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Queen's University, Belfast's "parody of esteem" principle is producing more, er, steam than light since Queen's appeased the Nationalist half of its intake by dropping the Queen from graduation ceremonies.

Now the Ulster-Scots Language Society is asking the student union for equal treatment with English and Irish. It is not immediately apparent how comfortably words such as wee, youse and farl - as in soda farl - will fit in on student union signs and literature. But the two-year-old society says that up to 100,000 people in the province are capable of speaking Ulster-Scots, which they argue is more than a dialect and has been classified by Euro bosses as an official "lesser used" tongue.