The Blether Region

The American academic Dr. Séamus Ó Direáin has been mapping the dialects of the Aran Islands for a quarter of a century. One of the interesting tidbits about the linguistic map of the archipelago is that the speech of one island, Inis Oírr, is closer to Munster than Conamara Irish.

Of course, that's no surprise, given its historically better connections with the south — boiling down to the fact that for much of human history, water, rather than being a barrier, has been a linking medium.

Nor is the phenomenon limited to the west. J. A. H. Murray, later to become founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, was able to quote his correspondent Robert Shipboy MacAdam in support of the "absolute identity" of the vernacular of eastern Ulster and Arran (the Scottish island) in his seminal work The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland.

Indeed, aficionados of Ulster Scots will be equally well acquainted with the like, to which the fact that Scots is spoken on both sides of the Sheuch testifies so eloquently.

Some notes by a recent American visitor to England have been doing the rounds on the Internet. Generally positive, he nonetheless has certain reservations about aspects of British life, such as the inexplicable lack of mixer taps — a problem about which Mrs. Blether has also been known to put in her tuppence worth.

More to the point, he also expresses surprise that the British are "defined" by their accents. Perhaps that last one is so obvious that it passes many of us by unnoticed, but egalitarian America provides a good example that the dominant reality need not be so (indeed, among the same racial groups at least, America's accents often differ so little, and so overwhelmingly from place to place rather than from class to class, that, where they exist, they are popularly referred to as "dialects"). Closer to home, in Germany, by an historical quirk the question of whether one has a "mild" or "strong" accent often has more to do with whether one lives in the north or south of the country than with class per se. Meanwhile, people from Norway generally speak their regional dialect all of the time. Indeed, much to the surprise of those from outside Scandinavia, they continue to do so even when they go to Sweden or Denmark.

Perhaps the most extreme examples of speech defining class in the UK are found in Scotland, where, under the pressure of Anglicisation, previously homogeneous Scots dialects have split into the distinct varieties of Scottish Standard English and Scots-influenced working-class vernacular. However, England too is subject to the great divide. Although very few people actually speak RP, how closely their speech approximates to the variety is a very good indicator of class. RP itself ("Received Pronunciation") is so called because it does not hail from a particular region. Rather it grew out of the vernacular of various key cities of yesteryear (all of them, broadly speaking, in the southern part of England) and is perpetuated by a complex life-support system of private schools, Oxbridge, and, one might argue, broadcasting. Its status as a "standard" variety is controversial, since it may be spoken by only 1% to 3% of the UK population.

The trouble with RP is its unparalleled prestige and, therefore, the fact that those who speak it — whose parents, let's not forget, had the spare income to school them privately — are wont to be favoured undeservedly. RP is associated with intelligence and high-level learning, which they may or may not have, and money and confidence, which they usually do. If we want a fairer society, there are steps that we can take to do away with it.

Stop treating private schools as charities and start treating them as businesses for tax purposes.
Since the privately educated get better grades at school but then go on to do worse than state pupils with similar grades at university, factor that in when offering places.
Cap the proportion of privately educated pupils at any given university (don't stop them going; just stop artificially sending them all to the same place).
Federalise the BBC. If RP is the standard language of the south of England, why should the rest of the UK have to listen to it?
Redistribute wealth to the poor.
Abolish the House of Lords.
Abolish the Monarchy.
Encourage regional varieties, regional theatre, regional broadcasting, and above all regional democracy.

As an aside, the Blether Region sometimes watches University Challenge and on rare occasions manages to get as many as three answers correct. Be that as it may, has anyone ever found it odd that the collegiate universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London are allowed to enter multiple teams, while Liverpool and Sheffield aren't? And doesn't that tell us rather a lot about the stranglehold of RP-speakers over our national broadcaster?

The Herald has an interesting article on Police Scotland, the newly created national police force, mulling over whether to brand itself bilingually.

The journalism has obviously benefited from some quality time spent with those working to promote Gaelic, since some of the more off-the-wall misconceptions — such as extreme cost and it all being an SNP plot — are notable by their absence. Indeed, as the article points out, current efforts for Gaelic began in a big way under a previous Labour/Liberal-Democrat Administration. Nor are all of those involved in promoting Gaelic Nationalists; many native speakers and academics support the Union (learners, one suspects, not so much), and some of them make unflattering comparisons of SNP policy with that of its predecessors.

Be that as it may, the Blether Region's eye was caught by the following.

"However, in some countries far right groups have reacted with anger when minority languages became associated with symbols of state power, including road signs and, especially, the police and military."

That is, of course, exactly the situation in Northern Ireland. Bilingual signage is either cost-neutral or very close to it. Moreover, as the name suggests, it is bilingual, i.e. retains English. Any claims that Protestants and Unionists would be disadvantaged by it are transparently spurious. Essentially they are arguments about symbolism and "purity" rather than rights. Dodgy ground, in other words.

And yet it remains the case that most representatives of Northern Ireland's self-styled non-sectarian party, the Alliance, either buy into that cranky and prejudiced view themselves or conclude that potential criminal damage to such signs should be pre-empted by the drastic and illiberal expedient of banning them.

One wonders what the reaction would be in England if supposedly moderate politicians took the same view about, say, a foreign-language sign pointing to a north London synagogue or a gurudwara in Slough. Probably, even if they shared the Alliance Party view, they would at least have the sense not to say so.

The Scotsman has an article headed "Nicola Sturgeon calls for an end to online abuse". The norie that online abuse, which is always wrong, is the exclusive province of nationalists is of course nonsense, though nonsense that suits the Scotsman.

The Blether Region's interest was piqued, however, by the cause of the First Minister's comments. It seems that Wings Over Scotland, aka Stuart Campbell, had questioned the right of J. K. Rowling, a £1 million donor to the Better Together campaign, to support the Scottish rugby team.

The Blether Region is not very big on sports, even ones like rugby that let the wee pretendy nations of Scotland and Wales compete alongside real ones like Fiji and Samoa. Hell, rugby even lets the Irish pretend they're united rather than partitioned into perpetual dysfunction.

As readers may have guessed, the Blether Region is being sarcastic, and yet a very good case can be made that separate sporting teams, like separate promissory banknotes or stamps with cute wee thistles on them, are a distraction from constitutional change, muddying the waters about where power lies. One might even call them the opium of the people.

As for Wings Over Scotland, why someone who, like 55% of Scots, voted No in the referendum, should be banned from supporting Scotland at the rugby is not obvious (would you ban your granny?). Moreover, Wings Over Scotland itself has been guilty of far, far worse in its comments on Gaelic, whose promotion it rejects on the grounds that keeping it alive amounts to "blood-and-soil ethnic nationalism".

Although there are some cultural nationalists whose main or exclusive linguistic interest is Scots rather than Gaelic, Stuart Campbell's comments would seem to preclude that possibility. It seems that, for him, the most potent symbol of Scottish nationality is not language but the predictably macho one of what was once memorably described as "a game played by men with odd-shaped balls"— uncodified before the nineteenth century and named after an English public school.

Good thing the Blether Region no longer reads him.

Recent weeks have seen concern expressed that, in the absence of 50/50 recruitment, the PSNI is gradually, like its predecessor the RUC, becoming dangerously unrepresentative of the population (remembering that, in the target recruitment cohort, it is now Catholics rather than Protestants who predominate).

In the Blether Region's view, opposing 50/50 recruitment, as Justice Minister David Ford has done, is a mistake, and one that betrays a doctrinaire emphasis on what Northern Ireland should be rather than what it is or, more negatively, threatens to become. Put bluntly, 50/50 recruitment is important because it keeps people alive, both within and without the police. It keeps Northern Ireland stable and lets people get on with their daily lives and business.

Yet there is an alternative to recruitment quotas, and one that comes at zero cost to the tax-payer. Last month Police Scotland launched a consultation on the incremental adoption of bilingual branding. Some people will have their doubts at whether such a change could really be achieved without public expense, but a much more ambitious re-branding involving place-names was achieved by ScotRail a few years ago at a cost of thousands rather than tens of thousands.

If Scotland, as seems very likely, finds itself with a bilingually branded police force in a few years' time, Northern Ireland will be the only Celtic part of the UK to be English-only, since Wales and Cornwall (yes, Cornwall) have already taken the bilingual route.

A cost-free re-branding in Northern Ireland could help save lives. It would, as we have seen, make Norn Iron not only more like the south but more like Great Britain. And it might also prove a good way for the Alliance Party to redeem itself from its policy errors.

Over the past two weekends Blether Region has been watching Tim McGarry's latest Ulster-Scots documentary mini-series, Minding Our Language. Overall he made a pretty fair fist of it, although, as always with such things, one wishes one had been present in the editing suite to comment on one or two matters, the notion that Ulster Scots is legally a language because the non-justiciable European Charter says so (or doesn't say so, as the case may be) being a case in point.

And was the word wheesht really borrowed from Irish, or was it, like crack, already part of the language at the time of the Plantation? Indeed — again, as with crack— a more fundamental question is whether it is a Goidelic word at all. The fact that it appears in Wycliffe's Bible suggests a variant of "hush", a borrowing into, rather than from, Gaelic. Wycliffe was a Yorkshireman by birth, making a Northumbrian origin likely.

One contributor to the programme memorably described the perplexity of a native Scots-speaker when sent trilingual Single Farm Payment literature. The letter can be found here.

The Irish version is bureaucratic, dry, difficult — and correct. Alas, the same cannot be said for the "Ulster Scots". Those able to understand it with any facility must surely be limited to the wee small circle of USLS luminaries who contributed to the translation.

It recks gyely ’at ye dinnae jalouse ’at ye shud pit in fur tha MEA fur ilka fiel. Tha MEA wad be whut we hae wechtit as tha bouns o yer fiels ’at’s shuitin; ye may see is thar onie ither airts ’at’s no shuitin ’at we haenae jubed oan. Gin ye pit in fur thae airts ‘at’s no shuitin, an we fyn thaim whan we’re leukkin roon, yer hansel wull aply be hinnèrt an, lippenin til tha ootcum o oor spierin, yer ownin wull be laiched an ye micht cud be skaithed.

Indeed, there has traditionally been a good deal of "shuitin" in the countryside — mainly at crows.

Yesterday's Belfast Telegraph has a prominent piece on Newry, Mourne and Down Council's Irish-language strategy, which will see up to £150,000 per annum go on Gaeilge. The DUP have branded it a "ludicrous indulgence" in the current financial climate. It's difficult to say whether the choice of the word "indulgence" was intended as a theological pun, but the Blether Region wouldn't put anything past them uns.

Unlike councils in Great Britain, those in Northern Ireland generally speaking raise their own funds, since many functions discharged at local level elsewhere — housing being a good example — are centralised here. Perhaps the DUP would have better grounds to complain were central government grants intended for quite different purposes being diverted to Irish, but there is no doubt in the current case that it is ratepayers' cash; and neither is there any doubt that, in an overwhelmingly Nationalist area, ratepayers will, by and large, support the move.

The DUP, of course, built its reputation in local government on low taxes in areas such as Castlereagh. Many people of a Conservative bent will instinctively support its view on the services that a council may properly provide. Closer consideration, however, reveals the truth: these services are being provided by some councils and not others because there is no Irish language Act in force to give central direction on the issue. The tight fiscal environment that, as the DUP would have it, should preclude such schemes, may also explain why it is councils rather than Stormont that are taking the initiative. Finally, although the new super-councils were always likely to result in a carve-up and a highlighting of communal rather than local identity, one should not forget the demographic march of time.

So what might the effect of the Bel-Tel's anti-Gaelic campaign be? Well, one of them will be to accelerate the trend that it seeks to decry. Unionists can do little to halt the language's progress in local government, but they will feel emboldened in their refusal to reject any language Bill put before the Assembly.

As for the newspaper itself, this may well be evidence of a change of direction under its new editor, Gail Walker, and a shift to a more avowedly Unionist stance. The newspaper market, like the market for Unionist politics, is a declining one, and Ms Walker's intention may be to gobble up the demographic that keeps the News Letter afloat. As such, it can be taken as a parallel to Unionism: despite long-term decline and a generally accepted need to reach out, consolidation based on taking a hard line is the quicker, and therefore the easier, option.

Having reason to research something in a dusty old file recently, the Blether Region came across a letter from the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. Anyone receiving mail from the Department (and not just the recently discussed trilingual kind) will know from its letterheads that the "Ulster-Scots" version of its name nowadays is "Männystrie o Fairms an Kintra Fordèrin".

The letter in the file, however, was from the early years of this century, and boasted a quite different version, "Depairtment o Agricultur an Lannart Oncum".

Now, readers will have their own idea of what the best translation is, and the chances are that it will diverge from both the above. It is the case, however, that the more recent and more common version is inferior on three counts: the employment of diacritics not native to Scots and used in a manner wholly foreign to any widely used language; the reductive equation of "fairms" with "agriculture"; and the use of "Männystrie" for "Department"— not in fact a translation at all but obsolete "Old Stormont" terminology retained by certain age cohorts (more controversially, the same translators have been known to refer to "Northern Ireland" as "Ulstèr").

The older translation, which dates from a time when the Internet was not what it is today, can now hardly be found on the web, and turns up only a few hits even when entered in inverted commas.

Further proof, if such were necessary, that not everything improves over time.

There was an interesting article in the Guardian last month about whether the Glasgow dialect was being eroded owing to the influence of television and modern life. As with all such popular expositions of detailed academic research, in this case that of Jane Stuart-Smith, it runs the risk of raising more questions than it answers.

However, one of the key points seems to be that the partial loss of rhoticity in Glaswegian is, far from a new development, a remarkably old — and therefore rather stable — feature of the dialect. The main contributor is the emergence of a pharyngealised /r/, presumably owing to glottalisation of a preceding /t/, although another, even older feature is assimilation of /r/ in words such as "further". Such assimilation is also recorded in Ulster (Robinson's 1997 grammar lists the form thie for "three"). According to Stuart-Smith, there is even partial loss of rhoticity in a 1916 Wilhelm Doegen recording of a Scots POW.

Of course, those familiar with Duncan Macrae reciting"The Wee Cock Sparra" ("tho he wasne his farra") might have been somewhat sceptical of the hypothesis about a sudden erosion of Glaswegian rhoticity in the first place. Why it has not led to a much more thoroughgoing loss is anyone's guess, but it may be to do with the fact that the phenomenon only happens in one of the (linked) registers available to residents of the city.

A much more dramatic erosion, however, is mentioned only obliquely, as if it were understandably of lesser interest.

"You can hear how he uses lots of Scots vocabulary, but if you listen very carefully, you will also hear that he has almost no "r" sounds in some words like "father"."

Clicking the link reveals a recording of the story of the Prodigal Son, read fluently in traditional Scots (the word turns out to be "faither"). A note on the speaker states: "His mother tongue is Scottish, views his learning of English as an 'additional language'." The Blether Region is unsure which version is being read; it is not William Wye Smith. It may be a Bonaparte translation, or the speaker's own.

One wonders how many Glasgow people would be able to reproduce the Doegen recording today. Certainly not all.

The Blether Region caught a few snippets of Ireland with Simon Reeve the other week, an experience that led to something of an epiphany. It is clear that the Irish do not know what nationalism is, with a fair chunk of the population believing that rejecting nationalism is rejecting a) political violence (a recessive tactic rather than an ideology) or b) an overweening Catholic Church (although, ironically enough, that ain't what it once was either). Nor was the feeling limited to zany liberal revisionists such as the man who said that Ireland must become "pan-global", since an equally zany person working for a conservative Catholic radio station also opined that rejecting Catholicism meant rejecting one's "identity".

The number of Catholics in the world, by the way, is estimated at 1.2 billion.

The real loser from this mush of confusion is Irish. Indeed, an acquaintance of the Blether Region hailing from the South but living in the North even stated that he supported the promotion of the language, although he did not like nationalism (which in his case was likely to mean violence). This, although promoting Irish is surely an example of — peaceful and constitutional — nationalism, and the person in question presumably did not think that his part of Ireland should be subsumed back into the United Kingdom.

For its part, the Blether Region is inclined to view nationalism as the foundation of representative government, the engine of democratic revolution in 1848 and after, and the basic bond that inclines us to accept the result of a lost election. It is a misconstruction to believe that this necessarily involves ethnic purity; Abraham Lincoln's policies against the supposed right of US states to maintain and expand the immoral system of slavery were also known as "nationalism" in their day. E pluribus unum and all that. Scotland, which, contrary to what many Irish Nationalists would like to believe, has two major and one minor surviving ethnicities, is an Old World example of a national identity built on citizenship. Indeed, it is for just that reason that Scotland is far more likely to become independent than, say, Wales.

Evidence of how the kind of voluptuous self-doubt described above is killing Irish is furnished by the Irish Times in an article entitled "Death knell tolling for Irish as community language", which predicts that, within 10 years, there may be no Irish-speaking communities left. The culprit, in the view of Professor Brian Ó Curnáin, is "an 'ignoriat', reflected in elements of academia, the media, State administration and politics, which ignores a 'series of detailed and high-quality research' showing evidence of the death of the language in the Gaeltacht." In journalism the basic form of such misinformation is articles by click-bait polemicists making one of two false claims: a) that Irish has survived thus far and will thus doubtless do so in future; or b) that it is already too late to save the language.

The message that friends of linguistic diversity, and, dare I say it, of nationalism, need to spread is that nothing, good or bad, is inevitable. In the case of Irish, the future lies in our hands.

Former Ulster Unionist leader Tom Elliott has complained about an Irish-language primary being moved out of portakabins and into a disused building formerly occupied by a controlled secondary school.

His territorially tinged reasoning has been roundly criticised by Chris Donnelly at Slugger O'Toole, who points out that he has failed even to consider that the sustainability criteria might be different for primary and post-primary schools.

The intervention will also hardly go down well with current UUP leader Mike Nesbitt, who recently called for Unionists to tone down their attacks on Irish culture.

More worryingly, Elliott's non-arguments have been taken up in an editorial by the ever more stridently Unionist Belfast Telegraph, which headlines its opinion piece with a plea to "hear the reasoning" behind the Education Minister's decision to merge one school and move another into its building.

The odd thing here is that the headline suggests the newspaper may not have bothered trying to find out before going to print.

Not to take into account that one school is a primary is, well, an "elementary" error.

The Blether Region has been browsing the collated responses to last year's consultation on an Irish language Act. Overall, readers will be pleased to know, some 94.7% of the almost 13,000 responses were in favour of bringing Northern Ireland into line with everywhere else. Indeed, when it came to the question of using the language in place-names, the figure was 95.9%.

Given the high number of responses received, evidence of a few duplicates here and there was perhaps to be expected. Overall, however, one is struck by just how much individual thought went into the submissions, and that's unsurprising too — if you go to the trouble of spending years learning a difficult language such as Irish, sending off a well-argued e-mail to DCAL on its behalf is the least you can do. Those few opposing the move, on the other hand — many of them from Loyal Orange Lodges — tend to be somewhat wortkarg. A high number also include the same mistaken use of "proscriptive" for "prescriptive" (although that could, of course, be the fault of DCAL transcribers).

And what result will this groundswell of public sentiment have? In the short term, precisely none, since the Unionist parties will vote against it. The Alliance Party will presumably support an Act — since it quite likes the idea of Irish, if not the reality — as might Basil McCrea. However, the Unionists can always use a petition of concern. Perhaps ironically, the best thing that could happen for the language is a breakdown of devolved government of sufficient length and permanence that the English Conservatives would feel compelled to legislate (they would no doubt introduce gay marriage and allow the abortion of headless foetuses while they were at it).

On the subject of English Conservatives, some years ago the Blether Region read extracts from Alan Clark's political diaries. In one memorable entry, he fantasised about employing torture and murder to keep Margaret Thatcher in power when she was ousted by her party. "Real blood, in other words. Fun, but a bit Angolan." was his judgment (wrong on so many levels, of course).

So how would the Blether Region describe the interaction of the Northern Ireland state with the native language of the province?

No fun, and a bit Turkish.

The Blether Region was in two minds about a piece by An Sionnach Fionn on the latest outbreak of anti-Gaelic loopery in Scotland, this time from Alex Johnstone MSP. Why in two minds, you might ask? Well, because it's a toss-up who's doing the most damage to Gaelic: Mr. Johnstone or An Sionnach Fionn — whose blog is subtitled "Irish Republican views from a Fenian Fox".

One could argue that the use of the word "Fenian" here is simply the reclaiming of a common term of abuse for Catholics. The fact that it's used alongside "Irish Republican", however, suggests that there is no irony about it and that it's being used in its sense of "violent revolutionary". So far, so good: there are of course many people of that persuasion in Ireland, and they are as entitled to comment on Scottish politics as the rest of us Euro-lefties are to comment on Donald Trump's presidential bid — even if not all Americans might thank us for it.

What really won't go down well in Scotland, however, is An Sionnach Fionn's insistence on referring to Scottish Gaelic as "Scottish", which amounts to a chauvinistic rewriting of history. That's all the sadder since the Blether Region — along with, no doubt, many others — has a good deal of sympathy for the view that the importance of Gaelic is not properly recognised by ordinary Scots. It is, after all, an historical fact that the extent of spoken Gaelic set the border with England and thus may be largely responsible for the existence of a separate state. It is a linguistic fact that it is more different from English than Scots is or could ever be. And it is an historical-linguistic fact that, of all Scotland's languages, Gaelic came by far the closest to being spoken across the entire nation, albeit not for very long.

The Blether Region also does its best to counter some of the more common tripey tropes about Gaelic, chief among them "we never spoke it down here" and "funding for Scots and Gaelic should be the same per capita" (try applying that one to seagulls and ospreys, if you will).

On the other hand, the notion that Gaelic is inherently more Scottish than Scots is nonsense; the two arrived in the territory at much the same time. Nor is Scots, as one whiles hears claimed in Ireland, somehow equivalent to Hiberno-English, owing its uniqueness wholly or even largely to a Goidelic substrate; Scots is, according to two respected academic studies, about 0.8% Celtic, of which Gaelic is only one constituent. But the really idiotic claim that Irish-speakers sometimes make — one implicit in An Sionnach's departure from conventionally accepted terminology — is that Gaelic is, or should be recognised as, the only genuine ethnicity in Scotland. Scotland has at least three distinct cultures: Highland; Lowland; and, in Orkney, Shetland and Caithness, Nordic. Although Gaelic culture has long been plundered as a source of national symbolism, it is naive to pretend that Scottish Gaeldom is the only, or even the main, ethnic tradition that people follow. It is patently obvious that pushing Gaelic as the sole legitimate ethnicity can have only two results: the secession of the Northern Isles; and the politicisation and then rejection of the promotion of Gaelic outside its nineteenth-century heartlands. Indeed, it's difficult enough to get the language used on signs in Caithness at the moment. Imagine how much more difficult that would be if it were being done on the basis not of contiguity with recently Gaelic-speaking areas, but of a conscious attempt to change the way people in Caithness view themselves.

The subtext to An Sionnach's choice of words may of course be the belief that certain people in the north of Ireland should wake up to their inherent Gaelachas. Now, if Irish were going to be the sole language of the island, that might be a necessary view to take. As it is likely to remain a regional and minority language, however, and is being promoted on the basis of cultural diversity rather than Nationalism, it seems churlish to say that Scots doesn't matter. Indeed, sensitive promotion of Scots may help sugar the pill when Irish unity eventually happens, as come it will.

While it is (relatively) easy to argue with folk about the facts with regard to Gaelic, it would be a brave man or woman who thought it a good idea to argue with them about what ethnic tradition they should follow. Yes, of course Mr. Johnstone is an obnoxious Tory clown and a serial twister of the truth. He may even be a blinkered political obsessive who thinks only of our crown jewels' value as shrapnel to be gaily stuffed into Mons Meg. But he is also from a north-eastern constituency in a region where people speak one of the most distinctive and sociolinguistically best preserved forms of Scots.

To see one but not the other is to see only half the truth.

The Londonderry Sentinel reports on some obvious, though apparently controversial, points made by poet Wilson Burgess about the Ulster-Scots Agency's spending priorities — which, he says, have left the dialect "on the verge of extinction".

According to Mr. Burgess, "They have put their talents to other things like marching bands and, as I say, Highland Jacobean (sic) dancing, and I just wonder is that one of the things that should have been on their agenda."

Presumably the word "talent" is here being used in the biblical sense.

In a response also reproduced in the article, Agency CEO and former DUP councillor Ian Crozier, who is apparently an ally of Nelson McCausland in north Belfast, has recourse to some dodgy statistical sleight of hand:

"Interest in Ulster-Scots is growing all the time, in schools and community groups all over Ulster. At the last census in 2011, more than 140,000 people (about eight per cent of the population) indicated that they could speak, read or write in Ulster-Scots. Just a year later, the Continuous Household Survey found the figure had almost doubled, to 14 per cent of the population."

Relatively dramatic differences of that kind can of course often be found when comparing apples with pears. The extreme unlikelihood of the speaker population doubling in a single year should have set the alarm bells ringing. Even if that didn't happen within the Agency on this occasion, it surely will have done so among readers of the Sentinel.

It seems that the Agency has defaulted into the kind of batten-down-the-hatches mode more associated with sectarian point-scoring than genuine debate with a critical friend.

But perhaps its sympathies are more Orange than linguistic.

The Impartial Reporter is carrying an article on Fermanagh Grand Lodge's response to the recent consultation on an Irish language Bill ("Orange Order Slams Use of Irish"). It once again underlines the huge gulf in sentiment between the most vocal Northern Ireland Protestants and their more liberal co-religionists in Scotland, the vast majority of whom would sooner ban Orangeism than Gaelic (clue: one makes it embarrassing to be Scots; the other doesn't).

Tellingly, any cultural reason for the promotion of Irish is rejected, while Ulster Scots is mentioned only as a spoiler, barely ranking above the languages of recent immigrants.

"The Irish language is a minority language, and should not be given official status any more than Ulster Scots, Polish, Lithuanian, or any other language. In fact languages like Polish for example, are much more prevalent throughout the population in Northern Ireland currently, and should in fact be given a higher preference for such consideration."

Above all, the fact that the Orange Order thinks it has the moral standing to "slam" anything is testament to the kind of parallel universe in which its members live and breathe.

For social cohesion, devolved government, peace and prosperity, even for the future of Protestantism and the Union, the things that it purports to value most, it should be clear to all by now that it would be infinitely better if it simply disappeared.

The last week has seen some debate in Scotland concerning a mooted, and then withdrawn, plan to do away with the title of "Makar" and replace it with the more pedestrian — and more English — "National Poet of Scotland". Some commentators believed that "Makar" implied someone who wrote in Scots (indeed, it does), or that it smacked of medievalism (in a healthy nation, it would imply cultural continuity). The stalled initiative sums up one of the main differences between the nationalism of Scotland and that of Wales and, to a certain extent, Ireland. Faced with the choice of reviving in general use a beautiful and uniquely Scots word or creating yet another public position including the word "national", many folk's first choice is reflexively for the latter.

The utilitarian nature of Scottish nationalism isn't all bad: it may be one of the main reasons why it will succeed, perhaps sooner than we think. It is hardly music to the ears of cultural nationalists, however.

In this case, faced with the mobilisation of just such people, who are among the SNP's longest-standing supporters, the Scottish Government has backed down. That's not to say that the current situation is perfect. While no one would bat an eyelid at a "Makar" writing in English, perhaps with the odd Scots word thrown in, what would the reaction be if a Gaelic-language poet were appointed to the post? Given the real possibility of that never actually happening, perhaps Scotland should have both a "Bard" and a "Makar".

As an aside, among the more bizarre suggestions to come out of the debate is support for the appointment of Tom Leonard. Mr. Leonard writes witty, entertaining, often thought-provoking poems in a subversive, deliberately illiterate version of Glaswegian. His work is dedicated to debunking the notion of Scots as a language, highlighting its Central Belt sociolectal incarnation at the expense of its historical and rural use as a language. Because, after all, it's only Glesgae that counts.

One could hardly think of a less suitable candidate.

Of course, there are those who argue that a "Makar" can write in any language, including Standard English or, in this case, cludgie-door graffiti. In particular, they draw attention to the fact that there is now a Scots "Scriever".

In the Scottish National Dictionary, the verb scrieve is defined as follows:

"To write, esp. to write easily and copiously (Sh. a.1838 Jam. MSS. XII. 193; Ayr. 1880 Jam.; Rxb. 1923 Watson W.-B. 341; Sh., Abd., Kcd., Ags., Per., Edb. 1969). Vbl.n. scri(e)ving. Agent n. scriever, skriever, a writer, used somewhat contemptuously, a scribbler, “a mean scribe” (Lth. 1825 Jam.)."

Now, of course, the word has since been revived in a more general sense — perhaps influenced by the use of cognates in other languages — in a manner shorn, or perhaps merely ignorant, of its pejorative overtones.

However, given that Mr. Leonard has, as a matter of explicit ideology, adopted just such an attitude to Scots, the Blether Region respectfully suggests that he might be a good candidate for the post. Just don't call him "Makar".

The approach taken by those who wish the UK to remain a member of the EU leaves something to be desired to say the least. As the Scottish independence referendum demonstrated, if you are arguing only on the basis of pounds and pence or narrow statistical self-interest, you have already lost the argument — even if, as in the case of Scotland, fear and inertia might yet suffice to bear you over the finish line.

There are, of course, those who say that a British vote to leave the EU would be a good thing because it would give Scotland a second chance at independence. That is undoubtedly true, but we should be clear that it is a peerie bubble of good on a vast sea of bad.

The Blether Region is not proud to be Scots, for the simple reason that pride without a reason behind it is not logical. Nationality is an accident of birth, a portion of good and ill doled out to every new bairn — but fundamentally not of one's own choosing. At the same time, however, it accepts the responsibility of its birth to do the best for Scotland, particularly regarding those things that Scotland should be doing but isn't. Gaelic, and Scots in the meaningful sense of a distinct language, remain at the point of extinction. Sectarianism may be buried in a political sense, but the corpse can yet show flickers of life. The final chapters of these aspects of our national story have yet to be written, and it is our task to ensure a happy ending.

Europe is another story, for, while the current generation may have inherited the foundations, it is also building the edifice. It is entirely logical to be proud of one's European identity, not because of any primitive sense of racial similarity, but because of one's active participation in the attempt, unparalleled in human history, to create a social union not dominated by a single culture.

The European idea does not get a good press in the UK, either in the newspapers owned by tax-dodging oligarchs, or on television, which takes its cue from them. That allows the propagation of the Big Lie. Just as the Conservatives are allowed to maintain unchallenged that excessive Old Labour spending rather than devil-may-care New Labour deregulation caused the economic crisis, so, for more than a generation now, it has been possible to disseminate the most outrageous untruths about the European Union, safe in the knowledge that one is highly unlikely ever to be brought to book.

The latest example came on today's BBC Breakfast news, when a report on the EU was intercut with footage of non-European immigrants. The UK has such communities, which enrich it, because it conquered so many other countries and, when it had finished exploiting the territories in question, chose to exploit their inhabitants as cheap labour at home. The reason that immigration is so prominent a political theme is the grotesque concentration of wealth in the influential south-east of England, which means that nearly all the immigrants currently want to go to the same region. None of that has anything to do with the EU, which was born as a reaction against imperialism, which insists on spending in poorer areas, and which would regulate financial markets if it were allowed to do so. Indeed, the UK has been allowed to take far fewer than its fair share of refugees just because the EU lacks teeth.

Many of the lies told about the EU have a common motivation: the desire to reverse gains made over a period of decades by working people, particularly women, for the benefit of bad employers. The propaganda tools to achieve that end are the worst sort of daily papers — comics with tits — a constant, stultifying diet of dog-whistle paranoia. Flicking through them, one often gets the impression that their editors prize anti-EU propaganda as an acceptable form of racism, a kind of legal opium for the masses.

The Blether Region is distinctly proud that its wee three-leedit family is a microcosm of a far greater and even more diverse one across Europe. It is proud that the EU has ended war. It is proud that the EU's negotiated politics are pragmatic rather than ideological. Proud too that it believes Old Father State should look after his children.

It would be a terrible shame if retired people, living off political promises wrung from elected representatives, were to ruin the life-chances of their grandchildren by voting to leave the EU — just as they imposed the wrong choice on them in the Scottish independence referendum.

During that debate, the Blether Region was struck by the injustice of Spain, a country that joined a decade after the UK, conniving to threaten Scotland with exclusion, and for the doubly undemocratic reason that self-determination in one country might fuel demands for self-determination in another. There is a similar irony in today's debates, since the UK may be about to leave the EU just when many countries in central Europe, which joined as soon as the fall of communism allowed them, are coming into their own, and with others queuing at the door.

It is no doubt British politeness to give up one's seat for a late-comer, but it may not be common sense.

Agitation for an Ulster-Scots Academy has some history in Northern Ireland. Its key proponents have traditionally been the British-Israelite clique that forms the core of the Ulster-Scots Language Society. Their motive is very simple: they want a form of public backing to standardise Ulster-Scots as something different from Scots in Scotland.

Having an academy allows them to do that, either by browbeating genuine academic linguists into going along with them and allowing them to take the flak for their excesses, or by using the institution as intellectual camouflage to convince the public that they are themselves academics. As USLS members have been heard to suggest that they want the academy to be a "people's college", one assumes that the latter is Plan A. No doubt the extremists would also profit personally, perhaps gaining a few well-paid posts of the kind that have been cheekily snapped up by politicians and Orangemen in other parts of the Ulster-Scots sectarian-linguistc complex.

Now the Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure has agreed to the proposal for an academy, and there is no mystery why: like successive Sinn Féin politicians before her, she hopes to get something out of it for Irish. History suggests that she will be disappointed in that regard, since the next DUP Culture Minister will surely once again institute a policy of levelling down provision.

One could argue that an Ulster-Scots Academy, funded through the Agency, might prove a good way of hypothecating funds for genuine research rather than the odd mixture of tourism and sectarianism that has marked out the latter. But I wouldn't hold my breath on that front.

In a new twist, the Minister has announced that Irish is to have an academy too. While the case for an Ulster-Scots Academy is non-existent, that for Irish is problematic to say the least, since Irish-speakers in Northern Ireland adhere to a written standard to a great extent created and nurtured outside the polity. Now, as everyone knows, that standard is polycentric, i.e. not as hard-and-fast as the standard of, say, French or German. Even so, it would seem that an obvious field of activity must remain beyond the future academicians.

So what will it do? Most of the other possibilities seem to be covered elsewhere already: the universities carry out university research and teaching; St. Mary's provides teacher training; and the various community groups cater for adult learners, social activities and entertainment.

Of course, one could argue that the Ulster dialect has not been well served historically because the learner community is cut off from the Donegal Gaeltacht by the border, but learning materials too could be (and, indeed, are) produced at St. Mary's.

The Minister tells us that "Irish and Ulster-Scots are unique and separate entities." That is, of course, absolutely true, and seems aimed at heading off the prospect of Campbell-style levellers, who may shortly return after the May Assembly election. Setting up an academy for Irish simply because one has (wrong-headedly) been granted to Ulster Scots seems a strange way of going about that.

The "curry my yoghurt" tendency of course typifies what is the actual key difference between the north and south of Ireland: politics. Anyone wishing to promote Irish in Northern Ireland has to deal with a different legal framework (or lack of one) and different attitudes, which may have to be assuaged or circumvented. Here, too, however, the Minister failed, since she decimated the existing self-starting, community-led expertise in favour of a pan-Irish feet-up salariat, either because the notion of something being all-Irish reflexively appealed to her or because she was sick of being criticised for Sinn Féin's failure to secure an Irish language Act.

Either way, it doesn't look good.

Even if the DUP do not take DCAL following the Assembly elections, there is a fair old chance that Sinn Féin will choose to rotate its Ministers again, which will mean a new face in the Department. Although the current Minister wasn't all bad and in particular can be proud of what she did with Líofa, overall many people's judgment will be a simple one: she could have done so much better.

Just a line to say that Wee Ginger Dug has a very erudite article about Scots on his blog that puts the nay-sayers — or, in this case, "No, thanks"-sayers — to shame.

More power to your elbow, Paul.

David Leask has a refreshing and long overdue article over at the Herald drawing attention to the constitutionally inspired bile now being directed at Scotland's autochthonous languages, self-hating invective of a kind that would have made the (Galician) Franco proud. Closer to home, it's curiously reminiscent of the rhetoric of Ulster Unionists (and, on occasion, the Alliance Party), who do their best to keep Northern Ireland looking like England lest a bilingual sign somehow offend a bigoted monoglot (although one English county, Cornwall, seems to be beating Northern Ireland too).

While these — obviously co-ordinated — attempts by Unionists with privileged media access to create a virtual Partido Popular in Scotland are most likely on a hiding to nothing, it is important that friends of linguistic diversity not be locked into defensive mode when discussing vital spending.

The obvious danger, were that to happen, is that existing provision for Scots and Gaelic, which is not yet sufficient to save either, will cease to grow.

For that reason, let's be up-front about the need for money, and the work necessary at Government level: Scotland's languages need more, not less.

Inis Mumhan?

Let's Eliminate RP

Opposing Bilingual Signage is a Far-right Position

Scotland's Answer to "Top Gear"

Time for a Bilingual PSNI

Minding Our Language

On Demonisation — and Displacement

Ulster Scots, Hay

Lost an Fund

The Irish Do Not Know What Nationalism Is

A Scholar of Bigotry

Acht na Gaeilge

Calling Half a Spade a Spade

Lose my Mind and Dance Forever

Brass Necks

Beards and Makars

Europa geht durch mich

Academies Galore

The Dug Has Barked

More, Not Less