Everything that's been written in Ulster Scots,

the way that Ulster Scots expresses the reality o' Ulster,

do you want that just to dee?

To be lost forever as a living force?

Cos there's nae need for it. It's nae very expensive.

You just stop correcting the children in the classroom.

You encourage the children to use these words.

There is something very soothing, something unique,

something lilting and musical in it, you know?

It makes me feel my Scottish ancestors.

There is just something very hamely about the hamely tongue.

It's really important to hang on to distinctiveness

and personality and accent and language, wherever you can,

and, you know, we should nourish and protect it,

because it's what makes life worth living.

There is a richness about the Scots language

of which...few can be surpassed.

It's part of your ain identity

and if you're a' just speaking a kind of computer language,

where are you?

Who are you?

The programme should be called Minding Our Languages,

because all the languages spoken here,

all the indigenous languages - English, Ulster Scots and Irish -

they are all our responsibility and our duty to support

and to promote and to protect them.

You can't insult a language. It's a thing. It is inanimate.

It can't answer back.

Dictionaries aren't going to fly off a shelf and attack you.

So, when you mock Irish or Ulster Scots,

you're basically mocking those who speak it, who learn it,

who value it and enjoy it -

which means I probably have a few apologies to make.

Now, I doubt I'll convince everyone that Ulster Scots is a language.

I'm not 100% sure myself.

But let's take the politics out of it.

I hope I've shown you that, even if you think Ulster Scots is a dialect,

it also has proper linguistic roots.

It has a history and a literature

and therefore, it deserves some respect.

And besides that, well,

it's something that...something that's just a bit of craic.

"Craic", by the way, is a Scots word. Not Irish.

That's another programme entirely.