What is ULLANS?

There are about 100,000 native speakers of the Ulster-Scots (Ullans) language in Ulster today. Unfortunately only a small number can read and write Ulster-Scots as there has been no formal schooling in the subject for 400 years. It is a Germanic (Teutonic) tongue, closely related to Scots and to some English dialects. The historical roots of the language are in Old Norse, but after 1000 years of contact with English, Gaelic, Latin and Norman-French, each of these other languages have left their mark. Ulster-Scots has evolved during the last 400 years in a very close relationship with the Scots language (Lallans) in Scotland, and continues to be gradually eroded by English.

LALLANS is a Scots word meaning ‘(the Scottish) lowlands’. Robert Burns first used it in print in 1796 with the meaning ‘the lowland Scotch tongue’, and such was the explanation he gave in the glossary to the Belfast edition of his poems published in 1797. Since then the Scots language has been (and still is) sometimes known as Lallans. (The magazine of the Scots Language Society is also called Lallans.)

ULLANS, or ‘the lands of the Ulaid’ (Ulster) is a word used by some modern Ulster-Scots writers and is taken to mean ‘the Ulster-Scots tongue’. However, native speakers of what we refer to as ‘Ullans’ or Ulster-Scots would rarely use any other term than “Scotch” when referring to their own tongue.