After
the 8th century Scots spread rapidly and soon became the dominant language
of the Scottish lowlands. As it evolved it retained the vocabulary of its
various linguistic influences. Today it has Anglo-Saxon words like bairn
(child), Norse words such as kirk (church), Flemish words such as redd (tidy),
French words such as douce (soft), Gaelic words such as glen and loch and
from Latin sederunt (a meeting) and dispone (convey land).
This
was the language the Scots settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries brought
to the North Eastern part of Ireland. However, Scots was soon to lose its
status as the official language of Scotland and this had an impact on Ulster
Scots. Two factors account for this: the Reformation brought to Scotland
in 1560 by John Knox and the Union of the Crowns in 1603.
When
the Reformation occurred in Scotland the Bible was available only in English
and not in Scots. This had a devastating impact on the use of Scots. Then,
in 1603 the Scottish court moved to London and adopted the English language
and manners. These two events led to the decline of written Scots which
also suffered from the lack of an agreed standard written version. In Scotland,
apart from the writing of Burns, Ramsay and Fergusson and in the 20th century
the writings of McDiarmid and Gribbon, Scots survived largely as a spoken
language. In Northern Ireland the Ulster Scots literary tradition was kept
alive by the Weaver-poets who published a body of work towards the end of
the 18th century. Ulster Scots continued to be used in prose works up to
the 20th century.
In
Northern Ireland there was little known or written about Ulster Scots until
the late 1980s when politicians began to foster public interest. Its revival
was firmly placed within a political context giving rise, in some circles,
to linguistic apartheid with Ulster Scots being associated with the unionist
tradition and Irish with the nationalist tradition.
