The Tape Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech is a partially completed survey of English in Ireland. It was initiated in the 1970s by Mr. Michael Barry of the English Department (now The School of English) of the Queens University of Belfast, Mr. Philip Tilling, of The Department of English, The University of Ulster, Coleraine Campus, and Mr. Brendan Adams of The Ulster Folk Museum (now The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum) Cultra, Holywood, N.I. The plan was to cover the entire country by interviewing typical informants from each point in a grid of the island of Ireland (several hundred informants were envisaged for this). All three informants, i.e. a child, a middle aged person and an elderly person, were recorded in 165 localities, the child only in 28 localities, leaving 46 of the proposed network of 239 localities unrecorded. A small number of interviewers were involved (both male and female, from the north and south of Ireland, it would appear) who contacted informants and went through a questionnaire with them and after this recorded some free speech in which they were asked about their locality, their youth, their occupations, etc. The questionnaire consisted of some 374 questions (see the text of this under Questionnaire used in the survey below) in which informants were tested for their pronunciations of key words. These words were not spoken by the interviewer but rather provoked by asking questions in which the relevant key word was the most likely answer. The TRS instructed its field-workers that 3 informants should be recorded in each locality, one from each of three age-groups, i.e. between 9-12 years, 35-45 years and 65-75 years. The informants consulted in this survey are generally rural inhabitants and tend to be at least middle-aged, if not older (though there is one young boy on the tapes). Hence the survey is in contrast to sociolinguistic investigations done of urban English in Ireland, for instance those by James and Lesley Milroy in Belfast or by myself in Dublin. Nonetheless, the survey offers a snapshot of traditional dialects around the island of Ireland in the late twentieth century.

The tapes used for the present digitisation were given to me by Dr Barry in 1984 to whom I am very grateful. The recordings were chosen from the available tapes in order to offer a representative sample of the survey which was then incomplete and which has remained so. The coverage for Ulster is best as here the first informants were found. For the remaining three provinces a smaller number of speakers were recorded, but some of these are from Irish-speaking areas which makes the material interesting for research into the syntax of Irish English. In addition, further material from the area of Cork has been included here thanks to Dr Brendan Gunn who kindly put his tapes from this part of Ireland at my disposal. My contribution to this project has been to prepare the material for digital processing (digitisation of audio tapes, programming of the Java interface, creation of the active map). The background information has also been supplied by myself and I reconstructed the questionnaire text as the original documents could not be found in Belfast when this website was being constructed.

   Questionnaire used in survey    Map with recording locations

   Connaught    Leinster    Munster    The Cork files    Ulster

Tapes of speakers from the following locations have been digitised and included in the current program. The locations can be identified on the maps which accompany this program (see menu option Information on the top of the screen). The locations for which recordings have been included here are encircled in red on the maps. Note that in some instances there are not both types of recordings for all speakers, in some cases one only has questionnaires and in others only free speech.

It should be stated here that the condition of the tapes of the survey varies greatly from case to case. Some tapes have good quality recordings with little ambient noise. Others are in a less fortunate condition. Furthermore, not all tapes are complete, for instance the questionnaire was either not carried to its conclusion, i.e. not all 374 questions were asked, or the tapes were truncated for some unknown reason. The length of the tapes also varies because some speakers reply quickly and do not need much prompting for them to provide the expected answer. The greatest variation, however, is found in the stretches of free speech. The subject matter of the tapes is very diverse as is the manner in which it is presented.

A few of the tapes (such as those from Dingle, Connemara and Gweedore in Donegal) contain stretches in Irish. This fact is interesting because some of the informants are native speakers of Irish and the Irish answer to questionnaire items first come to their minds. Such speakers are of interest of course because their phonology is heavily influenced by Irish.

The audio files of Tape Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech - Digital have been compressed using the MP3 format and can be processed with any commercial audio software if users wish to examine stretches of speech in detail or create extracts for themselves.

In all, there are 78 audio files is the Tape Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech - Digital. .

Connaught

Location 41	West Co. Galway	Connaught_41_Questionnaire.wav
		Connaught_41_Free_Speech.wav
Location 42	West Co. Galway	Connaught_42_1_Questionnaire.wav
		Connaught_42_1_Free_Speech.wav
Location 42 (speaker 2)	West Co. Galway	Connaught_42_2_Questionnaire.wav
		Connaught_42_2_Free_Speech.wav
Location 42 (speaker 3)	West Co. Galway	Connaught_42_3_Questionnaire.wav
		Connaught_42_3_Free_Speech.wav
Location 42 (speaker 4)	West Co. Galway	Connaught_42_4_Questionnaire.wav
		Connaught_42_4_Free_Speech.wav

Leinster

Munster

Location 7	Co. Clare	Munster_7_Questionnaire.wav
Location 19	Co. Tipperary	Munster_19_Questionnaire.wav
		Munster_19_Free_Speech.wav
Location 42	Co. Kerry	Munster_42_Questionnaire.wav
		Munster_42_Free_Speech.wav
Location 53	South Co. Kilkenny	Munster_53_Questionnaire.wav
		Munster_53_Free_Speech.wav
Location 55	Co. Kerry	Munster_55_Questionnaire.wav
		Munster_55_Free_Speech.wav
Location 64	Co. Waterford	(speaker 1) Munster_64_1_Free_Speech.wav
Location 64	Co. Waterford	(speaker 2) Munster_64_2_Free_Speech.wav
Location 69	West Co. Cork	(speaker 1) Munster_69_1_Free_Speech.wav
		(speaker 2) Munster_69_2_Free_Speech.wav
Location 72	Cork city	Munster_72_2_Questionnaire.wav
		Munster_72_1_Free_Speech.wav

The Cork files

Cork City	CorkCity_Female_1.wav
	CorkCity_Male_1.wav
	CorkCity_Male_2.wav
	CorkCity_Male_3.wav
Blarney, Co. Cork	Cork_Blarney_Female_1.wav
	Cork_Blarney_Female_2.wav
	Cork_Blarney_Female_3.wav
	Cork_Blarney_Male_1.wav
Coachford, Co. Cork	Cork_Coachford_Male_1.wav
	Cork_Coachford_Male_2.wav
	Cork_Coachford_Male_3.wav

Note. There are two other audio files which have speech samples from Cork City, see Location 72 under Munster above.

Ulster

Location 7	Co. Donegal	(speaker 1) Ulster_7_1_Free_Speech.wav
		Ulster_7_1_Questionnaire.wav
Location 7	Co. Donegal	(speaker 2) Ulster_7_2_Free_Speech.wav
		Ulster_7_2_Questionnaire.wav
Location 14	Co. Antrim	Ulster_14_Free_Speech.wav
Location 18	Co. Donegal	(speaker 1) Ulster_18_1_Questionnaire.wav
Location 18	Co. Donegal	(speaker 2) Ulster_18_2_Free_Speech.wav
Location 19	Co. Derry	Ulster_19_Free_Speech.wav
Location 22	Co. Antrim	Ulster_22_Free_Speech.wav
		Ulster_22_Questionnaire.wav
Location 25	Co. Donegal	Ulster_25_Questionnaire.wav
Location 28	Co. Tyrone	Ulster_28_Free_Speech.wav
Location 30	Co. Tyrone	Ulster_30_Free_Speech.wav
Location 33	Co. Antrim	Ulster_33_Free_Speech.wav
Location 34	Co. Antrim	Ulster_34_Free_Speech.wav
		Ulster_34_Wordlist.wav
Location 37	Co. Donegal	Ulster_37_Free_Speech.wav
Location 39	Co. Tyrone	Ulster_39_Free_Speech.wav
Location 41	Co. Tyrone	Ulster_41_Free_Speech.wav
		Ulster_41_Questionnaire.wav
Location 44	Co. Antrim	Ulster_44_Free_Speech.wav
Location 45	Co. Down	Ulster_45_Free_Speech.wav
		Ulster_45_Wordlist.wav
Location 46	Co. Down	Ulster_46_Free_Speech.wav
Location 51	Co. Fermanagh	Ulster_51_Free_Speech.wav
Location 54	Co. Armagh	(speaker 1) Ulster_54_1_Free_Speech.wav
Location 54	Co. Armagh	(speaker 2) Ulster_54_2_Questionnaire.wav
Location 62	Co. Fermanagh	Ulster_62_Free_Speech.wav
Location 63	Co. Monaghan	Ulster_63_Free_Speech.wav
Location 65	Co. Down	Ulster_65_Free_Speech.wav
Location 72	Co. Louth	(speaker 1) Ulster_72_1_Free_Speech.wav
Location 72	Co. Louth	(speaker 2) Ulster_72_2_Free_Speech.wav
Location 74	Co. Leitrim	Ulster_74_Free_Speech.wav

Note In two cases a wordlist would seem to have been presented to informants (though no information on this list is available). The wordlist contains word pairs, usually with contrasting vowels, e.g. push : pull.