Is Ulster-Scots a language or a dialect?

Interesting, thanks user.

True. I think linguistically Castilian Spanish and French are considered similar enough to technically be dialects. And then you get Catalan which blurs the lines even further.

Scots Gaelic is basically Ulster Irish, but unlike Irish, Scots Gaelic wasn't modernized. Greatest difference is written between the two.

Basically, yeah. There are some elements of Scots vocabulary in it, in the same way that Hiberno-English has certain elements of Irish vocabulary and grammar, but it's very much English. There's no continuity between the Scots spoken in Ireland in the early 17th century and modern Ulster Scots.

Historically it has always been considered its own language, that didn't really start to change until after the Act of Union, and even then the wind started to blow the other way a bit during the Scots Literary Revival. Present attitudes to Scots as being a dialect of English are mostly grounded in the pan-British spirit of the World Wars.

Interestingly, 1498, Don Pedro de Ayala, Spanish ambassador to James IV, remarked that Scots and English were "as different as the languages of Aragon and Castille".

youtube.com/watch?v=_6gzkjAkiVg

Its a fucking meme, its just english spelt differently and i dare you to prove me wrong.
Cant is more of a language than that shite

You have to be stupid not to know this, i was 7 when i first saw Ulster-Scots, it was written beside english and irish
English
>First Floor
Ulster Scots
>Ferd Flair
I didnt even type that correctly but i know no one will correct it because it will be equally ridiculous
Good post

Thanks user

I probed around the Ulster Scots Agency in the hope of them maybe publishing my dissertation if I added a chapter about Ulster Scots. I noticed there was a pamphlet inside produced by the Department of Education, and it read in Irish
>An Roinn Oideachais
And in Ulster-Scots
>Männystrie o Lear
I thought this was the strangest thing because having studied Scots historically, very few writers used umlauts and none of them living after the 15th century.

So I asked one of the bigwigs about it and she told me "we just thought it looked nice, and it made it look different and stand out, we took influence from German".

Absolutely bananas. It's basically a conlang at this point.

Tá failte romhat
It's mind boggling tbqh

Does your dissertation contain anything about the Scottish adaptation of Irish Gaelic? I'd very much like to read it if so.

U WOT M8?

FUK YA

FUKKING TAIGS

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

There's a very small bit about Gaelic in the introduction. I originally wanted to do a whole chapter on the Highlands but there just wasn't enough material and I didn't have enough time. I'd like to write something on it in the future but my Irish is much worse than my Scots and I don't know how well I'd be able to engage with the material.

Here's a link to it anyway if any anons want to read about the subject. I got a 2.1 so it's pretty okay.

docs.google.com/document/d/16ZYW61UKkeIEGVmAvXYn6oChVHyTIyVwmuncw0qA1pI/edit?usp=sharing

cheers la

>my irish is much worse than my scots
You should be able to move over to Ulster Irish easy enough, going from there to one of the other irish dialects will be slightly more difficult but not by much
Also thanks for the link

FUCK UP YA MELTER

FUKKIN DICKHEAD

>Is Ulster-Scots a language or a dialect?

Yes.

there is no universally applicable distinction between languages and dialects, it's purely a case of whether or not people treat it as foreign or merely regional. If Ulster became a sovereign state tomorrow, they could easily cite "Ulster Scots" as their language, and boom, it's a language. When Yugoslavia broke up, the republics that formed each adopted a different language, but all those languages were previously consider merely to be dialects of Serbo-Croat. The same thing happened when India was partitioned, Urdu and Hindi were dialects of the same language, now after 70 years of divergence they are "true" languages, with Urdu written in arabic and with many arab and persian borrowings, while Hindi is written in latin and indian scripts and takes its borrowings from English.

more of a mental issue

Another example: The Chinese languages consider themselves to be dialects of the same language, but Europeans classify them not only as separate languages but indeed separate families of languages.

like mandarin vs cantonese or mandarin vs vietnamese?

Hibernian is as separate from English as Scots. Hibernian branched off from Middle English and has a whole different mixture of influences; Danish, Norse, Norman and Irish.

That level of differences, yes. This situation exists because of the peculiar Chinese writing system, of course, but it hi-lights how vague the distinction between languages and dialects can be.

>Hibernian is as separate from English as Scots.
No it isn't you clueless fuck. t. Irishman.

Any NI folk around here suddenly noticed a green and red flag being flown a lot? It's def a loyalist or unionist flag since I always see it with LoL and UDA flags, but I don't know what it is specifically

This. To anyone who hasn't read Ulster-Scots before I encourage them to read this and then judge for themselves if it's a language or not: web.archive.org/web/20120306025941/http://www.psni.police.uk/ulster_scots.pdf

Every worthwhile linguist agrees that Hibernian is a distinct language

Sorry your bitter and petty prejudices blind you from the beauty of my language

Yeah I've seen the same thing. No idea what it's about.

> The Polis Service o Norlin Airlan is aa sat for makkan Norlin Airlan saufer, wi
progressive, professional polisin. We ar ettlet at makkan our services apen
tae the haill commontie.

Top. Lel.

>Sorry your bitter and petty prejudices blind you from the beauty of my language

sorry, but even if we acknowledge it as a distinct language, and at this point it contains more than 50% loan words, most of those badly spelt, but still clearly derived from english, so that claim is debateable.

it is not going to be a beautiful one, it lacks grace, it sounds like clumsy and heavily accented english, and the accent is not a pleasant accent it sounds in fact like the speaker is having to remember how to talk, a language for drunks and fools to curse eachother in,

I don't get this argument
Isn't it universally acknowledged that Hiberno-English is literally just a dialect?

>I think linguistically Castilian Spanish and French are considered similar enough to technically be dialects.
Hell, no. Spanish and French different enough to be unintelligible from each other. I am from Spain and I just can understand a few words in French. The phonemes are not the same and the verbs follow another structure.
Seriously, I don't know why somebody would affirm that.

>Isn't it universally acknowledged that Hiberno-English is literally just a dialect?

not according to I wrote , making the point that its claim to being a language is debateable at best, with only the scots and irish really trying to make that case, and that not only is it not really a separate language but that it is ugly as languages go.

Yes, nobody thinks of Hiberno-English as a language. user is just pulling your leg. I assume because he's mad that somebody referred to Scots as being a separate language from English. The situation isn't comparable though. Scots and English evolved separately from one another, while Hiberno-English just refers to the variety of English spoken in Ireland.

It's absolutely baffling that you guys are replying to them seriously though.

>with only the scots and irish really trying to make that case
Nobody, Irish or otherwise, tries to claim that the variety of English spoken in Ireland is a language in and of itself. user is being facetious and you're falling for it.

I'd definitely consider Scots to be its own language, at least historically. It's been anglicised a fair bit since the beginning of the 20th century and the waters are a bit muddied now.

>Every worthwhile linguist agrees that Hibernian is a distinct language
Name one, big man.

>Sorry your bitter and petty prejudices blind you from the beauty of my language
I'm Irish you mong. There is no such thing as """"hibernian""""

I know you're joking but I'm in an anticraic humour so you can get to fuck with this shite. Go to /int/ or something.

>Irishman
>anticraic humour

fuck off

>I'd definitely consider Scots to be its own language, at least historically. It's been anglicised a fair bit since the beginning of the 20th century and the waters are a bit muddied now.

bollocks, scots gaelic is a language, scots english is a dialect, the fact that the daft bastards occasionally wrote phonetically rather than with proper spelling does nothing to change that fact

>scots english is a dialect, the fact that the daft bastards occasionally wrote phonetically rather than with proper spelling does nothing to change that fact
For a start, "Scots" and "Scottish English" are very different things. Scots, historically anyway, was never written phonetically, no more so than English was anyway.

Moreover, Scots was historically considered a language by the international community.

>"The author of the anonymous 1548 work, The Complaynt of Scotland, laid out a case for there being manifold cultural differences between England and Scotland, including differences in language. In England, correspondence in Scots was both written and received, though it was often tinged with some Anglicisation.

>In 1624, the English operating in Ireland petitioned for clerks who spoke Scots, because their Scottish peers' letters could "not be read or understood.'

>In 1578, the Italian tutor John Florio wrote that Elizabeth I was able to speak eight languages, “Scottish” among them, listed separately from English. Supporting this, the Scottish wife of Irish Lord Turlough O’Neill, Agnes Campbell, penned a letter in Scots to Elizabeth I in 1571, because she could not speak English.

>In the 16th century, Scottish priest Ninian Winzet wrote an angry letter to John Knox, complaining that he could not understand Knox's writing anymore, and they would have to correspond in Latin. Knox had started to write in English due to his association with English refugees in Switzerland, and other Scottish writers besides Winzet claimed to have difficulty understanding him.

>In the early 16th century, the Scottish philosopher Florence Wilson was said by Frenchman Barthelemy Aneau to be fluent in several languages, including “Escossais”, but explicitly not "Anglais". In 1590, during a meeting with Dutch Envoys, one Colonel Stuart at the court of James VI (as recorded by an English writer) “had drawn up a certain writing, first in the Scotch language” which he had to translate to Latin to be understood by the Englishman. In 1498, Don Pedro de Ayala, Spanish ambassador to James IV, remarked that Scottish and English were "as different as the languages of Aragon and Castille". In 1533 in Sweden, the Scots book The Richt Way To the Kingdome of Hevine was published by reformer John Gau, translated from Danish for a Scottish audience, and was remarked upon by an English observer as being written in "his own Scottish language"

notably both aragon and castille are both types of spanish, not distinct languages, the centuries inbetween have seen extensive anglicanisation of scottish until by the late 18th century scots as a separate language had decayed.

Scots is a dialect, no more a different language than american english or australian english or for a example closer to home welsh english.

it may have been a separate language but even as early as 1548 as you noted the language was begining to be subsumed by what we know as english today.

>Scots is a dialect, no more a different language than american english or australian english or for a example closer to home welsh english.
>American English
"There are wolves and bandits at the boundary of the forest, please send more soldiers to the fort over the hill"
>Australian English
"There are wolves and bandits at the boundary of the forest, please send more soldiers to the fort over the hill"
>Welsh English
"There are wolves and bandits at the boundary of the forest, please send more soldiers to the fort over the hill"
>Scots
"Thairis woufis an reiviris i the meith o the canreuch, bid I caw ye fir mair soldatis tae the broch abuinne the drom"

There's kind of a difference there, wouldn't you say?

>it may have been a separate language but even as early as 1548 as you noted the language was begining to be subsumed by what we know as english today.
Definitely not as early as 1548, that part was in reference to Scots as written by Englishmen. Obviously if you're writing in a language similar to yours you're probably going to include some of your own vocabulary in it, especially in an era before a codified standard of vocabulary and spelling. For example in 1556, King Philip and queen Mary of England addressed a letter dated to the Regent of Scotland discussing the welfare of a shipwrecked Russian merchant. The letter is written in Scots, but it uses, for example, the English words "frome", "our" and "forasmuch", rather than the Scots equivalents "fae", "owr" and "fersameikle".

Heavily anglicised Scots starts appearing at the end of the 17th century, but it was only anglicised within the realm of writing. Written Scots, arguably, ceased to be a distinct language from English, but spoken Scots never did. You can see this a bit later when we start finding Kirk session minutes from the middle of the 18th century, where the vocabulary resembles 15th century Scots more than it does 17th.

>notably both aragon and castille are both types of spanish
The language of Castile is Spanish, Spaniards do call their language "Castilian" after all, but the Aragonese was another Romance developed along with the Navarrese. They were pretty similar, and once the Castilian Trastamaras became kings of Aragon the Aragonese speech fell off favour and the Castilian romance grow more and more popular in the whole Spain becaming what we call Spanish today.