evidence: As in Ireland, the majority language of Northern Ireland is English, where it is also (and unlike in the Republic of Ireland) the sole official language. Alongside the English-speaking population, there are subsets of the population in Northern Ireland who use and speak the minority languages of Irish and Ulster-Scots. Northern Ireland’s census data from 2011 show that slightly over 10 per cent of the population in the jurisdiction have some competence in Irish, while just over 8 per cent have some competence in Ulster-Scots.6 This endurance is, in some respects, unsurprising—the Irish language, which [End Page 174] was spoken throughout Ireland by a majority of the population until the mid-nineteenth century, has historically been particularly strong (perhaps even strongest) in Ulster.7 Moreover, Ulster was historically an area of complex and intersecting linguistic identities. [...] 56. A similar desire for language rights based on proportionate use of a language within the population was voiced in 2017 by then DUP party leader Arlene Foster, who argued that it was more desirable and practical to have a Polish Language Act because more people in Northern Ireland speak Polish than Irish. See ‘Arlene Foster on Irish language act: "More people speak Polish"’, Belfast Telegraph, 6 February 2017. This is a tidy obfuscation, reducing minority language speakers to an unreasonable minority while refusing to acknowledge that the reason the place of such languages must be seriously considered is the colonial legacy of the UK and its institutionally and legally enshrined linguistic mandate.