Northern Ireland’s Third Language Got Written Into the Peace Agreement. Then Came the Tricky Part.
In September 1787, a Belfast printer named James Magee did something nobody in London, Dublin, or Edinburgh had done: he published Robert Burns. Not reviewed him, not quoted him in a newspaper column — published him, in a full collected edition, the first to appear outside Scotland. He aimed it at an audience who already knew the Ayrshire poet’s work, because Burns’ poems had been running in the Belfast newspapers since the year before. There was a ready market. And the reason there was a ready market is the same reason Ulster-Scots exists at all: the North Channel between Antrim and Ayrshire is barely 20 miles wide at its narrowest point, and for centuries the people on both sides of it spoke the same language.
That language is Ulster-Scots, sometimes called Ullans. It sits in one of the stranger corners of modern Northern Irish politics — formally recognised in the Good Friday Agreement, written into law as recently as 2022, spoken daily by tens of thousands of people across the glens and coastal towns of east Antrim and north Down, and connected to a literary tradition that includes poets who literally walked to Dumfries to hand books to Burns in person. It is also, by most measures, the least-discussed recognised regional language in the United Kingdom.
Where It Came From
The story starts with the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century. When Lowland Scots settlers crossed the North Channel in their tens of thousands — estimates put the total movement at around 200,000 people over several generations — they brought their language with them. The Scots tongue they carried was the same one Burns would later write in: a Germanic language, closely related to English but distinct from it, with its own vocabulary, its own rhythm, and literary traditions stretching back centuries in Scotland.
In the counties of Antrim, Down, and the eastern edges of what is now Northern Ireland, this language took root. It absorbed influences from Ulster Irish and from the English of later waves of settlers, developing its own character — recognisably Scots, but distinctively Ulster. By the eighteenth century it had its own poets, its own rural publishing culture, and its own living relationship with the wider world of Scots letters across the water.
That relationship ran in both directions. The same sea that carried settlers to Ulster also carried manuscripts, poems, and newspapers back and forth. Burns’ work appeared in the Belfast Newsletter before most of England had heard of him. When Magee’s 1787 edition appeared, the advertisement in the Belfast Evening Post simply called them “Burns (the Ayrshire Ploughman’s) poems” — no introduction needed, because the Belfast reading public already knew who he was.
The Rhyming Weavers
The most vivid chapter of Ulster-Scots literary history belongs to a group now known as the rhyming weavers: artisan poets who wrote in the Scots dialect during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many of them linen workers in the glens and villages of mid-Antrim and north Down. Their connection to Burns was not merely literary admiration. Several of them knew him personally.
Samuel Thomson, known as the Bard of Carngranny, published his poetry collection in 1793 and dedicated it to Burns directly. The following year, he and a companion made the crossing and the journey inland to Dumfries to meet the Scottish poet in person. They brought books and exchanged poems. Burns gave Thomson snuff. Thomson came back to Antrim having corresponded and sat with the man who had shaped his entire understanding of what the Scots tongue could do on a page.
James Orr, of Ballycarry in County Antrim, went further still. Orr — who has since been called “Ulster’s Burns” — published his own collection in 1804, eight years after Burns’ death, and included in it a full elegy to the man he regarded as his literary ancestor. Scholars who have worked through both bodies of poetry have argued that Orr’s writing, at its best, stands alongside Burns’ rather than beneath it. That argument has never received much of a mainstream hearing, in part because Ulster-Scots literature is not widely taught, and in part because the tradition as a whole exists in a language that most readers in Britain and Ireland have never been formally introduced to.
David Herbison, the Bard of Dunclug, captured the hunger for this literary tradition in a single detail that has stuck with historians: when he was young, Herbison walked 26 miles from Ballymena to Belfast specifically to purchase works by the Scottish poets Ramsay and Burns. He walked back the same day.
The Legal Architecture
Fast-forward two centuries, and Ulster-Scots has accumulated a notable legal record. The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement acknowledged, in the section on rights and equality, “the importance of respect, understanding and tolerance in relation to linguistic diversity, including in Northern Ireland, the Irish language, Ulster-Scots and the languages of the various ethnic minority communities.” It was listed alongside Irish. Both were named in the same sentence of a document the world watched being signed.
In January 2000, the UK government went further, formally accepting Ulster-Scots as a language by signing the Council of Europe Charter for Regional and Minority Languages — the same international framework that covers Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Catalan.
Then, in 2022, the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act arrived. It created two new offices: an Irish Language Commissioner, and a Commissioner for the Ulster-Scots and Ulster-British Tradition. Both sit within a single umbrella body called the Office of Identity and Cultural Expression. On paper, a parallel structure. In practice, the two mandates are written differently in ways that matter.
The Irish Language Commissioner has a specific remit to “recognise, support, protect and enhance” the rights of Irish speakers. The 2022 Act also brought provisions that allow Irish to be used in courts and the Assembly, and established a dedicated £4 million investment fund for the language. The Ulster-Scots Commissioner’s mandate is framed differently: their role is to “enhance and develop the language, arts and literature associated with the Ulster Scots and the Ulster British Tradition.” It is a broader cultural brief, and it does not carry the same suite of language rights provisions. There is no parallel right to use Ulster-Scots when accessing public institutions. Both languages received formal recognition in 2022. They did not receive identical recognition.
The Numbers Behind the Language
According to the 2021 Northern Ireland Census, around 47,500 people reported being able to speak Ulster-Scots. A wider measure — covering those who can understand, read, or write it, even if they don’t speak it daily — puts the figure at over 190,000. The Continuous Household Survey for 2019/20 found that 16 per cent of the adult population of Northern Ireland claimed some knowledge of the language in one form or another.
The geographic heart of living Ulster-Scots use is the Causeway Coast and Glens and mid and east Antrim — exactly the counties where the rhyming weavers wrote and where Scottish settlement was densest during the Plantation. In those districts, roughly one in thirteen people reports the ability to speak Ulster-Scots, making it a daily presence in local communities rather than a historical relic.
This is a smaller community than Irish speakers in Northern Ireland, but it is not a marginal one. Forty-seven thousand people is a real population, concentrated in a real geography, using a real language at home and socially. The Ulster-Scots Agency — the cross-border body established to promote awareness of the language and its culture — has been operating since the Good Friday Agreement, alongside the far larger Irish-language promotional body, Foras na Gaeilge.
The Funding Gap
Language survival is, among other things, a question of money. Foras na Gaeilge, the Irish language’s principal cross-border promotional body, was established under the Good Friday Agreement as part of a North-South Language Body jointly funded by the Irish and British governments. It operates at a budget of approximately €16.5 million per year, approved by the North South Ministerial Council, with around 75 per cent coming from the Irish government.
The Ulster-Scots Agency — the equivalent institution on the other side of the Language Body — operates at a significantly lower level of funding, though published figures are fragmented and hard to compare directly. What public records make clear is that recent decisions to increase the Agency’s funding involved incremental reallocations in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. A 2025 increase involved £103,000 transferred from the Department for Communities, which unlocked a further £34,500 from the Irish government through cross-border funding arrangements — a total uplift of £137,500, described in government communications as a “one-off” adjustment.
The disparity has generated friction in council chambers across Northern Ireland, where elected representatives have argued publicly that public spending on Irish language activities is not matched by comparable investment in Ulster-Scots. Government responses have generally acknowledged both languages as supported, without directly addressing the gap in scale.
A Language in the Middle of Something
The modern Ulster-Scots revival is generally dated to 1992, when the Ulster-Scots Language Society was founded and began publishing a literary magazine called Ullans. It was a deliberate effort — consciously modelled on what Gaelic revivalists had done for Irish in the late nineteenth century — to collect, standardise, and argue for a language that had been treated variously as a dialect, a rural affectation, or simply unremarkable background noise in the places where it was spoken.
The debate about whether Ulster-Scots constitutes a distinct “language” or merely a “dialect” of English — a distinction that carries considerable political weight in Northern Ireland — has never been fully resolved. Linguists tend to observe that the boundary between language and dialect is as much political as structural, and that Ulster-Scots has the documented history, the distinct vocabulary, and the living community of speakers that typically accompany language status. The Council of Europe Charter and the 2022 Act both use the word “language.” The new Commissioner is in post. The institutional framework, after decades of pressure, exists.
Whether that framework translates into genuine vitality for the language — whether young people in Ballycarry and Ballymena are learning it, whether it appears regularly in broadcast media and classrooms — is the open question. Recognition is not the same as resources. A commissioner is not the same as a curriculum.
James Orr, writing his elegy to Burns in 1804, was already aware that the Scots tongue he wrote in was losing ground to Standard English in churches, schools, and the expanding print culture of his time. He wrote in it anyway. The poets who walked to meet Burns and then walked home again to their looms and their farms kept writing in the language because it was theirs — because it said things about the glens and the shore and the world they knew that Standard English couldn’t quite reach.
That community is still there, in the same coastal towns and farming country, speaking a language that has outlasted empire, partition, and decades of political near-invisibility. The formal recognition it now holds is real and hard-won. What it does with that recognition, and what resources flow behind it, is a story still being written — in a language that has been waiting a long time for the world to pay attention.
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