Lecture: "Mountain Talk: Searching for Appalachian roots in Ulster Scots"

Monday 25 November 2024, 1pm

Tower Museum, Derry

Mountain Talk: Searching for Appalachian roots in Ulster Scots

A talk by Meagan Jennett

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The connection between Northern Ireland and Appalachia is often cluttered with the low-hanging cultural kitsch propagated by that folkloric figure: the over-eager and boorish American ‘searching for their roots.’ But what if there was something to that figure? What do immigrants carry with them when they leave? And what do they forget, to keep moving forward? What might have been obscured by prejudice, or simple circumstance?

The linguistic community remains torn on the presence of Ulster Scots in southern Appalachian speech. But this author, not herself a linguist, but a native of the Virginia Blue Ridge, argues that, perhaps, lived experience and local knowledge can offer unique insight into areas otherwise shrouded by history. Where might Ulster Scots reside in the Virginian mouth? In texts? Where does it pop up, even centuries after the first waves of Ulster immigrants swept into Appalachia? This talk is a story: of a people and a language, and a rediscovery. Like all great stories, it ends with a journey hame.

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 About Meagan Jennet

 Meagan Jennett is a poet, novelist, and current DFA candidate at the University of Glasgow, where she is researching the multilayered connections between Scotland and her native Blue Ridge, Virginia. She is the author of You Know Her. 

To book your place please contact ulsterscots@derrystrabane.com or call us on T: (028) 71376 579.

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