The University of Ulster has been successful in its bid to carry out a Language Heritage and Good Relations Project with rural communities in the Derry City Council area.
The ‘Parallel’ project will explore language heritage, concentrating on the languages of English, Irish and Ulster-Scots and the relationships that exist between them.
The project team is now seeking to invite a rural community in the Derry City Council area to take part in the initiative.
Ulster’s Dr Frank Ferguson, from the Arts and Humanities Research Institute on the Coleraine campus and Dr Peter Smith, from the Irish and Celtic Studies Research Institute at Magee, who are leading the project team, said: “We are very excited to be charting the historic and contemporary languages of rural Derry~Londonderry and exploring the relationships that exist between them.”
The project will be delivered in two stages.
In the first stage, the project team will gather detailed information about languages in the participating rural community, and in the second stage, they will directly engage with groups and individuals from the community to find out what relationship people living in the area have with the languages of English, Irish and Ulster-Scots.
The team will also make recordings of oral history which will be used to create a website and a physical timeline illustrating language heritage in the participating area, past and present.
The project seeks to promote good relations by raising awareness of shared linguistic heritage at a local level and the project facilitators would like to get in touch with rural groups and/or communities based in the Derry City Council area, who would be interested in taking part.
If you would like to avail of this opportunity to explore the language heritage of your own rural community and would like to take part in the project please contact Dr Frank Ferguson by Friday 23rd November 2012 briefly outlining your reasons for wishing to take part. f.ferguson@ulster.ac.uk. Tel: 028 70123577.
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Notes to editors:
The 'Parallel' project is funded by Derry City Council’s Good Relations Programme and runs until March 2013.