Dialect archive
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The Ulster Dialect Archive contains published and unpublished wordlists and glossaries that document the distinctive speech of the people of the area that comprises the old nine-county Ulster. Within that area, three principal dialect areas are generally distinguished. The first is Ulster-Scots (sometimes called ‘Scotch-Irish’). The second is Mid-Ulster English (also described as ‘Northern Hiberno-English’ or ‘Ulster Anglo-Irish’),. The third is the speech of those areas where Irish Gaelic is either still in use or has died out relatively recently. Most of the material in the archive is in the form of the written or printed word. However, a significant proportion is found within the museum’s Sound Archive. The paper-based dialect archive contains several manuscript collections, notably the Sir John Byers glossary (c. 1910), the Montgomery manuscript (County Antrim dialect, 1961), and the Huddleston manuscript (Ulster-Scots poetry and prose] Published collections include the donated Ulster-Scots library of Professor Robert J Gregg (1912-1998) and many now rare and out-of-print works. Finally, much of the material in the collections has been electronically captured on a dictionary database and on a dialect literature textbase, and supervised access to these can be arranged by prior appointment.
Staff contact: Anne Smyth, Editorial and Database Manager
Tel: +44 (0) 28 9042 8428
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