Does anyone here have any experience of Scots or Ulster Scots?

Im curious cause I know there is a huge amount of negativity and general dismissiveness towards the language/dialect.
Where my family is from along the borders it seems to have been spoken alongside Irish for a long time. My grandparents speech is very much influenced by both languages. For example my Granny would use the phrase Cuttie-cub for a person of indeterminate gender. Cuttie being a girl and cub a boy. along with a whole range of other expressions.

But because of the similarity's to English and the idea that it was just an incorrect form of English it seems to have slowly merged with English.

Id be interested to see if there are any speakers of a more pure form of the dialect. I looked on Forvo and the speaker with the most recordings referred to it as a corruption of English and a slang, and that he himself speaks Clear English.

Ive heard it closer to its Germanic routes than standard English , similar to Yola and Fingalian were. Does anyone have any first hand knowledge of this?

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Bíonn rudaí maithe mall

I don't know that much about what's happening for Ulster Scots, but certainly in Scotland, Scots has been making a comeback. First of all there's Dr. Dauvit Horsbroch who works at the Scots Language Centre/Centre for The Scots Leid and who you can see on YouTube explaining about the language and then there's Matthew Fitt who has done a lot of work writing children's books and promoting the leid in schools. Collins have published a Gem Scots Dictionary - ISBN 978 0 00 722412 8. There's an online Scots dictionary and the publishers Itchy Coo have a CD called the Compact Coo that's well worth listening to. I mustn't forget to mention Ewan McColl who in the 60's and 70s was making recordings of Scots songs for the Poetry and Song collection of records for use in schools across the UK. (I remember trying to get him to sing Lord Randal - but he never would, he always said he was too tired). There's Isla St Clair with her CD Murder & Mayhem, Alastair McDonald - CD Oor Ally's Red Yoyo, Chokit on a Tattie, Hot Peas and Barley-o, Ewan McVicar who's done so much research into children's games.There's an on-line forum (but they haven't got round to answering any of my questions) .......srl srl srl

In much of Ulster, when the "native" Irish learned English (which mostly occurred after the Plantation), they frequently learned it from Scots-speaking settlers (some of whom were, however, still Gaelic speakers). That explains the very different, obviously Scottish-influenced accents one finds in Ulster, as compared with the rest of Ireland. The process of learning English was so heavily Scots-influenced that I've read that the Irish natives referred to learning English as "lifting the Scots".

Wikipedia has a very informative article about Scots, discussing how it developed, spread, and was ultimately replaced by more "standard" English (in most places, anyway). Although it is mostly focused on the history in Scotland proper, it does mention the use of it in Northern Ireland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language

Editing to say that Wikipedia also has a separate, very interesting article on the spread of the Scots language to Ulster, with maps and all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulster_Scots_dialects

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Interesting to see that there is a body of non native speakers making up words or reviving words which native speakers find hard to understand. What a strange notion

I read somewhere that one Scots speaker preferred watching Frisian TV and listening to Frisian Radio, but as far as I know I thought that was quite different from Scots, albeit with some similarity to old English ?

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Bíonn rudaí maithe mall

Part of the reason Scots gets such a hard time is the fact that English itself is such a mess.

The difference between high register (formal) English and low register (colloquial) is pretty huge.

I was thinking about how to respond to this message, and I was going to do it in Scots (I'm from Central Scotland), but when I started thinking about it, I found myself inventing words by recasting high register English into my own accent.

The particular sentence was:
"We werenae alloued tae speak it in scuil"
"Alloued" is just my rendering of "allowed" with an "oo" sound instead of "ow".

In some respects, the difference between Scots and colloquial English is less than the difference between colloquial English and formal English, so a lot of speakers ignore the very real difference between Scots and English.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.