Madam, - Growing up in Belfast in the 1920s and 1930s I understood that the community I came from spoke English of a sort whose gist at least could be understood by others whose native language was English.
We used dialect words and phrases that varied to some extent throughout the nine counties of Ulster and that derived from Scots and the Irish language, as can be seen from the excellent A Concise Ulster Dictionary, edited by Dr C.I. Macafee (1996).
Of the Ulster-Scots language we had never heard.
Has this language come into being since I departed from the North some 65 years ago? Is English no longer spoken north of Dundalk? - Yours, etc,
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ROBERT GREACEN, Sandymount, Dublin 4.