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This chapter examines the history of the languages of Ireland after Partition. In Ireland, the policies of the Gaelic League and other revivalists were implemented by the Government in education and the civil service, the language was enshrined in the constitution, and the net result was a decline in the use of Gaelic throughout the 20th century and the almost complete dominance of English in civil, public, and everyday life. In Northern Ireland, Gaelic was effectively banned because of its association with Irish nationalism and more or less completely disappeared. However, over the past twenty years or so a revival of Gaelic has taken place — both North and South of the border — and the linguistic situation is now changing. The chapter traces the emergence of recent legislation in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland designed to protect not only the rights of Gaelic speakers, but also those of the users of other languages, including in the case of Northern Ireland, Ulster-Scots — a linguistic form which has gained prominence only very recently — and minority languages.

The final chapter of this book briefly considers the way in which a select number of writers have used the linguistic wealth of the island of Ireland to pose and interrogate the question of the language. Particular attention is paid to the work of contemporary poets writing in Gaelic, English, Hiberno-English, and Ulster-Scots. But the fact that Ireland and Northern Ireland are now multi-cultural societies (there are more than thirty language communities in Northern Ireland alone) raises another pressing issue: is the cultural model which has lasted for so long in the island of Ireland, one which conceives of culture in terms of the clash of two or perhaps three traditions, a model which matches what Friel calls the ‘landscape of fact’ in the new social formations which are emerging on either side of the border?

The arrival of mass film and television reshaped the long-established literary conceit of the tinker. Thus, the final chapter considers screen portrayals of Travellers, particularly contemporary American depictions of the descendants of Traveller immigrants. US racial history facilitates the cinematic figuring of the Irish-American Traveler as a lovable ‘white trash’ rascal who invokes both post-Famine Irish-American ‘ethnic whiteness’ and furtively appealing Scots-Irish (Ulster-Scots) roguishness; though eventually integrated into an unhyphenated ‘white’ Americanness, the 18th-century Ulster Irish were initially perceived to be scoundrels. The discourse of an ethnically unmarked ‘white trashness’, originally created in response to the incivility of the subsequently assimilated eighteenth-century Irish, inflects the ‘white‘ Traveler’s contemporary image as unreformed but reformable Same. This is considered as an explicit contrast to the irrefutable Othering of the Irish Traveller in many Irish films.

Ulster in the seventeenth century was a province of aggressive inward migration. In the succeeding three centuries it was a region of net outward migration. The descendants of the Scottish and English newcomers laid the basis for commercial enterprises which made east Ulster the most economically advanced region in Ireland. Yet Ulster continued to send thousands of migrants across the Atlantic to north America. Presbyterians, of Scottish descent, dominated these outflows. From the later eighteenth century onwards many migrants found their way to Britain and to Scotland in particular. Thus, one of the largest concentrations of Scots outside of Scotland was to be found in Belfast. As with so much else, industry and industrialization animated these cross-channel movements. More generally, movements of people in recent centuries can be related to Ulster's positioning within a British and an Atlantic world that was experiencing unprecedented economic, social and demographic change.

Most scholars agree that modern populists tell nationalist stories promising to protect “the people” against malignant elites. They appeal to economic and cultural anxieties stirred by many forms of globalization. They also respond, however, to the multiplicity of competing narratives of political identity that have proliferated globally since the end of the Cold War. These have created a cacophony of identity stories that often heightens the appeal of familiar nationalist ones. Examples are drawn from the three great waves of modern nation-building, including Wisconsin in the U.S. and Ulster-Scots in the U.K.’s Northern Ireland; the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines; and the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

This chapter focuses on the distinctive phonological systems of accent types found in Northern Ireland and outlines the characteristics of Mid Ulster English, South Ulster English and Ulster Scots. The analysis is based on recent recordings of word list, reading passage and interview data from a range of informants representing different regional and social backgrounds. There is a considerable body of scholarship on the phonetics/phonology/prosody of these varieties and we are fortunate that several large-scale phonological surveys have been conducted on them (often using sophisticated sociolinguistic/dialectological methodologies and frameworks of interpretation). However, these largely reflect urban Belfast and other urban/rural varieties of the 1970s and 1980s. The new materials presented here extend our knowledge of innovations that have happened subsequently and change in progress.

This chapter summarises what the book is about and how it is structured, it introduces the concept of Mid-Ulster English (MUE) and how it relates to other dialects in Ulster and the rest of Ireland, and it describes sources that may be used in the study of the dialect’s phonology. These include not only published data and descriptions, but also substantial unpublished corpora, which the author puts to use in the analysis in the rest of the book. It also includes a new map of the linguistic landscape of Ulster. In addition, it begins to explore the phonological origins of MUE and what kinds of questions we need to answer.

Many analysts of the politics of Northern Ireland have argued that there exists some form of ‘Ulster nationalism’, particularly among Ulster Unionists. After 1886, when Gladstone promised Home Rule for Ireland, Unionists fashioned an Ulster identity predicated on Protestantism and ‘loyalty’ to the British Crown. This was contrasted with the ‘disloyalty’ of Catholics in what would become the Republic of Ireland. This form of ‘nationalist unionism’ was more ethnic in character than the civic variety which existed in Scotland and Wales. It too contained contradictions, not least its suspicion of Westminster and paranoia as to the intentions of successive UK governments towards the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. At various points after 1921, some Ulster Unionists even toyed with the idea of Northern Ireland becoming a ‘Dominion’ (like the Irish Free State) or else pursuing some other form of ‘independence’ from the UK.

This chapter explores the relationship between literature and union among Presbyterian writers in nineteenth-century Ulster. It examines the work of the poet William McComb and the journalist James McKnight, who together were responsible for the publication of The Repealer Repulsed (1841), a collection of reportage and literary fancy written in response to Daniel O’Connell’s campaign to repeal the 1800 Act of Union. Their various publications employed a shared Ulster–Scottish Presbyterian heritage to express opposition to the imposition of English Protestant forms and principles, and to highlight the importance and distinctiveness of Presbyterian Scots and Ulster-Scots within the United Kingdom. It demonstrates that Presbyterian writers saw Robert Burns as only one part of a broader literary culture that they shared with Britain and that was usually expressed in standard English, included prose as well as poetry, employed a number of literary genres, and sometimes drew upon a shared Gaelic heritage.