Unionism, Loyalism, and the Ulster‐Scots Ethnolinguistic ‘Revival’

Abstract

The Ulster‐Scots ethnolinguistic ‘revival’ in Northern Ireland has been appropriated, promoted, and internalized by many across the varieties of unionism and loyalism. Much of the academic literature on Ulster‐Scots has focused on political and cultural dimensions of the ‘revival’. This article analyses the written promotion of the Ulster‐Scots movement by those who purport to conceptualize it primarily in terms of a literary‐linguistic revival. Through a close textual analysis of the Ulster‐Scots Language Society's journal, Ullans, I investigate where this part of the Ulster‐Scots ‘revival’ fits in the nexus of unionism and loyalism. Although Ullans does contain markers of the ‘Protestant community’, in general its Ulster‐Scots narrative fails to conform to any specific form of unionist ideology. Rather, this victimhood narrative may be more mimetic towards Irish linguo‐cultural promotion, defence, and legitimization than a development of various strands of endogenous unionist ideology.

Ethnicity monopoly: Ulster-Scots ethnicity-building and institutional hegemony in Northern Ireland

“…It gained notoriety initially as a language, promoted as a long-subjugated dialect of Scots (Görlach, 2000). The movement was also widely understood to be a conspicuous attempt to produce a Protestant linguistic equivalent of the Irish language (Crowley, 2006; Gardner, 2015; Mac Póilin, 1999; Níc Craith, 2000, 2001; Radford, 2001). Its colloquial register and use of words previously considered to be local slang, combined with attempts to maximally differentiate its spelling from standard English (Mac Póilin, 1999), rendered it open to media scorn (McCall, 2002).…”

“…The idea of Ulster-Scots began to disseminate through certain unionist currents of thought in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Ulster-Scots Language Society was formed in 1992, producing the first publication explicitly about, and partly written in, Ulster-Scots the following year (Gardner, 2015; Níc Craith, 2003). In the final decade of the conflict, prior to the signing of the Agreement in 1998, there emerged a small number of grass-roots educators who began to teach Ulster-Scots in schools.…”

“…Subsequent to its creation in 1992, the Ulster-Scots Language Society began to produce its publication, Ullans , in which articles on Ulster-Scots heritage, culture and politics, linguistic and literary history, and new poetry, prose and translations from English were printed (Gardner, 2015). A central function of this publication was, essentially, to engage in Ulster-Scots ethnolinguistic apologetics.…”