VARIETIES OF ENGLISH IN

IRELAND

History
The English language has existed in Ireland since the late Middle Ages and has experienced phases of prosperity and decline during some 800 years. Even a cursory glance reveals that English in Ireland involves many subtypes, traceable to the origin of those settlers who carried English to the country. This is most obvious in the linguistic and political division between the north and south. However, the linguistic diversity within Ireland is much more subtle than this basic split suggests. Ulster shows major differences in varieties, above all that between Ulster Scots and Ulster English (see chapter 3). The south of the country has a long-standing distinction between forms of English spoken on the east coast (the oldest in the country) and those found to the south and west, which show greater evidence of the shift from Irish to English which largely took place in the last 300 years or so.

For the development of English at locations outside Europe, varieties spoken in Ireland are of importance as many of Englands former colonies were populated by deportees and settlers from Ireland who provided input to incipient forms of English at overseas locations.

The history of English in Ireland is not that of a simple substitution of Irish by English. When the AngloNormans and English arrived in Ireland the linguistic situation in Ireland was quite homogeneous. For the history of English in Ireland, the sixteenth century represents a break in its development. Politically, it was marked by increasing separatist activities on the part of the Irish (of native and/or original English/Norman stock) which ended in the final victory over the Irish by English forces at the Battle of Kinsale (Co. Cork) in 1601. The subsequent departure from (the north of) Ireland by native leaders in 1607 known somewhat romantically as the Flight of the Earls (Byrne 2004: 123) left a political vacuum which was filled energetically by the English.5

The spread of english The development of English in Ireland since the twelfth century has not been continuous. This is due both to the settlement of the island by the English and to the political conditions in England itself. Only the east and south-east coast of Ireland were settled to any appreciable extent in the late Middle Ages, above all the cities of Wexford, Waterford, Kilkenny and Dublin, though there were outposts of the AngloNormans, such as Carrickfergus immediately north of present-day Belfast. At this time Dublin had already gained the status of capital of the country. Like other cities in Ireland, Dublin largely owes its origins to a Viking settlement before the turn of the millennium (Moore 1965: 10). Because of its favourable position in the middle of the east coast and with the central plain as its hinterland, Dublin was able to assert itself over other urban settlements on river estuaries in Ireland. This fact is of some importance for the English language.

The regional accents of English speakers show great variation across the areas where English is spoken as a first language. There are a number of languages used in Ireland. Irish is the main language to have originated from within the island, while others have been introduced through foreign settlements. Since the late nineteenth century, English has been the predominant first language. A large minority claims some ability to use Irish, even though it is the first language only for a small percentage of the population. Within the Republic of Ireland, under the Constitution of Ireland, both languages have official status, with Irish being the national and first official language. The most remarkable fact in the linguistic history of Ireland since the seventeenth century is the abandonment of the Irish language by successive generations, to such an extent that the remaining Irishspeaking areas today are only a fraction of the size of the country and contain not much more than 1 per cent of the population. Bilingualism did not establish itself in Ireland, though it characterised the transition from Irish to English. Ireland has several main groups of accents, including those of Dublin and surrounding areas on the east coast where English has been spoken since the earliest period of colonisation from Britain, the accents of Ulster, with a strong influence from Scotland as well as the underlying Gaelic linguistic stratum which in that province approaches the Gaelic of Scotland, and the various accents of west, midlands and south.

Because of the number of emigrants from Scotland and Ireland, these varieties of English have had a surprisingly strong influence on the development of varieties outside the British Isles, often in ways which are not appreciated. The varieties of English Ireland are not colonial varieties but colonising ones, we could choose simply to ignore the complex linguistic situations in these countries, and treat each country as linguistically monolithic.

Although English was established in Ireland by the fourteenth century, there appears to have been a decline in its usage until the sixteenth century. By the time of Elizabeth I, the English did not expect the Irish not even those of English descent to speak English. While this seems to have been outsiders misperception, there is evidence that English speakers in Ireland at the period were bilingual in English and Irish. Whatever the state of English in Ireland in the sixteenth century, there was a resurgence in its use in the seventeenth century when Cromwell settled English people there to counteract the Catholic influence.

The English deriving from this settlement is now usually called Hiberno-English, or Southern Hiberno-English to distinguish it from the language of the English settlers in Ulster. Meanwhile, Ulster had been planted with some English, but mainly with Scots settlers under James I. The language of the Scots settlers is called Ulster-Scots, and the people are known as the Scots-Irish. There were approximately 150,000 Scots settlers in Ulster, and about 20,000 English ones in the early seventeenth century. Although the Scots were much more numerous and the influence of their language on their English co-settlers persists to the present day, we can still find a Northern Hiberno-English in the areas which were Englishdominated which is distinct from the Ulster-Scots.

Mixed accents
There is a transition area between the north and south of Ireland (cf. the recordings for this region in Hickey 2004a). Some features, like non-distinctive vowel length, are confined to Ulster, whereas others, such as fronted [u], reach quite far down into the south (Hickey 2004a: 74f.). The transition area stretches approximatelyfrom Co. Sligo in the north-west to Co. Louth in north Leinster. The status of southern accents in the north deserves mention here. For many Catholics, particularly in Derry, south Armagh and city areas like west Belfast, southern accents are quite acceptable. However, the nationalist community in Northern Ireland does not appear to have adopted features of southern speech.

In both the north and south of Ireland, RP-like accents are not regarded as worthy of emulation. They are associated with people with an English orientation and are generally interpreted as a sign of snobbishness. In fact there is a common ridiculing of RP-like accents as grand with a retracted // vowel as opposed to the normal centralised /a/ of Irish English [grand] (Hickey 1986a).

Decline of the irish

The nineteenth century, more than any previously, experienced the decline of the Irish language (Duffy et al. 1997: 94f.; Hindley 1990: 1320; O Cuv 1969: 13740). Because of the Great Famine (18458) Ireland may have lost anything up to two million native speakers of Irish (about a quarter of the population in the mid nineteenth century), either through starvation or emigration. Those Irish who sought work in North America or England were for the most part rural inhabitants from the west and south of the country, i.e. they were in the main native speakers of Irish.

Dialects The two main dialects of English spoken natively in Ireland are HibernoEnglish (mainly found in the provinces of Connacht, , Leinster and Munster) and Mid Ulster English or Ullans (mainly found in Ulster).

Republic of Ireland Hiberno-English Dublin Cork Waterford City Kerry and Cork County Connacht Sligo Town Galway City Rural Munster (Tipperary, Limerick County, Clare, Waterford) Limerick City North Leinster (Louth and Meath) South Leinster (Carlow, Kilkenny, Laois, Longford, Offaly, Westmeath, Wexford, Wicklow) Donegal

Northern Ireland Mid Ulster English Belfast Derry Ulster Scots South Ulster English

Hiberno-English Hiberno-English, or Irish English, is the dialect of English written and spoken in Ireland. English was first brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion of the late 12th century. Initially, it was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with Irish spoken throughout the rest of the country. By the Tudor period, the Irish culture and language had regained most of the territory initially lost to the colonists: even in the Pale, "all the common folk for the most part are of Irish birth, Irish habit, and of Irish language".[ However, the resumption of English expansion following the Tudor conquest of Ireland saw a revival in use of their language, especially during the plantations. By the mid-19th century, English was the majority language spoken in the country. It has retained this status to the present day, with even the minority whose first language is Irish usually being fluent in English as well. Modern English as spoken in Ireland today retains some features showing the influence of the Irish language, such as vocabulary, grammatical structure, and pronunciation.

The Cork The Cork accent displays various features which set it apart from most of the accents used in Ireland. Patterns of tone and intonation often rise and fall, with the overall tone tending to be more highpitched than the standard Irish accent. English spoken in Cork has a large number of dialect words that are peculiar to the city and environs. Unlike standard Hiberno-English, some of these words originate from the Irish language, but others through other languages Cork's inhabitants encountered at home and abroad.

Irish Travellers Irish Travellers have a very distinct accent closely related to a rural Hiberno-English, particularly the English spoken in Connaught from where they originate. Many Irish Travellers who were born in parts of Dublin or Britain have the accent in spite of it being strikingly different to the local accents in those regions . They also have their own language which strongly links in with their dialect/accent of English, see Shelta.

Middle English was first introduced by the Cambro-Norman settlers in the 12th century. It did not initially take hold as a widelyspoken language, as the Norman lite spoke Anglo-Norman. In time, many Norman settlers intermarried and assimilated to the Irish cultures and some even became "more Irish than the Irish themselves". Following the Tudor conquest of Ireland and the 1610 15 Ulster Plantation, particularly in the old Pale, Elizabethan English became the language of court, justice, administration, business, trade and of the landed gentry. Unilingual Irish speakers were generally of the poorer and less educated classes with no land. Irish was accepted as a vernacular language, but then as now, fluency in English was an essential element for those who wanted social mobility and personal advancement. After the legislative Union of Great Britain and Ireland's succession of Irish Education Acts that sponsored the Irish national schools and provided free public primary education, Hiberno-English replaced the Irish language, as it did in Wales and Scotland. Since the 1850s, English medium education was promoted by both the UK administration and the Roman Catholic Church. This greatly assisted the waves of immigrants forced to seek new lives in the US and throughout the Empire after the Famine. Since then the various local Hiberno-English dialects comprise the vernacular language throughout the island.

Mid-Ulster English is the dialect of Hiberno-English spoken by most people in the province of Ulster in Ireland. The dialect has been greatly influenced by Ulster Irish, but also by the Scots language, which was brought over by Scottish settlers during the plantations. Events in the south of Ireland also had an effect on Ulster. After the Anglo-Norman conquest, several prominent Norman families established bases in Ulster. The north of Ireland (Adams 1965) can be divided linguistically into three main areas (see table 3.2): (1) Ulster Scots, stemming from seventeenth-century Scottish immigrants; (2) mid Ulster English, deriving from immigrants, largely from the north of England, who arrived at roughly the same period (Adams 1965, 1967); and (3) south Ulster English consisting of transitional varieties between the north and south of Ireland Mid-Ulster English is the main subdivision of Ulster English (also called Northern Hiberno-English). The varieties spoken in south Armagh, south Monaghan, south Fermanagh, south Donegal and north Cavan are termed South Ulster English by linguists. Conversely, the varieties spoken in much of north County Antrim are termed Ulster Scots. The Mid-Ulster English dialect is used in the area between these. Phonology Vowels have phonemic vowel length, with one set of lexically long and one of lexically short phonemes. This may be variously influenced by the Scots system. It is considerably less phonemic than Received Pronunciation, and in vernacular Belfast speech vowel length may vary depending on stress. /a/ in after /w/, e.g. want, what, quality. // and // distinction in cot, body and caught, bawdy. Some varieties neutralise the distinction in long environments, e.g. don = dawn and pod = pawed.

Consonants Rhoticity, that is, retention of /r/ in all positions. Palatalisation of /k, , / in the environment of front vowels. /l/ is not vocalised[vague], except historically; usually "clear" as in Southern Hiberno-English, with some exceptions. Unaspirated /p/, /k/ between vowels in words such as pepper and packet. Voiced /d/ (or tapped //) for /t/ between vowels in words such as butter and city. This is similar to North American and Australian English. Dental /t/ and /d / for /t/ and /d/ before /r/ in words such as butter or dry. This feature is shared by Southern Hiberno-English. ///w/ contrast in whichwitch. This feature is recessive, particularly in vernacular Belfast speech. Dental realisations of /t, d, n, l/ may occur through Irish influence before /r/, e.g. ladder, matter, dinner and pillar, etc. Elision of /d/ in hand [hn], candle /kanl/ and old [l], etc. Elision of /b, / in sing [s], thimble, finger etc. // and // for th.

English Phonology in northen Ireland

The prosody of northern Irish English is quite distinctive. This manifests itself most clearly in the fall in pitch on stressed syllables (Jarman and Cruttenden 1976), the highlighting of which is realised in the south, as in most varieties of English, by a slight lengthening of the stressed syllable. This fall may have been responsible for the lowering of short high front vowels as in: He was hi[]t by a car. General features, typical of northern speech, are shown in table 1.1. Retroflexion of /r/. Northern Irish English is clearly rhotic and speakers who attempt to approach something like RP retain rhoticity longest. Syllable-final /r/ is different in both parts of the country, so that one can tell where speakers come from by their pronunciation of a word like north. While in the south /r/ is traditionally velarised in post-vocalic position, it is retroflex in the orth, Vowel length. A feature shared with varieties of Scottish English is the lack of contrastive vowel length. This naturally applies in particular to Ulster Scots. Although the latter is largely a rural formof English, the lack of distinctive vowel length can be found in urban varieties and those outside the core Ulster Scots areas.

Grammar
The morphology and syntax of Irish is quite different from that of English, and it has influenced both Northern and Southern Hiberno-English to some degree. There is a general preference in Irish English for that as relativiser with animate antecedents. This was clearly confirmed in A Survey of Irish English Usage where a mean acceptance rate of 78 per cent was returned for the test sentence: I know a farmer that rears sheep. On the lexical level, various markers of British usage are absent or very rare in Irish English, e.g. ta for thanks, mate for friend or the use of folk in the sense of people. Phrases may also be regarded by the Irish as significantly English and hence avoided, for instance, the augmentative ever so (nice).

Grammar and syntax

The syntax of the Irish language is quite different from that of English. Various aspects of Irish syntax have influenced HibernoEnglish, though many of these idiosyncrasies are disappearing in urban areas and among the younger population.
The other major influence on Hiberno-English that sets it apart from modern English in general is the retention of words and phrases from Old- and Middle-English. There are some grammatical traits which only occur in the north, such as positive anymore or whenever for when (see discussion above). Others which could be mentioned are (i) the use of a past participle as a verbal complement, especially after the verb need, e.g. My hair needs washed, and (ii) the use of from in the sense of since, e.g. Shes living here from she was married, i.e. from the time she was married The grammatical samples of Dublin English were collected over a period of several years and consist in the main of vernacular forms of English in the capital. These are not available in audio form (they consist of notes made by the author) because permission to tape record was not sought from the informants.

Grammar More generalised use of reflexive pronouns than in standard English English: It was yourself said it. (Hiberno-English) An indefinite anterior perfect without auxiliary have: Were you ever in Dublin? (Hiberno-English) The use of after as an immediate perfect: He was only after getting the job He had just got the job. (Hiberno-English) The use of an included object with a perfect: They hadnt each other seen for four years. (Hiberno-English) The use of be as a perfect auxiliary with go, come and an ill-defined set of other verbs: All the people are come down here. (HibernoEnglish) The use of inversion in indirect questions: She asked my mother had she any cloth. (Hiberno-English) The use of resumptive pronouns: A man that the house was on his land.(Scottish English, Hiberno-English, Ulster-Scots) A preference for will rather than shall in all positions. (Scottish English, Hiberno-English, Ulster-Scots) The use of yet with the simple past rather than the perfect: Did you get it yet? (Scottish English, Hiberno-English, Ulster-Scots)

Spelling

Unlike the United States and Canada , Ireland does not have its own spelling rules and British English spelling is used throughout the island.

Bibliography

Laurie Bauer, An Introduction to International Varieties of English Edinburgh University Press RAYMOND HICKEY, Irish English, history and present-day forms, Cambridge University Press 2007 www.questia.com www.englishtips.org