Irish English

Englisches Seminar
Universität zu Köln
Seminar: Varieties of English
VARIETIES OF ENGLISH

IRISH ENGLISH (IRE)

by

Benjamin Althaus

SS 2005

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION  1

2 HISTORICAL AND SOCIO-CULTURAL ASPECTS  2

2.1 Geography and population of Ireland  3
2.2 History of Ireland and its language  3

3 LINGUISTIC ASPECTS  7

3.1 Irish  8
Spelling system and the lexicon  8
Phonology  8
Syntax  9

3.2 Language Varieties in Southern Ireland: Phonology  9
Irish English in the south-west  10
Irish English in the west  10
Irish English in the east  11
Irish English in the Midlands  12

3.3 Language varieties in Northern Ireland: Phonology  12
Ulster Scots  13
Ulster English  14
The transition zone from south to north  15

3.4 The IrE lexicon  15

3.5 The grammar of Irish English  16
Tense-aspect-modality  17
Relativisation and complementation  18
Noun phrase structure  18
Pronominal systems  19
Word Order  19
Prepositional usage  20
Auxiliaries and negation  21

4 CONCLUSION  22

5 BIBLIOGRAPHY  23

1 INTRODUCTION

Every language has several varieties which differ from each other in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Different speakers use different varieties depending on their regional provenance, individual social background, or educational level (see Erickson 1997: 106). Even the same speaker may use several varieties according to different situations. This paper will focus on the varieties of English used in Ireland. The name ‘Ireland’ is popularly used to refer to the Republic of Ireland. This paper, however, will include the varieties of English spoken on the whole island, namely the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. These two parts have a different government, a different history, and quite different features in the language that is spoken. Linguistic analysis should therefore differentiate between the languages spoken in each of these two parts separately. However, one must keep in mind that dividing the subject according to political borders is not meant to imply that there are language borders that run equally accurate. Linguistic features merely appear with greater or lesser frequency when one moves around the country. As Kortmann and Upton (2004: 26) point out, there are no “regional cut-off points for ways of speaking” but boundaries “blend subtly and imperceptibly into one another”.

Before the 12th century Irish was the native language spoken in Ireland. English was introduced in the late 12th century and was slowly established on the island. The development of English in Ireland can roughly be divided into two periods. During the first period (~1200- 1600) English was mainly spoken by a few English settlers who lived in the south east of Ireland. During this phase English was exposed to considerable Gaelicisation (see Hickey 1997: 359). In the second period (~1600-1900) several political and social changes allowed English to spread out across the country and displace Irish as a native language roughly from east to west. In the first part of this paper I will have a closer look into historical developments in Ireland and investigate how they have influenced the moulding of Irish English¹. Nowadays the English language plays a complex role in Ireland; its usage and the degree of its prestige strongly differ in different areas of the island.

In this paper I will discuss the main varieties of English spoken in Ireland by giving examples and pointing out some of their features². In chapter 2 I will investigate some of the accents³ spoken in Ireland and compare them to the features of the Received Pronunciation (RP). The choice of an accent used by a speaker can depend on various conditions, e.g. social

context: Speakers will try to adjust their pronunciation to the social status of the addressee or the degree of familiarity. The same is the case for the use of dialects⁴ (stylistic variation). In chapter 3 and chapter 4 I will point out typical lexical and grammatical features of dialects of IrE. Of course dialect features are not used by all speakers of a dialect with the same intensity; and most speakers are not totally consistent in their grammatical usage or lexical choice. However, one can abstract certain features and describe certain tendencies shown by speakers of dialects of IrE.

Map 1: Ireland (from Trudgill/Chambers 1991: XIV)

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2 HISTORICAL AND SOCIO-CULTURAL ASPECTS

2.1 Geography and population of Ireland

Ireland is an island of about 84 km2; it is about 460km long and about 260km wide. Ireland lies in the Atlantic ocean and is part of the British Isles. The island is bisected by the River Shannon and its vegetation consists mainly of grasslands and moors. Most of the former forest stand has been cleared in the course of the island’s colonisation.

Since the middle ages Ireland has been divided into 4 provinces: Ulster in the north, Connacht in the west, Munster in the south west, and Leinster in the south east and east. It is further subdivided into 32 counties (see map 1). The population of Ireland is approximately 5.7 people, 4 millions of which live in the Republic of Ireland and 1.7 millions in Northern Ireland. The inner region of Ireland is sparsely populated; most inhabitants live in coastal areas.

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1 The English spoken in Southern Ireland has often been called Hiberno-English1. Nowadays this term is not used that frequently anymore as many non-Irish readers are unfamiliar with it (see Hickey 2004: 68). In the following I will refer to this variety as IrE to parallelise it to the designation of other varieties, e.g. Scottish or Welsh English.

2 Unless indicated otherwise, all information and examples presented in this paper are taken from Kortmann, Bernd. A Handbook of Varieties of English New York: Mouton New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004.

3 The term ‘accent’ is used to refer to varieties in pronunciation (see Hughes/Trudgill 1996: 3).

4 The term ‘dialect’ is used to refer to “varieties distinguished from each other by differences of grammar and vocabulary” (Hughes/Trudgill 1996: 3).