A Corpus of Irish English
In the following the structure and design of A Corpus of Irish English is described. The corpus gathers together the main documents for the English language in Ireland throughout its history. These begin in the early fourteenth century and continue up to the present-day. There are various genres represented in the corpus, reflecting the diversity of text types to be found in the history of Irish English: poetry, glossaries, sketches and full-length plays. A Corpus of Irish English was originally published with Corpus Presenter by John Benjamins, Amsterdam in 2003, see Information on Corpus Presenter.
Getting started
A Corpus of Irish English consists of over 70 texts with a time span of nearly 600 years. The material is arranged in a manner which reflects the main division in the history of Irish English into an earlier period, from the late twelfth century to the end of the sixteenth century, and a later period, from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the present. The beginning of the first period is marked by the Norman invasion of 1169 and ends with the defeat of the Irish forces at the battle of Kinsale in 1601. After that date a renewed plantation of the country began with vigorous policies being applied throughout the seventeenth century which led to new forms of English being introduced, both to the north (from Lowland Scotland) and the south (from Western and North-Western England). There is a degree of continuity between the two periods in the east coast, above all in the city of Dublin. For the remainder of the country the English of the early modern period (seventeenth century) formed the basis for later developments.
First period of Irish English |
Second period of Irish English |
Middle Ages |
Drama (sixteenth to twentieth centuries) |
Forth and Bargy |
Novels (nineteenth century) |
Fingal |
Varia (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries) |
To download the ZIP file containing all the texts of the corpus click on the following link:
A Corpus of Irish English (ZIP file)
Sources of the corpus texts
There are basically two sources for the texts of A Corpus of Irish English. The first consists of Irish writers using English as their literary medium. This is the case with the Kildare Poems which represent the earliest attestations of Irish English. Whether these authors were native speakers of Irish, English or to some degree bilingual is uncertain. What is true is that they knew the form of English in Ireland from first hand. The second source consists of writers from outside Ireland, for all practical purposes from England, who chose to represent Irish English in their works, mainly with the aim literary parody, i.e. often within the context of the stage Irishman, a stock figure of fun in English drama.
As the documents stem from both Irish-born and English-born writers they represent a perspective from within and without so to speak. Linguistically this fact is particularly interesting as it tells us what features of earlier Irish English were salient and hence perceived by English authors concerned with imitating Irish speech in their writings. This situation applied from the time of Shakespeare until well into the nineteenth century and has to a certain extent not ceased to exist if one takes more modern media, apart from drama, into account.
Text types in the corpus
The range of text types in the history of Irish English is impressive. It starts with poetry, the so-called Kildare Poems, a collection of 16 poems in the Harley 931 manuscript housed in the British Museum. There are glossaries for the dialect of Forth and Bargy from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. These are stored in A Corpus of Irish English as databases and can be transferred to text if you wish. The two remaining text types are 1) drama and 2) the novel. In the latter case one complete novel has been included, Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth, because of its importance as the first regional novel in Britain and because in it the author represents the speech of the Irish population as we presume she would have heard it. The plays contained in the corpus cover a time span of some four centuries, starting with some pieces from the Elizabethan era, through the Restoration period and into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Given the speech basis of drama it plays a central role in the documentation of historical Irish English and is hence so amply represented in A Corpus of Irish English.
Corpus Presenter
N.B.: The software provided in this book, written some 25 years ago, is now hopelessly outdated. However, there is a recent version of this software (very much updated) which can be downloaded from this site. Goto the next item in the tree on the left (Corpus Presenter book) then click on the link Corpus Presenter on the last line of the text on the left. You can downloaded the self-installing EXE file and then run the software on your computer, using the Corpus Presenter startup file CIE.CPD to view and interrogate the corpus.