The campaign to have Ulster-Scots officially recognised as a minority language and to be treated as favourably as Irish is likely to clear its final hurdle shortly when the British government signals its intention to sign the Council of Europe's charter for regional or minority languages.
When the formalities have been completed in a couple of months, Ulster-Scots will, for the first time, be classified in the terms of the charter as a language.
But the government decision and its new status will not conclude the cerebral debate among academics and other purists as to whether Ulster-Scots really is a language rather than just English spoken with a Ballymena accent, as it has been sceptically defined.
Neither will it lay to rest the claim that the Ulster-Scots language and heritage cause has been set rolling only out of a sense of cultural rivalry among some Protestants and unionists, keen to counter-balance the onward march of the Irish language movement, and that they are now to be expensively humoured in the name of political correctness and cultural appeasement.
Language and culture emerged as a political axe to grind in the 1980s from within the Maze prison, where, initially, republican inmates took to learning Irish and studying the associated heritage and culture to reinforce their sense of identity. They adopted it as a weapon by talking and writing in Irish, or "jailic", as it was dubbed, to bamboozle the warders and police.
This new cultural front in the IRA's campaign was watched with a mixture of amusement and contempt by loyalists, who scoffed at a few of their number who became interested in Irish. But as the overlapping renaissance of Irish and the advance of Sinn Fein to political power rippled beyond the perimeters of the Maze and tradition and identity were recognised as being among the factors to be sorted out in achieving conflict resolution and reconciliation, some loyalists began thinking and embraced what had, until then, been a tiny, obscure, semi-eccentric cultural persuasion, the study of Ulster-Scots, to infuse their own cause with some cultural legitimacy.
The deep disillusionment with their previously cherished British heritage also played its part in the shift of allegiance.
AS the Irish language was steadily afforded unprecedented recognition and funding in the North - heavily stimulated by Sinn Fein agitation and direct action, such as erecting bilingual street signs - a similar Ulster-Scots pressure campaign emerged.
It argued that the influx of lowland Scots into the Ulster plantations in the 16th and 17th centuries led to the evolution of an Ulster-Scots speech unique to north-east Ireland. It pointed to a body of prose and poetry to justify the claim, especially the works of Samuel Thomson, the bard of Carngranny, Hugh Porter, the bard of Moneyslane, and James Orr, the bard of Ballycarry. They also pointed to the work of the late Prof John Braidwood, who had compiled an extensive word archive during his tenure at the school of English at Queen's University, Belfast.
Language purists argued that Ulster-Scots was not a distinct language and that Scots-type sayings, such as "bashed neeps and chapped tatties", or "brae bricht moonlight nicht", were merely expressions of an English dialect.
Despite the controversy, the Belfast Agreement conferred an initial measure of legitimacy on Ulster-Scots by affirming that "all participants recognise 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 communities, all of which are part of the culture wealth of the island of Ireland."
When the present political impasse is bridged, power is transferred to the new Northern Ireland administration and the cross-Border bodies come into operation, the third tongue, with its even more official standing now, will therefore take its place alongside English and Irish, creating in the North the only trilingual zone in these islands.
Already, a new linguistic diversity branch has been created within the central community relations unit at the Northern Ireland Office, which is to be responsible for devising language policy and advising how the obligations to Ulster-Scots and Irish, arising from the signing of the charter, are to be fulfilled. This work will ultimately move into the proposed department of culture, arts and leisure to be established in Belfast.
Moves are also under way to recruit Hansard reporters capable of transcribing Ulster-Scots when it is uttered in the Stormont assembly, so that it can be recorded in the official report of the proceedings.
BUT the real powerhouse for promoting Ulster-Scots will be through the North-South language body, as it will be known in English. An Foras Teanga, the Irish version, or tha Boord O Leid, in Ulster-Scots, will have a board of 24 members appointed by the North-South Ministerial Council, eight of whose members will be drawn from the Ulster-Scots constituency, to promote the understanding and use of the two languages.
It will work through two agencies, one charged with promoting Irish, the other Ulster-Scots cultural issues and Ullans, the variety of the Scots language found in part of Northern Ireland and Donegal. It will operate from an office in Belfast with a branch in Donegal.
This new era of tri-lingualism will inevitably create more bureaucracy, spawn cadres of language police and impose another cost on the hard-pressed public purse on both sides of the Border. It will clearly form a significant element of the millions it is costing to restructure the administration in the North.
Given the pressure to close schools, rationalise hospitals and healthcare and build roads and factories to stimulate employment and prosperity, do we really need bi- or tri-lingualism? As there are only 120,000 people in the North with a knowledge of Irish (not speakers), according to the 1991 census, and 90,000 Ulster-Scots disciples, according to official guess-timates, is the cost of political correctness and cultural appeasement of vociferous minorities, however worthy their cause, proportionate?
Can we really defend it to those awaiting operations, suffering unemployment or being educated in sub-standard schools?
(Mary Holland is on leave.)