Is Ulster Scots a dying language?

Nursery rhyme art project by children from the Mall-ard's Kindergarten

Ulster Scots is in intensive contact with English and, to a lesser extent, Irish. Most Ulster Scots speakers are fluent in English and use it frequently both actively (e.g. in school, making it their language of literacy) and passively (e.g. on TV and in newspapers.) English is the more sizable, more dominant and overall more prestigious language. Based on these facts the situation of Ulster Scots makes it very likely that the language is degenerating rapidly, and makes gradual language death a very plausible outcome. We can therefore expect to find loss of registers and associated language forms; loss of lexicon, phonology, morphology and syntactic patterns, and replacement of lost aspects with English equivalents.
It is quite difficult to investigate exactly how and when the language contact with English has influenced the lexicon and structure of Ulster Scots, because few documents survive that were written in Scots in Ulster. This is because English was in the process of becoming the language of literacy already by the time the plantation began.

As shown by Montgomery and Gregg (1997: 584-8), Scots writing conventions gave way to English conventions in Ulster, as they did in Scotland, in the second half of the 16th century and the first half of the 17th. At the end of this period distinctive Scots writing conventions such as quhilk or thir and grammatical features such as the indefinite article ane and the northern verbal concord had all but disappeared.That they had disappeared from writing does not necessarily mean that they had disappeared from speech as well; for instance, the geographical distribution of Scottish settlements during the Ulster plantation is almost exactly the same as the boundaries of Ulster Scots speaking areas found by Robert Gregg in the 1970s and 1980s (Montgomery and Gregg 1997: 578), indicating that the language in fact continued to be spoken by much of the population.

The way that speech has changed is even harder to establish for the plantation period, if not impossible, because there are no spoken records available and we do not know whether surviving texts are a good representation of pronunciation. About speech change in modern Scots we know more. Caroline Macafee (2003: 55) has interviewed urban Glaswegian Scots speakers, which, although not directly relevant to the situation in Ulster, has resulted in a useful overview of the processes of speech change. She focuses on lexicon and finds that indeed, distinctive lexicon is disappearing. While older generations do still have passive knowledge of distinctively Scots words, they do not use them themselves but instead opt for English counterparts and English cognate forms, meaning their children no longer have even passive knowledge of the Scots terms. Scots words lose their full range of meaning, instead becoming specialised to particular senses; some of them are preserved only in compound forms or nursery rhymes.