A Hiberno-English Dialect of West Tyrone

Bruce D. Boling

Among the holdings of the Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a series of personal letters written by members of the Sproule family of the west Tyrone townland of Carncorran Glebe (referred to simply as 'Carncorran' by the correspondents), in the parish of Ardstraw, barony of Omagh West, just to the southeast of the town of Castlederg. The 29 letters in the collection date from 1845 to 1890 and originate from both Ireland and the United States (principally Ohio; see Appendix 2 below for a complete list of dates and places of writing and names of correspondents). The principal purpose of this essay is to provide the reader with an inventory of the linguistic content of the letters and to throw light on the English spoken in the extreme western reaches of county Tyrone in the second half of the 19th century.

The letters are composed in an unself-conscious ('naive') style, close if not identical to the spoken word, and this feature makes them an important source for the reconstruction of the Hiberno-English speech current in west Tyrone at the time of writing. What follows is an attempt at an account of the grammatical and lexical features of the dialect of the Sproule letters. The data are arranged in broad classes of phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and phraseology. Considerations of space forbid exhibiting more than a selection of what is a very rich linguistic lode. Where appropriate, all forms and constructions cited are illustrated in context and, when deemed necessary to comprehension, provided with glosses. It is hoped that a complete edition of the letters can be made available on some future occasion.

Surname distribution places the origin of the Sproule family in Dumbarton, Scotland, and family tradition has it that the older generation spoke 'with a Scotch accent'. Griffith's Valuation and the Tithe Applotment Composition Books surround the Sproules with friends and relations bearing Scots surnames, although the area was settled by English undertakers. The letters also teem with Scots surnames, and we may legitimately ask whether we have to do here with an outlyer Scots dialect. We will attempt to answer the question at the end of the presentation of dialect features.

This essay is intended as the first in a series exploiting the linguistic aspects of the many thousands of immigrants' letters collected by Professor Kerby A. Miller and the author to form the basis of a 'personal' history of Irish immigration to North America from the earliest times to the present (the first volume of this material was published under the title Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan 1685-1815 by Oxford University Press in March 2003).

A few remarks on editorial conventions are warranted. Square brackets enclose matter originally present in the text which is now either gone altogether (because, for example, there is a hole in the paper) or obscured (because, for example, it lies on a fold). Square brackets are also used to indicate that in the case of errors the editor has rearranged letters for easy comprehension; e.g. int[ar]ly 'entirely' for intraly in the text. Angled brackets indicate that a letter, word, or phrase is missing in the original: e.g. un<con>cidret 'inconsiderate' for textual uncidret. Angled brackets are also used to indicate spelling and square brackets pronunciation. The location of the cited matter is given in the right-hand margin and has the form 'letter number.page number.line number'.

PHONOLOGY

MORPHOLOGY

LEXICON

GAELICISMS

ULSTER-SCOTS OR MID-ULSTER?: A TENTATIVE ANSWER

Most of the hallmarks of Ulster-Scots are absent from the language of the Sproule letters. The letters know nothing of such Ulster-Scots staples as the negative particle -no/na(e), the modal auxiliary maun, the prepositions tae ('to') and wae ('with'), [e] for [o] (as in claes ('clothes') or hame ('home'), the loss of final [l] as in a ('all') or ca ('call'), etc. On the other hand the letters regularly exhibit features which are characteristic of Mid-Ulster speech, such as [ar] as a development of [ɛr] (cf. Ulster-Scots nervish 'nervous' vs. Mid-Ulster narvich ness, 8.2.13-15), the negative particle not, etc. The only unequivocal features of Ulster-Scots found in the letters are the retention of Middle English [u:] (vs. Standard [au]) (Phonology, section 3), the coalescence of the cot- and coat- classes (Phonology, section 2), and the monophthongization of [oi] to [o] (Phonology, section 14).

The area of west Tyrone in which the Sproule family held land from the 17th century on was heavily settled by people of Scots ancestry, as is indicated by the high incidence of Scots surnames among the landholders. One would therefore expect that the language spoken by these landholders would be a variety of Scots, as it surely was at the beginning of the settlement. That the speech recorded in the Sproule letters in fact looks far more like Mid-Ulster than Ulster-Scots has probably to do with the fact that the Scots community of west Tyrone is isolated from the Ulster-Scots heartland and its language is therefore vulnerable to Mid-Ulster linguistic pressure. To judge from the paucity of unequivocal Ulster-Scots features it seems likely that the language of the Sproule letters is in an advanced stage of assimilation to the proximate Mid-Ulster dialect and will sooner or later sever its ties with the distant Ulster-Scots speech. Such assimilation is not unknown in Ulster: a similar development took place in south Co. Donegal on the Murray estate, isolated like west Tyrone from the Ulster-Scots linguistic heartland. In the mid 18th century the tenants on the estate spoke Ulster-Scots, but by the late 19th century the local speech had assimilated to Mid-Ulster (for a comparison of this south Donegal Ulster-Scots speech to the language of the Sproule letters see Kerby A. Miller et al., Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan (New York, 2003), ch. 2 'Alexander Crawford, 1736'). Interestingly, in spelling (as opposed to grammar) the Sproule letters have a heavier Scots cast, showing such typical Scots spellings as sch for sh (e.g. sche 'she'), hir for her ('her'), ght for final gh (e.g. Omaght 'Omagh') among others. These spellings, which do not appear in writings of Mid-Ulster provenance, are relicts on a level with the phonological archaism seen in the retention of Middle English [u:]. Both phonological and orthographic archaism in the Sproule letters highlight the loss of most of the distinctive features of an Ulster-Scots speech well on its way to assimilation to a neighboring language.

APPENDIX 1: PECULIARITIES OF SPELLING

a. Conventions

b. Departures from the Standard:

APPENDIX 2: DATES OF THE LETTERS

NOTE

(1) Here 'C' refers to any consonant, 'V' to any vowel