Irish English, Research and Developments

The current chapter is intended as an overview of the main focus of research on Irish English to date. This variety has been well served by scholars in recent decades with a flourishing of interest stemming from various approaches to analysing English in Ireland. For the purpose of presentation, this chapter is divided into various sections each of which concerns itself with a particular subarea. After these introductory paragraphs, there is a section on the early history of the variety of Irish English (Section 2.). This is followed by a consideration of the main linguistic event in the history of Ireland, the shift from Irish to English for the great majority of the population (Section 3.). In keeping with new trends in Irish English scholarship (Hickey 1999a), shared features across the country as a whole are then reviewed (Section 4.). Following on from this, there is a section on the interpretation of features, considering in particular their possible sources (Section 5.). Such reflections are relevant to the question of whether language contact or retention of dialect input are the source for features of Irish English (Harris 1991; Hickey 1995, 2006). The last section looks at recent changes in Dublin English (Section 6.) which, because of the status of the capital in the Republic of Ireland, are having a profound influence on the course of non-local varieties of English in the south of the country (Hickey 1999b).

ABSTRACTThe English language in Ireland can look back on a history of several centuries during which it developed various forms, from urban varieties, especially in Dublin, to rural varieties which arose during the language shift from Irish to English, above all in the nineteenth century. In addition, divergent forms of English arose in the North of Ireland, chiefly as a result of significant immigration from Scotland and the North of England during the seventeenth century. Contemporary English in Ireland evinces a wide range of varieties determined by a number of factors, including strongly localised forms of English as well as supra‐regional varieties, which show the greatest degree and rate of change, given the sensitivity of their speakers to both developments of English outside Ireland and their reactions to local forms of English in their surroundings.

W. E. H. Lecky (1838–1903) was one of the most distinguished Victorian historians. He was unusual in the extent to which he made use of archival sources, and noted for his ability of do justice to both sides of an argument. His History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century was first published as part of A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, but was reissued in 1892 as a five-volume work. He has been described as the first revisionist Irish historian, as the aim of the book was partly to respond to Froude's The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, which is markedly anti-Irish in its sentiments. Lecky was no nationalist, and opposed Home Rule, but wanted to provide a more truthful and balanced narrative, and his account of the United Irishmen and the events of 1798 was highly regarded. Volume 1 covers the period to 1760.

This paper explores the comparative analysis of vowel systems within British, American, and Irish English accents, examining their phonetic characteristics, historical roots, and social implications. English has evolved into numerous varieties worldwide, primarily influenced by regional and social factors. The paper focuses on Received Pronunciation (RP) in British English, General American in American English, and Supraregional Irish English in Irish English, highlighting their distinct phonological features. Rhoticity and lexical sets are examined as key aspects of variation. Differences in the pronunciation of /r/ contribute to unique phonetic landscapes, with British English exhibiting non-rhoticity and American and Irish English maintaining rhoticity. The presence of centering diphthongs in British English and vowel contrasts before /r/ in Irish and American English further distinguishes these accents. Analysis of lexical sets reveals variations in vowel quality and realization, emphasizing the dynamic nature of phonological systems across accents. By examining these differences, the paper underscores the intricate interplay of historical, geographical, and social factors in shaping linguistic diversity. Understanding these nuances is essential for appreciating the complexity of English language variations and their cultural significance.

The most common dialectal alternative to the Modern English comparative particle than is a negative form with variants such as ne, na, and nor, e.g. You’re my son – more to me nor any son (Dickens, Great Expectationsii. xx). This paper presents a detailed historical survey of this dialectal usage in varieties of British and Irish English, and offers an assessment of its regional distribution since the medieval period. The paper also investigates the possible origins of the form, first highlighting some problems of previous analyses, before comparing and contrasting the use of negation in comparative constructions in French and Insular Celtic. The evidence strongly suggests that the negative comparative particle in English should be seen as an areal feature of the British Isles, and that language contact with Celtic lies at the root of it.

This study examines two features of the Irish English literary dialect of William Carleton, a bilingual writer of the period when Ireland shifted to English. It addresses the issue of the validity of literary dialect via empirical comparison of the use of plural verbal -s in Carleton and in personal letters written by a close contemporary from a similar background. The result suggests considerable accuracy in Carleton’s dialect representation: he uses plural verbal -snot only in agreement with the complex constraints of the Northern Subject Rule but also in line with usage in the letters. Then the study examines Carleton’s use of the be after V-ing construction, which is typically a perfect in present-day Irish English. The future uses found in older texts are sometimes cited as examples of inauthentic literary dialect. However, like others of his generation, Carleton uses be after V-ingin both future and perfect senses. Given his social and linguistic background, his place in relation to the language shift, and the apparent accuracy with which he portrays dialect features, Carleton provides crucial support for the view that future uses arose in a language contact situation in which speakers of British English interpreted be after V-ingas a future, while speakers of Irish acquiring English intended it as a calque on an Irish perfect. As more Irish shifted to English, perfect meanings came to dominate. Carleton and his contemporaries bear witness to the middle phase of this process.

Irish English (IrE) was initially learned as a second language as a result of the successive colonizations of Ireland by speakers of English and Scots dialects that began in the Middle Ages and reached a peak during what is termed ‘The Plantation Period’ of Irish history. The scheme persuaded English and Scottish settlers to colonize the island of Ireland, hailing from urban centres like London as well as more rural areas like Norfolk and Galloway. This intensive colonization process created the possibility that a novel type of English could emerge. This new variety is characterized by: (i) innovative forms; (ii) the incorporation of features drawn from Irish, the indigenous language prior to colonization, and (iii) other characteristics caused by the mixing of Irish with the regional Scots and English vernaculars of the new settlers. Interestingly (and not uncommonly when migratory movements of these kinds arise), modern varieties of IrE still retain this mixed heritage. Moreover, the colonization is preserved culturally – particularly in the north of Ireland – by ethnic divisions between the descendants of the migrant and indigenous populations. Thus, Catholics, who reflect the latter group, celebrate events like ‘St Patrick's Day’ while their Protestant neighbours commemorate ‘The Glorious Twelfth’ each July, celebrating the day in 1690 when King William III's victory at the Battle of the Boyne ensured the ultimate success of the Plantation scheme in which their forefathers participated. The linguistic consequences of this contact permeate all aspects of the speech used within these communities (accent, grammar and vocabulary). Moreover, some of the grammatical features that are the focus of this article have travelled to regions that have been intensively settled by Irish migrants. Hence, these features also have important implications for the study of transported dialects, which has recently become very topical and is the focus of a new strand of research in English variation studies typified by the publication of Hickey (ed. 2004).

Hospitality in Medieval Ireland, 900–1500. By CATHERINE MARIE O'SULLIVAN (Dublin: Four Courts P., 2004; pp. 272. Eur 55). POLITICAL history has long dominated the writing of Irish history, as befits a nation whose political identity is relatively new (in the Republic) and still a bone of contention (in the ‘province’ of Northern Ireland). The majority of the chapters in A New History of Ireland—recently completed in nine very substantial volumes, having first been advocated publicly by one of its founding joint-editors, Theo Moody, back in 1962—tell the political story of Ireland. Much of that story, of course, relates to the deeds and the misdeeds of the English in Ireland. It is a story that is often misunderstood or misrepresented in Ireland and little known in England. In many ways it is a brutal story with uncountable casualties, most of them Irish. One of the casualties of Irish historiography has been other approaches to the writing of history—cultural, economic, local and social to list the most obvious. The last quarter of a century or so has witnessed serious attempts to remedy this defect and the work here under consideration is a notable example in the ‘yet much neglected field of Irish social and cultural history’ (p. 11). The author acknowledges the influence of the social anthropologist Marcel Mauss, whose ideas were first published in the early 1920s and ‘have largely served as the theoretical underpinning for this study’ (p. 13). A more recent source of inspiration is Felicity Heal's Hospitality in Early Modern England (1990), while O'Sullivan justly draws attention to the life-long and ground-breaking work of her mentor and research advisor at Trinity College Dublin, Katharine Simms. One of the many strengths of this book is the author's awareness of other cultures and of other historical periods. Its theoretical underpinning recognises from the start and throughout its course that, in the middle ages, ‘the practice of hospitality was an inescapable obligation that formed the nexus of people's most important relationships, making it both fundamental and indispensable to the functioning of medieval Irish society’ (p. 14). Yet this social practice is scarcely, if ever, mentioned in the standard political narratives, which, equally inescapably, offer only a superficial view.

Over the past 40 years, a number of studies of Irish English have demonstrated the substrate influence of Irish on Irish English. Significant amongst these are the work of, inter alia, Harris (1984), Filppula (1999), and Hickey (2007), all of which treat Irish English as a contact variety of English (and perhaps the oldest such variety). While this line of research has focused on various aspects of language, there is still room to explore the cognitive aspects of language variation in Ireland. This chapter aims to explore the substrate influence of Irish on Irish English as it pertains to the conceptualization of containment and support. Using Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the relationship between a structure and the road where that structure is located is shown to vary between the road providing a surface for the structure (“on the road”) and the road containing the structure (“in the road”), both of which are found in other studies of Irish English, but thus far, not from the viewpoint of a contact phenomenon that has the capacity to vary between the different conceptualizations. In this chapter, the way in which the Irish language deals with these conceptualizations is described as a distinction of permanency, which leads to the substrate influence on Irish English speakers, who apply this same distinction in describing the conceptualizations in English. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future research.

Varieties of ‘Contact Irish English’ (CIE), i.e. English spoken by native Irish speakers, are often thought to display significant phonological influence from Irish (Hickey, 1986, 2007; Ó hÚrdail, 1997). However, modern systematic acoustic descriptions of CIE speech data are scarce, relative to other Irish English (IrE) varieties. This study investigates a phonological phenomenon often attributed to an Irish influence, that of epenthesis in words with liquid+sonorant coda clusters (LSCCs) e.g., in film [ˈfɪləm], in CIE spoken in the Connemara Gaeltacht, an Irish speaking region in the west of Ireland. We examine (i) the extent of LSCC epenthesis and effects of sociolinguistic factors and (ii) whether prosodic contours for epenthesized words are realized similarly to other disyllabic words in Connemara English. 314 LSCC token from sentences produced by 12 L1-Irish bilinguals and 12 English monolinguals were acoustically analysed using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2023) and IViE prosodic annotation (Grabe et al., 1998). Statistical findings indicate significantly higher epenthesis rates among bilinguals, with age, Language Profile Score (LPS) and cluster type affecting variation. Prosodically, epenthetic tokens predominantly portray low target tones L*_% (54%), particularly among women, irrespective of age. These results do not align with previous findings for prosodic realization of disyllabic words in Connemara English (Théveniaut & Herment, 2023). By providing empirical evidence, this study enhances our understanding of CIE phonology as well as the role of language contact in shaping phonetic and prosodic variation in bilingual communities.

Sociolinguistic consequences of language contact: English versus Nigerian languages

English is a product of contact with other languages (Hickey, 2010a). This essay explains the major effects of language contact on the languages or dialects involved, using examples from Shetland Scots, which has been influenced by contact with Norn, and from Southern Irish English (S.I.E.), which has been influenced by contact with Irish Gaelic. The focus is on the borrowing of lexical items between Norn and Shetland Scots and of grammatical features between Irish Gaelic and S.I.E. The essay begins with a brief overview of language contact in general and then give examples of the effects of contact from each dialect. Throughout the essay the claim is made that language contact is an ongoing and fluid process and that the examples given merely illustrate the effects of contact necessitated by the particular situation in question, not universal effects of language contact.

Chapter Ten - Encapsulation of food ingredients by nanophytosomes

This volume presents discourse production in multilingual contexts as a specific type of language contact situation. Translation may be seen as the prototypical type of multilingual discourse production, other types would include parallel text production in different languages (e.g. for websites) or the production of versions more loosely connected with the source text. When divergent communicative norms and conventions come into contact in any of these types of text production, one may find that such conventions transcend established language boundaries, potentially leading to the emergence of new genres. This volume represents the first collection of papers that focus on the specific properties of language contact through multilingual discourse production. It brings together approaches by historical linguists, language contact researchers and translation scholars, thus presenting the topic in its full variety and providing valuable suggestions for further research in this emerging field of study.

The importance of communication as a central idea in language usage cannot be over-emphasised. This seems to inform how many Nigerian speakers make extensive use of the mixture of indigenous languages and the English language in one and the same breath. It seems to reveal a kind of perception of reality in two ways at the same time. They seem to go through the process of thinking in diverse ways at the same time. This study thus seeks to find out the extent to which the average Nigerian user of the English language makes intelligible contribution to discourses. How much sense is made to and by interlocutors in the course of their discussions? To what extent is reality to them influenced by their knowledge of the English language? The extent of the indigenisation process is also of interest to the study. The expectation is that such contact should be to the advantage of one or the other of the languages in contact. Real time linguistic data were collected and analysed, using linguistic levels as base to access the extent to which Nigerian indigenous languages have been able to influence the English language. The finding shows that codemixing is an important part of the Nigerian communication process and has enabled the vernacularisation of the English language to a very large extent. This has produced a new spatial identity that reveals the Nigerian’s domination of the colonial English language.Keywords: Code-mixing, Communication, Language usage, English vernacularisation, Nigerian indigenous languages, Spatial identity