In 1905, his grandfather George Gregg, and his family, arrived in Larne from the Clough area of Co Antrim.
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'.
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.
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.” [8] 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.
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 fieldwork culminated in a widely revered map with precise detail on the geographical boundaries of the Ulster-Scots language.
[16][17][18][19] “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.” [20] 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.
“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.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gregg conducted a survey of southern British Columbia English.
[23] 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.
[25] Source: “The Academic Study of Ulster-Scots” edited by Anne Smyth, Michael Montgomery, and Philip Robinson.