Mid Ulster English

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Mid Ulster English is the dialect of most people in the traditional province of Ulster in Ireland, including those in the two main cities. It represents a cross-over area between Ulster Scots and Hiberno-English. The closest affinity of its most commonly spoken form is, however, with Scottish Standard English, and middle-class speakers in particular are sometimes mistaken by outsiders for Scots.

It is an English-based dialect spoken across mid Ulster between the Lagan and Clogher valleys in areas historically planted by settlers, some of whom came to Ireland from the West Midlands of England. However, its vowel length may suggest that at a key point in its formation, most speakers had a Scots substrate, and the demographic contribution of Scotland and Ireland to its speech community is at least as great in each case as that of England. Spoken across Northern Ireland's confessional divides, the dialect has enjoyed higher social prestige than the Ulster Scots dialects that have influenced it to varying degrees. It is currently encroaching on the Ulster Scots area, especially in the Belfast commuter belt, and may eventually consume it; the position of Scots on the Ards Peninsula may now be particularly weak.

Phonology

Main article: phonemic differentiation.

Phonetics are in IPA.

Vowels

/i/	feet	/əi/	fight
/e/	fate	/əʉ/	shout
/ɛ/	bet	/ɛ̈/	bit
/a/	bat	/ɔ̈/	but
/ɑ/	pot	/ɔː/	bought
/o/	boat	/aː/	father
/ʉ/	boot	/ɔe/	boy

Vowels have phonemic vowel length, with one set of lexically long and one of lexically short phonemes. This may be variously influenced by the Scots system. It is considerably less phonemic than Received Pronunciation, and in vernacular Belfast speech vowel length may vary depending on stress.
/a/ in after /w/, e.g. want, what, quality.
/ɑ/ and /ɔː/ distinction in cot, body and caught, bawdy. Some varieties neutralise the distinction in long environments, e.g. don = dawn and pod = pawed.
like, light, meat and beard also with /e/ [lek], [let], [met], [berd]
/e/ may occur in such words as beat, decent, leave, Jesus, etc.
Lagan Valley /ɛ/ before /k/ in take and make, etc.
/ɛ/ before velars in sack, bag, and bang, etc.
Merger of /a/ - /aː/ in all monosyllables, e.g. Sam and psalm [sɑːm].
/i/ may occur before palatalized consonants, e.g. king, fish , condition, brick and sick.
/ɑ/ may occur before /p/ and /t/ in tap and top, etc.
/ʉ/ before /r/ in floor, whore, door, board, etc.
Vowel oppositions before /r/, e.g. /ɛrn/ earn, /fɔr/ for and /for/ four.

Consonants

Rhoticity, that is, retention of /r/ in all positions.
Palatalisation of in the environment of front vowels.
/l/ not vocalised, except historically; generally "dark" as in Scottish English rather than "slender" as in Hiberno-English.
/b/ for /p/ in words such as pepper.
/d/ for /t/ in words such as butter.
/g/ for /k/ in words such as packet.
/ʍ/ - /w/ contrast in which - witch. This feature is recessive, particularly in vernacular Belfast speech.
Dental realisations of may occur through Irish influence before /r/, e.g. ladder, matter, dinner and pillar, etc.
Elision of /d/ in hand [hɑːn], candle /'kanl/ and old [əʉl], etc.
Elision of in lamb [lam] and sing [sɪŋ], thimble, finger etc.
/θ/ and /ð/ for th.
/x/ for gh is retained in proper names and a few dialect words or pronunciations, e.g. lough, trough and sheugh.

Mid-Ulster English by region

Belfast

The urban Belfast dialect is not limited to the capital itself and also takes in neighbouring cities and towns such as Lisburn, as well as towns whose inhabitants are mostly from Belfast (such as Craigavon, further west in County Armagh). The dialect has influenced the way the rest of the province sounds through the media (Radio Ulster, BBC Northern Ireland), and a growing number of young people are adopting the accent and vocabulary of Belfast through exposure to them, as well as through commuting, etc.

Features of the accent include several vowel shifts, including one from /æ/ to /ɛ/ (/bɛg/ for "bag"). The accent is also arguably more nasal compared with the rest of Ulster.

Other phonological features include the following:

Long vowels are diphthongized in closed syllables, usually to /ɪə/. Hence "maid" is pronounced /mɛ:d/, while "made" is /mɪəd/.
The /ɔ/ phoneme in "pot" and "paw" is better distinguished than other Ulster dialects, with short "o" often unrounded (i.e. "not" is /nat/, while "pawed" is /pɔ:d/ (see "Vowel Lengthening" above).
The /au/ phoneme is typically pronounced /ɑʉ/. In strong dialects, the second vowel in this diphthong can become a [rhotic] consonant, so that "doubt" and "dart" are nearly merged to /dɑɺt/.

Some of the vocabulary used among young people in Ulster, such as the word "spide", is of Belfast origin.

North, north-east and east Ulster

The dialect in some places here is similar, if not identical to, the Belfast dialect, but (especially rural) places such as north Antrim are strongly Ulster Scots-influenced, and Scots pronunciation of words is often heard. A good example is in the County Antrim village of Carnlough, where locals speak with an almost Scottish accent.

In the 1830s, Ordnance Survey memoirs came to the following conclusion about the dialect of the inhabitants of Carnmoney, east Antrim:

Their accent is peculiarly, and among old people disagreeably strong and broad.

The results of a BBC sociolinguistic survey can be found here.

Derry

The speech of the inhabitants of Ulster's second-largest city and the areas around differs from that of Belfast, being simultaneously more Irish and more Scottish. There is a higher incidence of palatalisation after /k/ and its voiced equivalent /g/(eg. /kʲɑɹ/ "kyar" for "car"), perhaps through influence from Hiberno-English. However, the most noticeable difference is perhaps the intonation, which is unique to the Derry and Strabane area.

Tyrone

The speech in Co. Tyrone is again influenced by Hiberno-English, but retains a large lexicon with many words from Scots and Irish.

Vocabulary

Much non-standard vocabulary found in Mid Ulster English and many meanings of Standard English words peculiar to the dialect come from Scots and Irish. Some examples are shown in the table below. Many of these are also used in Hiberno-English, especially in the northern half of the island.

Mid-Ulster English	Standard English	Notes
Ach!/Och!	annoyance, regret, etc. (general exclamation)	Usually used to replace "Oh!" and "Ah!". "Ach" is Irish for "but", which is usually used in the same context.
aye	yes	General Scots and dialect or archaic English, first attested 1575.
bake	mouth	From Scots, extension of meaning from beak. Many body parts are also from Scots: see below.
boke, boak	vomit	From Scots bowk, Middle Scots l-vocalisation with West Central monophthongisation to /o/ betraying the origins of Scottish Planters. Cognate with English "baulk".
cowp, cope	to tip over, to fall over	From Scots cowp, Middle Scots l-vocalisation with West Central monophthongisation to /o/ betraying the origins of Scottish Planters.
craic	banter, fun, eg. "What's the craic (with ye)?" - "What's up?"	From Scots or Northern English, but often found in an Irish Gaelic spelling.
culchie	a farmer, rural dweller	Either from "Kiltimagh" (KULL-cha-mah), a town in County Mayo, or from the -culture in "agriculture".
dander	walk (noun or verb)	Usually encountered as a noun in (Ulster) Scots (daunder), its use as a verb is well attested in the Dictionary of the Scots Language, and Ulster use may reflect the preponderence of nouns over verbs in an Irish adstrate.
duke, jouk, juke	duck, dodge	From Scots jouk, "to dodge".
gob, gub	mouth	Perhaps from Scots gab, but also Scottish Gaelic and Irish gob, mouth.
gutties	plimsolls	Note also the phrase "Give her the guttie" - "Step on it (accelerate)". From Gutta-percha, india-rubber. Also used in Scotland.
hallion	a good-for-nothing	From Scots.
(to have) a hoak, hoke	to dig, to look around in e.g. "Have a wee hoak"	From Scots howk, Middle Scots l-vocalisation with West Central monophthongisation to /o/ betraying the origins of Scottish Planters.
jap	to spill	From Scots jaup.
lug	ear	Scots, almost certainly from a Scandinavian source, c.f. Norwegian lugg, a tuft of hair.
oxter	armpit	Scots
poke	ice-cream	From Scots poke, a bag or pouch.
scunnered, scundered	embarrassed (esp. Belfast area), annoyed (around Tyrone)	From Scots scunner.
sheugh	Pronounced /ʃʌx/ a small, shallow ditch.	From Scots sheuch.
thole	tolerate, put up with	From Scots, with numerous Germanic cognates.
thon	that	From Scots, originally yon, the th by analogy with this and that.
throughother	untidy, like "something the cat dragged in"	This usage has parallels in both Goidelic, e.g. Irish trína chéile, and Germanic, e.g. German durcheinander.
wee	little, but also used as a generic diminutive	Cognate with German wenig, meaning "a little", although more closely related to English weigh.

Furthermore, speakers of the dialect conjugate many verbs according to how they are formed in the most vernacular forms of Scots, e.g. driv instead of drove and driven as the past tense of drive, etc. (literary Scots drave, driven). Verbal syncretism is extremely widespread, as is the Northern subject rule, which has probably been reinforced by Irish.

References

Here an Irish film critic describes the nasal Belfast accent that American actress Gillian Anderson put on for the film The Mighty Celt as "nothing short of the real thing".
From p 13 of Ulster-Scots: A Grammar of the Traditional Written and Spoken Language, by Robinson, Philip, published 1997.
BBC Your Voice poll results
Elmes, Simon Talking for Britain: A Journey Through the Nation's Dialects (2005) (ISBN 0-14-051562-3)
See this lexicon of south-west Tyrone for examples
See for more information on the Belfast dialect.

External links

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Last updated on Friday December 28, 2007 at 08:37:09 PST (GMT -0800)
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