The Ulster-Scots Dialect Boundaries in the Province of Ulster*

Robert J. Gregg

The Questionnaires — Lexical and Phonological

The Lexical Questionnaire

In the early summer of 1960 a lexical questionnaire was drawn up with the purpose in mind of determining the geographical limits of the US dialect of the Laggan district in E Donegal. It was hoped that a number of the items would yield a bundle of isoglosses that would delineate the boundary between US and the UHE areas.

In compiling the list, recourse was had to the literature relating to Donegal dialects:

The latter was particularly useful. It includes not only Hart's items but hundreds of others — with etymologies —culled from a very full bibliography of Donegal dialect literature of all types.

In the final draft of this questionnaire many other sources were consulted, including the two lexical books circulated by the Linguistic Survey of Scotland, Orton and Dieth's questionnaire for the English Survey, Kurath's items for the American Survey and Henry's for the Irish Survey.

It soon became apparent, however, that many of the Scottish words had spread far beyond the original settlement area as described by the historians of the Laggan plantation, and that their rather haphazard distribution would clearly not give a satisfactory linguistic demarcation line.(31) In other words, for the very particular objective of this investigation, this questionnaire would not serve and something much more specific had to be devised. For purposes of comparison this first questionnaire is added here in full:

The Experimental Lexical Questionnaire (32)

Introduction | Historical and Geographical Factors | Lexical Questionnaire | Phonological Questionnaire | Discussion | Notes