John J. Marshall

Life
[var. J. J. Marshall]; Ulster man of letters and dialectologist, well represented in Irish Book Lover, and occasionally cited in Brian McKenna, Irish Literature (Gale 1978); associate of F. J. Bigger in establishing - or re-establishing - the Feis of the Glens of Antrim; and, like the other, he rigged archaeological evidence (acc. to Mr. Heslip, Ulster Museum); Marshall made cuttings of F. J. Bigger’s journalism, held in an album in Linen Hall Library.

[ top ]

Works
History of Dungannon (1929); Old Belfast (1894); Life of William Kennedy (1920), and other works of Ulster local history.

Marshall contrib. an article with corrections to D. J. O’Donoghue’s Poets of Ireland in The Irish Book Lover, Vol. IV (Sept. 1912), pp.35-36 [see NLI - Research Sources, online].

[ top ]

Commentary
Michael Montgomery, ‘The Lexicography of Hiberno-English’, in Irish Studies: Working Papers, 93:3, Nova Southwestern, 1993, pp.20-35, notes that John J. Marshall stated that ‘the great majority of persons writing on this subject [Ulster dialect] seem to think that by Ulster Dialect is meant that form of speech prevalent in Co. Antrim and the Ards district of Down, and that a story, say, unless written in the Lowland Scottish prevalent in these districts is merely Irish, not Ulster dialect’; he also contributed lists of words, some of them local, but most of them in fairly general use through Mid and North-west Ulster’ in five instalments to the Ulster Journal of archaeology, and invited readers to furnish material, along with W. H. Patterson’s Glossary of Down and Antrim Words, for a Dictionary of Ulster Dialect in which words would be philologically treated, fully explained, and illustrated. (Montgomery, p.26).

[ top ]