# Robert John Gregg

Robert John Gregg (July 2, 1912, in Larne, County Antrim, Northern Ireland – November 15, 1998, in Vancouver, BC, Canada), known as Bob Gregg or R. J. Gregg, was a linguist, a pioneer of the academic study of Ulster-Scots as well as a linguistic authority on Canadian English.

## Personal and early childhood

Robert John Gregg, the second child and eldest son of Thomas Gregg and Margaret McDowell, was born July 2, 1912, in a house on Glenarm Road in Larne, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. In 1905, his grandfather George Gregg, and his family, arrived in Larne from the Clough area of Co Antrim. George Gregg & Sons operated a road contracting business, and many of the roads in and around Larne were built by the Gregg Company . The McDowell family came from the Glynn/Gleno area of Larne. From a young age, Gregg was interested in linguistics. He grew up around the “urban modified English” in Larne. However, he and his brother frequently holidayed at the countryside with his mother's relatives. In the more rural areas he discovered the Ulster-Scots language. He stated in his M.A. dissertation that his 'linguistic curiosity was early aroused by the sharp contrasts' between the two language varieties, and 'these bilingual comparisons have always been discussed with interest in my own family, and with the help in particular of my mother and my brother'. By his teenage years, he began collecting linguistic material. By 1930, he was already writing down his own notes regarding his research on linguistics. He later married his wife Millicent, known also as “Penny,” (née Bowman). With her, he had three sons and a daughter. They moved with him to Vancouver, BC, Canada in 1954.

## Education

Gregg began his education at Larne Grammar School. It was here where he, as a teenager, began to notice the striking differences between the urban modified English taught and practiced there with the speech of some of his classmates, which included a cousin, who were from the rural areas. After graduating from Larne Grammar School, he attended Queen's University, Belfast. He graduated from Queen's in 1933 with a B.A. (Honours) degree that mainly focused on French and German and to a limited degree on Spanish. He then studied in pre-war Nazi-Germany for just a year, where he experienced the effects of fascism, which were especially forceful in (German) language studies, first hand. Subsequently, his M.A. was also taken at Queen's University. His dissertation, presented May 1953, was on the historical phonology of the East Antrim Ulster-Scots.
Between 1933 and the culmination of his Master's studies, he also studied Latin and Spanish. He passed his examinations in Intermediate Latin in 1948 and took a B.A. in Spanish, both at the University of London. From 1960 to 1963 he worked on his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied “The Boundaries of the Scotch-Irish Dialects in Ulster.”

## Career

Gregg began his teaching career as a Senior Modern Languages Master at Regent House School, Newtownards, in 1934. He taught as Head of the Modern Languages Department and Senior Master at Belfast Mercantile College from 1939 to 1954. He Immigrated to Canada in 1954 and was appointed Assistant Professor of French at the University of British Columbia in January 1955. Later, he become a Professor in the Department of Linguistics in 1969, and subsequently became the head of that department from 1972 to 1980. After he retired from teaching, he set up the first language laboratory in Canada at the University of British Columbia.
For a time he was co-editor with John Braidwood of the Ulster Dialect Dictionary project. This project was put on hold and Gregg went on to other things. In 1989, the Department of Education in Northern Ireland commissioned the Concise Ulster Dictionary and Gregg was enlisted as a consultant and editor through 1994. This Dictionary made its appearance in 1996.
Gregg was a member of the Canadian Linguistic Association. In 1957 the Association established a Lexicographical committee, whose goal was the creation of three dictionaries. Out of this committee came a series of four dictionaries, entitled collectively as the Gage Dictionary of Canadian English, of which he was a co-editor. This dictionary was a compilation of three smaller dictionaries - The Intermediate Dictionary (1963), The Beginning Dictionary (1962), and The Senior Dictionary(1967) – and “A Dictionary of Canadianism on Historical Principles". Gregg was responsible for The Senior Dictionary, which by the 1979 edition had been renamed "Gage Canadian Dictionary" and became the leading dictionary for Canadian English for the 1980s and 1990s. This dictionary was first published in 1967 in Vancouver, BC, just in time for the Canadian Centennial.
Gregg helped preserve the Mount Currie (British Columbia) language and Sechelt language in written form in the 1960s after the last fluent elders had died.

## Main research areas and influence
### Ulster Scots

Gregg was keen on researching the Ulster-Scots language and dedicated much of his research time on linguistic analysis and the application of his research. His work was quite extensive and widely published. See the Publications list for more information on his publications. While on sabbatical from UBC in 1960, Gregg travelled back to Ulster and participated in the conference inaugurating the Ulster Dialect Archive at the Ulster Folk Museum (now the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum) in 1960. From 1960 to 1963, he also finished his doctoral fieldwork. He travelled throughout the Ulster countryside and interviewed older traditional speakers. This fieldwork culminated in a widely revered map with precise detail on the geographical boundaries of the Ulster-Scots language. “He was the first to demonstrate that Ulster-Scots was spoken in the eastern part of County Donegal in the Republic of Ireland and was thus international.” This map is still used today, although some more recent work has shown that there are areas, such as south-west Tyrone, that have Ulster Scots characteristics even though they were not categorised as Ulster Scots by Gregg.

#### Ulster-Scots orthography

Also starting in the 1960s, Gregg began to devise an orthography for Ulster-Scots. This orthography was based on Gregg's extensive fieldwork in the province. “In this process he produced transcriptions of local Ulster-Scots texts, or in some cases Ulster-Scots versions of English texts, to test and demonstrate various conventions.” Near the end of his life he shared his work with the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum's Concise Ulster Dictionary project, which ran from 1989–96. He was also hopeful that the new Ulster-Scots Language Society and Ulster-Scots Academy (created in 1994) would find his work useful for the Academy's language development work.

### Canadian English

In 1957, Gregg made a phonological assessment of Vancouver, BC, speech in 1957. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gregg conducted a survey of southern British Columbia English. The results were not published, but can be found in two M.A. theses.

#### Survey of Vancouver English, 1976-1984

In 1976, Gregg and a team of students, featuring Margaret Murdoch, Gaelan Dodds de Wolf, and Erika Hasebe-Ludt, embarked on a major project surveying the English spoken by native English speakers born in Vancouver, BC, Canada. It began with a small preliminary survey from 1976 to 1978 of 60 individuals. This survey was then incorporated with the larger Survey of Vancouver English that ran from 1978 to 1984. The larger survey included the individuals from the preliminary survey as well as 240 other individuals. After its completion, it was a primary informant for de Wolf's study comparing English in Vancouver with that of English in Ottawa. The survey was funded by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and other foundations.

## Awards and recognition

Named Honorary President of the Ulster-Scots Language Society in his later years.