86)  ‘Evolving Near the Source: The Dynamic Model in Ireland’, (in a festschrift - title cannot be announced yet).

Models for the development of (post-)colonial varieties of English have been proposed in the past few decades, such as the New Dialect Formation model of Peter Trudgill and, more noticeably, the Dynamic Model of Edgar Schneider. In the present study the applicability of the latter model to the evolution of English in Ireland is discussed, briefly compared to others and evaluated in terms of what aspects of the model match what developments in Ireland. The evolution of English in Ireland is shown to a multi-level, multi-stage phenomenon which is difficult to characterise adequately using the five stages of the Dynamic Model. Extensions to this, in particular the Extra-, Intraterritorial Forces model by Sarah Buschfeld and Alexander Kautzsch offer more possibilities of characterisation. In sum, it can be shown that certain aspects of the Dynamic Model and its extension apply well to Irish English and highten awareness of the stages this set of varieties went through during its history.

85)  ‘Southern Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) The New Cambridge History of English Language. Vol 4: Varieties of English in Britain, Ireland and Europe (ed. Raymond Hickey). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The English language in Ireland can look back on a history going back to the late Middle Ages. It the course of the following centuries 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 nrth of Ireland (Ulster) 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. On the one hand there are strongly localized forms of English, in both urban and rural settings, which are associated with local identities and attitudes. On the other hand there are more supraregional varieties which, while maintaining a distinctly Irish profile, are more closely allied to supranational varieties of English. It is the latter set of 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. This is most true of the speech of young female urbanites in the capital Dublin whose English has been in a state of flux in the past two to three decades.

84)  ‘The development of a pragmatic marker: Anyway in Irish English’. (under review).

The development of the pragmatic marker anyway in Irish English is of relatively recent date and arose from an input which is part of a set consisting of the pattern any + X, where any is an indefinite determiner and X is functionally an adverbial element. From an original lexical meaning there developed a more pragmatic one when the element shifted to the right periphery (or became exposed there). A transition period occurred during which varying interpretations of anyway were possible, facilitating the rise of anyway as a pragmatic marker. Later it appeared in the prosodically more prominent left periphery where anyway can only have a pragmatic interpretation. In present-day Irish English the pragmatic marker anyway expresses speaker stance and can serve as a hedging device with the additional function of forcing a shift from a topic of disagreement among discourse participants or indeed of simply terminating the discourse.

83)  ‘Lookit - the story of a pragmatic marker in Ireland’. (in a festschrift - title cannot be announced yet).

Full clauses with the verb look developed into pragmatic makers in the past few centuries in English. The initial clauses contained a pronominal direct object, e.g. look at it. In the course of pragmaticalisation, the phrase was univerbated to lookit and from then on took on a new role as a pragmatic marker, typically in the left periphery, and occasionally in the right periphery of an utterance. Although it is common colloquially in Irish English, lookit (sometimes written with a space, i.e. look it) is not recorded in texts from the nineteenth or the first half of the twentieth century. Present-day fiction does afford a few instances: there are a few examples from two novels by Roddy Doyle. For the present study examples collected during fieldwork in different parts of the Republic of Ireland in the period 2014-2020 form the data base. This data confirms that in present-day Irish English lookit is used to get the interlocutor to agree with the speaker, either in a mild form, as an appeal, or in a strong one, as a demand. In addition, lookit, is used as an exhortation to an interlocutor to accept a situation. What is common to these various usages is the request by the speaker that a situation be accepted and not be (further) discussed or contested.

82)  ‘Pronouns of address in the history of Irish English’. (in a festschrift - title cannot be announced yet).

The second person pronouns in English underwent major changes during the Early Modern English period. The change was triggered by the loss of thou as a specific second person singular reference which was later entirely restricted to religious and some poetic usage. After a period of overlap, the gap which was vacated by the demise of thou was later filled by the plural form you being used for the singular as well. This led to syncretism of the singular and plural and represented a quandary when speakers desired to distinguish the two categories. The solution for many varieties was to introduce an innovative form for the plural, retaining you for the singular. In Irish English the new pronouns took on a number of forms, notably ye(e)z and yous(e). The concern of this paper is to trace the appearance of these forms, offering a credible chronology, and to conjecture about their source.

81)  ‘Southern Irish English’, in: Kingsley Bolton and Daniel Davis (eds) The Wiley Encyclopedia of World Englishes. Malden, MA: John Wiley.

English has been present in the south of Ireland for over 800-years during which time the fortunes of the language waxed and waned. After the Great Famine in the mid-nineteenth century the heritage language Irish had declined repidly with a few percent of native speakers remaining by the beginning of the twentieth century. The forms of English which arose during the transition from Irish were consolidated in the twentieth century into varieties with specific profiles. English in Ireland was also the source of many transported dialects of English, first to the Caribbean and North America and later to the Southern Hemisphere, above all to Australia and New Zealand. Irish English today continues to develop along lines defined by both internal and external forces, for instance in new modes of pronunciation and in its pragmatics which is closely linked to Irish customs and culture.

82)  ‘Sociolinguistics in Ireland’, in: Martin Ball and Rajend Mesthrie (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics around the World. London: Routledge, 2023, 478-487.

The relationship of language to society in Ireland is multifaceted and multilayered. This has been the case in history and is so to this day. The two languages whose relationship dominated the linguistic landscape of Ireland in previous centuries, Irish and English, are both still present. The forms and use of English are determined by a variety of factors. While traditionally the nature of Irish English was largely determined by the shift from Irish to English and to a certain degree by the nature of the English input to Ireland, contemporary English in Ireland is independent of both these sources. Instead, modern social forces have been shaping and continue to shape the English language in Ireland. Among these factors are an ever-increasing exposure to language and societies beyond the island of Ireland and the increasing numbers of non-Irish in Ireland who have made the country their home, so-called New Irish. This chapter looks at the forces operative in modern Irish society and attempts to outline the linguistic results they have engendered.

79)  ‘Irish English in the today’s world’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Irish English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 3-19.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the conception of Irish English as a distinctive variety of English began to emerge with scholars dedicated to the subject active in the early decades. In the decades after WWII, further studies appeared in which the relationship of the Irish language to forms of English in Ireland loomed large and most of the specific features of Irish English were traced to the historic language shift from Irish to English. Scholarship in the 1980s moved away from this 'transfer' position in favour of 'retentionist' views. At the same time, urban varieties formed a new focus with different levels of language receiving increasing attention, above all pragmatics, a level on which Irish English differs clearly from other varieties. In addition, new corpora have been compiled which have broadened the data base for linguistic investigations.

78)  ‘The History of English in Ireland, 1200-1800’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Irish English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 39-56.

Contact between Irish and English began in the late twelfth century with the coming of the Normans who arrived in the South-East of Ireland along with some English who settled in the towns of the east coast. The French-speaking Normans came in contact with Irish, especially in the countryside, with the English residing in the towns. The relationship of English and Irish varied in later centuries with the latter remaining the dominant language for some time. During the Elizabethan period and afterwards, English emerged clearly as the superstrate and has remained so ever since with the linguistic effects of contact seen most clearly in the language shift which was virtually complete by the late nineteenth century. This chapter provides the necessary historical and demographical background to understand the shift and offers discussions of key linguistic factors operating during this process.

77)  ‘Contact between Irish and English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Irish English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 93-118.

Irish and English have been in contact over more than eight centuries with the relationship of the two languages varying over the centuries with Irish being a superstrate to English in the first few centuries. However, during the Elizabethan period and afterwards, English emerged clearly as the superstrate vis a vis Irish and has remained so ever since. The linguistic effects of the contact between Irish and English is seen most clearly in the historical language shift which took place in Ireland with speakers of Irish in the past few centuries. The aim of this chapter is twofold: first to provide the necessary historical and demographical background to understand the shift and then to use this information as a basis for a more general review of contact scenarios.

76)  ‘The pronunciation of English in Ireland’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Irish English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 121-143.

With the first documents from the late Middle Ages a specifically Irish form of English is clearly visible. Features of this variety re-appeared in the satirical literary texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, documenting a range of features, such as an incomplete Long Vowel Shift, which had become typical of Irish English. The dawn of the modern era in the late nineteenth century shows a split in varieties, on the one hand vernacular forms and on the other more supraregional ones which were influenced by British pronunciation norms. With independence for the south of Ireland in 1922 a re-orientation towards endonormative models took place leading to supraregional Irish English of the late twentieth century. Further changes, emanating from Dublin in the 1990s and into the 2000s, continued the ever-changing nature of non-local varieties of Irish English which are increasingly under the influence of forms of English from outside, chiefly from North America.

75)  ‘The spread of Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Irish English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 491-519.

From the beginning of the English colonial period in the early seventeenth century Irish emigration to overseas locations figured prominently. The reasons for emigration were various: deportation, the search for religious freedom, but above all the escape from oppressive economic conditions. Emigration from Ireland can be broken down into different periods with early input to the Caribbean during its Homestead Phase (first decades of seventeenth century) followed by major Ulster Scots input to North America in the eighteenth century and large-scale emigration by southern Irish in the nineteenth century during the Great Famine and immediately afterwards. This was to both North America and to Britain with an influence on the formation of new dialects in both these regions. This chapter examines features of overseas varieties and considers whether Irish sources are likely given what is known of group status and contact and the mixing of different ethnicities.

74)  ‘The Language of Irish Literature in English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Irish English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 467-487.

Works containing dialect can be examined in an attempt to reconstruct vernacular features for different regions at various times, while bearing questions concerning the reliability of written representations in mind (rendering these explicit helps to prepare the ground for later linguistic analysis). In Irish English literary texts a range of phonological and morphosyntactic traits are in evidence, including lexical and discourse pragmatic features, especially in literature from the nineteenth century. Enregistered features of Irish English are apparent in literary texts and serve to express a specifically Irish identity. Data is provided by corpora of literary works and enable a data-driven, sociolinguistically-aware analysis of the language of Irish literature. The issue of translation of Irish and English texts (in both directions) to gain insights into the specific nature of Irish English as a literary medium is also considered.

73)  ‘In Sheridan's Shadow. Elocution and its legacy in Modern Ireland’, in: Luisella Caon, Marion Elenbaas and Janet Grijzenhout (eds) Language Use, Usage Guides and Language Norms. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022, 17-30.

The rise of elocution as an educational discipline in which training in 'correct' pronunciation was offered to young people aspiring to be well-received on higher levels of society is intimately connected with the efforts of Thomas Sheridan, who wrote copiously on the subject. Eighteenth and later nineteenth-century elocution was concerned with the eradication of regional and local urban accents and was often promoted, engendering linguistic insecurity in potential subjects for elocution training. The stance taken by Sheridan and his followers, namely that regional accents should be stamped out and the standard cultivated, also applied to Ireland where the issue was compounded by the difference between Irish accents and those found in England. The issue of elocution became inextricably linked with negative attitudes to local accents of English in Ireland and it is this attitude which is still prevalent when the subjects of elocution and standards of language are discussed today in public spaces such as internet forums.

72)  ‘Heritage, identity and language use in public spaces in Ireland’, in: Stephen Lucek and Carolina Amador Moreno (eds) Expanding the Landscapes of Irish English Research. London: Routledge, 2023, 254-269.

The linguistic identity of Irish people is something which has changed dramatically in the last 150 years or so. The expression of Irish linguistic identity - the Irish language - lost that function, this now being carried out by English, albeit specifically Irish varieties of that language. Despite the English native-speaker status of over 99% of the present-day Irish heritage population, the presence of Irish looms large, in the consciousness of Irish people and also in public spaces in present-day Ireland. This study aims at analysing the complex attitude of the Irish to their former native language and to the manner in which it is displayed in public in the Republic of Ireland. Building on previous work on linguistic landscapes in Ireland, the study attempts to show both how elements of Irish English and Irish interplay in public spaces. This also demonstrates how language elements have become enregistered, i.e. have undergone a process in which linguistic features, which were hitherto unnoticed or non-salient, come to be associated with a place or region or register and to be seen as typical of its language/variety through a specific discourse referring to these features, that is the language/variety is conceptualised by others as displaying these features.

71)  ‘The Englishes of Ireland. Emergence, transportation and current trends’, in: Andy Kirkpatrick (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes. Second edition. London: Routledge, 2021, 77-95.

English in Ireland can look back on an 800-year history during which time the fortunes of the language waxed and waned. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the heritage language Irish had declined radically so that under 10% of the population spoke it as a native language. The forms of English which arose during the language shift period were consolidated in the twentieth century into varieties with unique profiles. English in Ireland was also the source of many transported dialects of English, first to the Caribbean and North America and later to the Southern Hemisphere, above all to Australia and New Zealand. Irish English today continues to develop along lines defined by both internal and external forces, for instance in new modes of pronunciation and in its pragmatics which is closely linked to Irish customs and culture.

70)  ‘Sure in Irish English: the diachrony of a pragmatic marker’, in: Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson (eds) Voices of English: Tapping into records past and present. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2020, 173-186.

The English adjective sure functions in Irish English as a pragmatic marker in sentence-initial or clause-initial position (occasionally in tag questions) expressing intersubjectivity in discourse. This essentially has the effect of affirming shared knowledge among speakers and offering reassurance in cases where a speaker feels it is appropriate to do so. The specifically Irish use of sure can be traced back to the late seventeenth century with a peak in the nineteenth century, going on literary representations of Irish English. Its indexical value for Irishness may have contributed to its decline, but not demise, in twentieth century literature, despite its continued occurrence in Irish English today.

69)  (with Carolina P. Amador-Moreno) ‘Linguistic identities in Ireland - Contexts and issues’, in: Raymond Hickey and Carolina P. Amador Moreno (eds) Irish Identities – Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2020, 3-20.

By the early modern period, the manifestation of linguistic identity in Ireland came to be realised by either the Irish or the English language. The fortunes of the two languages varied over the centuries but with the dawn of the modern era, from about 1700 onwards, the dominance of the English language could not be denied and continued to increase steadily leading to the situation in present-day Ireland where only a tiny minority of the population still speak Irish as a native language. Linguistic identity is a continually evolving phenomenon whereby speakers use a variety which uniquely identifies them in a spectrum of language forms. Nowadays Irish linguistic identity is expressed via forms of English, all of which are clearly recognisable as from Ireland and hence sufficiently delimited from other forms of English. For urban Irish English an additional social dimension arose with vernacular varieties offering a unique profile for many city dialects such as those in Dublin or Cork. Ethnicity is reflected in language differences in cities like Belfast and Derry adding a further dimension to identity issues, one which is not present in the Republic of Ireland or only with the non-Irish born, the so-called New Irish or non-nationals.

68)  ‘Pluricentricity and Irish English’, in: Rudolf Muhr, Josep Àngel Mas Castells, Jack Rueter (eds) European Pluricentric Languages in Contact and Conflict. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019, 133-146.

Pluricentricity is a major characteristic of the English language in today's world. There are regional epicentres which have a significant influence on varieties in their orbit. However, in older anglophone countries like Ireland there is a complex relationship between national and extranational varieties English which is determined by history and present-day attitudes. This study examines the factors which determine language attitudes and influences in Ireland and attempts to evaluate the forces acting in this arena of Irish social life.

67)  ‘Adjusting language identity: twentieth-century shifts in Irish English pronunciation’, in: Raymond Hickey and Carolina P. Amador Moreno (eds) Irish Identities – Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2020, 69-83.

For the majority of Irish people their linguistic identity changed from the heritage native language to that of the colonial power England in the course of the nineteenth century. Forms of English, which were unambiguously differentiated from those in England, had already arisen in Ireland in previous centuries so that there was no necessity to adopt any variety of British English. Subsequently, there arose in Ireland a continuum of varieties from the most basilectal form, used by speakers in close contact with Irish, to non-regional forms which showed some influence of Irish but was clearly much more standard than the contact varieties. This high-end of Irish English in the nineteenth century developed into a supraregional form of Irish English which became the de facto standard in the country and remained so after independence providing a non-local variety of Irish English with which a broad section of Irish society could identify with linguistically. Supraregional Irish English was initially quite close to British English in such features as non-rhoticity and a low, central STRUT vowel, but these features were gradually replaced by more Irish ones after independence in 1922 leading to a sharper profile for Irish English in the course of the twentieth century.

66)  (with Elaine Vaughan) ‘ Introduction’, in: World Englishes (2017), 36.2: 154-160 (Special issue on Irish English).

65)  ‘Irish English in the Anglophone world’, in: World Englishes (2017), 36.2: 161-175 (Special issue on Irish English).

The 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. On the one hand there are strongly localized forms of English, in both urban and rural settings, which are associated with local identities and attitudes. On the other hand there are more supraregional varieties which, while maintaining a distinctly Irish profile, are more closely allied to supranational varieties of English. It is the latter set of 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. This is most true of the speech of young female urbanites in the capital Dublin whose English has been in a state of flux in the past two to three decades.

64)  ‘The pragmatics of grand in Irish English’, Journal of Historical Pragmatics (2017), 18.1: 82-102, 2017.

In the past two centuries the use of the adjective grand underwent a specific semantic expansion in Irish English. Apart from the meaning of ‘displaying grandeur’, the adjective came to mean ‘fine’, ‘alright’, ‘in good form’, both as an expression of the speaker‘s situation and as a reference to that of the addressee. This development can be shown to represent a case of subjectification, as seminally described by Elizabeth Traugott in various publications (e.g. Traugott 1995), with the element of intersubjectification arising somewhat later (Traugott 2003). Via the examination of various texts, this study looks at the diachronic development of grand in its various uses and the rise of the Irish English extension with a consideration of possible precursors and parallels in other varieties. The subjective and intersubjective uses of grand are labelled ‘approving grand’ and ‘reassuring grand’ respectively and are shown to be in keeping with other features of Irish discourse structure and pragmatics.

63)  ‘Early recordings of Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Listening to the Past. Audio Records of Accents of English. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 199-231).

This chapter examines whether individuals born before Ireland became independent in 1922 show accents closer to British English than later Irish English. This is partially true: older persons show an open vowel inthe STRUT lexical class and are frequently non-rhotic. This is true of James Joyce and Patrick Kavanagh (two Irish authors), for example. But such individuals also have a monophthong in the GOAT lexical class, no sign of GOOSE fronting, no BATH retraction and dental stops in the THIN and THIS lexical classes. In sum, people born at the end of the nineteenth or into the early twentieth century show combinations of features which are not found anymore. It would seem that after independence supraregional accents of Irish English, deriving from middle-class Dublin usage, developed in which a retracted and slightly rounded STRUT along with complete rhoticity were, and still are, typical.

62)  ‘Irish English and the English writing system’, in: Vivian Cook and Des Ryan (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System. (London: Routledge, 2016, 317-331).

The historical development of the writing of English in Ireland is traced in the sections of chapter. It begins with considering the orthographic conventions of medieval Irish English, especially those in the Kildare Poems and looks in particular at unexpected and unconventionalised combinations of letters and speculates on their phonetic values. The second half of the chapter is dedicated to the attempts by authors to represent Irish English in the Early Modern Period and again considers the possible phonetic realisations of non-standard spellings.

61)  ‘English in Ireland: development and varieties’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Sociolinguistics in Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 3-40.

Here an overview is offered of how the English language developed in Ireland from the late Middle Ages onwards. Particular attention is given to popular perceptions of Irish English and the enregisterment of features which this has led to. In addition the most recent changes in pronounciation found above all in Dublin with young females is discussed. These involve short front vowel lowering similar, but not identical, to that found in Canada and large parts of the United States.

60)  ‘Society, language and Irish emigration’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Sociolinguistics in Ireland. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 244-265).  

The manner in which the Irish left Ireland for other parts of the anglophone world during the colonial period, roughly from 1600 to 1900 is examined here along with the circumstances which led to this emigration. The possible linguistic influence which the Irish had on varieties at the overseas locations they went to is considered in detail.

59)  ‘The pragmatics of Irish English and Irish’, in: McCafferty, Kevin, Carolina Amador Moreno and Elaine Vaughan (eds) Pragmatic Markers in Irish English. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015, 17-36).

The Irish and English languages are spoken by groups of people who belong to the same cultural environment, i.e. both are Irish in the overall cultural sense. This study investigates whether the pragmatics of the Irish language and of Irish English are identical and, if not, to what extent they are different and where these differences lie. There are pragmatic categories in Irish which do not have formal equivalents in English, for instance, the vocative case, the distinction between singular and plural for personal pronouns (though vernacular varieties of Irish English do have this distinction). In addition there are discourse markers in Irish and Irish English which provide material for discussion, e.g. augmentatives and downtoners. Historically, the direction of influence has been from Irish to English but at the present the reverse is the case with many pragmatic particles from English being used in Irish. The data for the discussion stem from collections of Irish and Irish English which offer historical and present-day attestations of both languages.

58)  ‘English as a contact language in Ireland and Scotland’, in: Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier (eds) English as a Contact Language. (Cambridge: University Press, 2013, 88-105).  

The historical language shift which took place in Ireland and Scotland with speakers of Irish and Scottish Gaelic is the topic of this paper. Its aim is twofold: first to provide the necessary historical and demographical background to understand the shift and second to use this information as a basis for a more general discussion of contact scenarios. The discussion of such situations includes the following aspects: 1) Category and exponence in language shift, 2) Transfer in language shift, 3) The search for categorial equivalence, 4) Neglect of distinctions in language shift, 5) What does not get transferred in language contact?, 6) Non-binary categories in contact and 7) Permeability of linguistic systems. The specifics of language shift in Ireland and Scotland is then viewed in the wider context of shift scenarios in the anglophone world.

57)  ‘The English language in Ireland’, in: Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 90: 881-887. Special issue The Languages of the 27, edited by Wim Vandenbussche and Piet van Sterkenburg.  

This is a short overview of the main dates and the chief development in the history of English in Ireland. It is an additional section to the chapter on British English in the current volume and has been added as an appendix to provide a concise discussion of the specific features and nature of Irish English.

56)  ‘Rural and urban Ireland: A question of language?’, in: Irene Gilsenan Nordin (ed.) Urban and Rural Landscapes in Modern Ireland: Language, Literature and Culture. (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012: 17-38).  

This paper opens with a consideration of the population distribution in present-day Ireland, emphasising the large concentrations in the two metropolitan areas of Belfast and Dublin. It then reviews the urban-rural split in Irish literature of the past two centuries and considers the use of language with writers from both the city and the countryside. The use of the 'brogue', a stereotype rural Irish accent, for the portrayal of prototypically Irish characters is examined as are the ambivalent attitudes of Irish writers to this accent and its speakers. The paper also looks at the deliberate exploitation and manipulation of Irish rural accents by later writers such as Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge as well as at twentieth century representations of urban Irish English, e.g. with Sean O'Casey.

55)  ‘Areal features of English in Ireland’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Areal Features of the Anglophone World. (Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2012, 79-107).  

The notion of linguistic area (from German Sprachbund, lit. ‘language federation’) is one which is often invoked when dealing with languages which share features and are found in a geographically contiguous area. The present paper considers to what extent this notion applies to the island of Ireland which in its history and at present has been home to a number of languages. The main two are Irish and English and the relationship between these has been especially close given that there was a historical shift from the former to the latter. However, the influence has been in both directions so that areal features have arisen in Ireland. In addition the Ulster Scots input from the seventeenth century came under the influence of both Irish and southern Irish English and thus engaged in Ireland’s linguistic areality.

54)  ‘Standard Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Standards of English. Codified Varieties Around the World. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 96-116).  

This study is concerned with examining the de facto standard of English used in the south of Ireland. Here there is no explicitly codified standard of English, i.e. there are no guides to standard Irish English, no publications dealing with the subject. Nonetheless, the population are aware of what features belong to the non-stigmatised variety of Irish English, a form based on middle class usage from the first half of the twentieth century. This standard exists by contrast with more vernacular varieties which in their pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary differ from the standard. The non-colloquial variety of Dublin English arose due to the process of supraregionalisation during which the majority of vernacular features were removed by the rising middle classes of Ireland who came increasingly to enjoy higher levels of education during the nineteenth century. The supraregional variety which came to be accepted as the standard of Irish English occupies an intermediate position between vernacular forms within Ireland and the extranational norm in England.

53)  ‘Present and future horizons for Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Irish English in Today’s World. Special issue of English Today, Vol 106, June 2011, 3-16.  

The English language was first taken to Ireland in the late twelfth century and enjoyed a modest position in late medieval Irish society, a position which betrayed no sign of the later dominance of English in Ireland as in so many countries to which the language was taken during the period of English colonialism. The fate of the English language after initial settlement was determined by the existence of Irish and Anglo-Norman as widely spoken languages in the country. Irish was the continuation of forms of Celtic taken to Ireland in the first centuries BCE and the native language of the great majority of the population at the time settlers from Britain first arrived in Ireland. The following centuries experienced a shift from Irish to English which was never to be reversed and led to Ireland becoming an overwhelmingly English-speaking country. The situation today is one dominated by (i) the north-south divide (Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland) and (ii) the rural - urban split, above all Dublin versus the rest of the country. The language of the capital has been especially dynamic and has undergone major changes since the early 1990s due to the expansion of the city and the great increase in prosperity, at least up until 2008.

52)  ‘The languages of Ireland. An integrated view’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) 2011. Researching the Languages of Ireland. (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2011, 1-45).  

This study offers an overview of all the languages which have been spoken on the island of Ireland since the earliest documents (runic-like forms of Celtic from the first centuries CE). It considers the structures of these languages, the ethnic groups who spoke them and the manner in which these interacted with each other. The mutual influence of languages in Ireland a the central focus, not just that of Irish on English, but such historical relationships as that between Anglo-Norman and Irish as well as Latin and Old Norse.

51)  ‘Ulster Scots in present-day Ireland’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Researching the Languages of Ireland. (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2011, 291-323).  

Of all the varieties of English taken to Ireland since the 17th century, Ulster Scots is that which has retained a very distinct profile and which can be unambiguously linked to related present-day varieties in western and lowland Scotland. Undoubtedly, Ulster Scots – especially in its rural forms – is quite separate from other varieties of English in the north of Ireland, let alone in the south. Its divergent nature has meant that much debate has taken place concerning its status as a language or ‘simply’ a dialect. In addition there has been a conscisous urban revival in recent years which has sought to expand the lexical basis of the dialect by artificial creations and thus ‘create’ a fully-fledged language. This study offers an assessment of the attempts at revival and expanding Ulster Scots and consider the vital question of its acceptance in Northern Irish society.

50)  ‘Irish English in early modern drama. The birth of a linguistic stereotype’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed). Varieties of English in Writing. The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010, 121-138).  

The rise of the linguistic stereotype of Irish English in drama written in English by English-speaking authors is the topic of this contribution. It considers a variety of features found in dramatic representations of Irish characters and checks these against non-standard speech in other text types, notably emigrant letters and court proceedings. The question of whether such representations can be regarded as genuine forms a central focus of the study. There are also additional issues considered here, such as the survival and demise of certain non-standard features in varieties of Irish English and the relationship of contact features (from Irish) to those non-standard features which most likely derive from dialect input from England and Scotland.

49)  ‘The Englishes of Ireland. Emergence and Transportation’, in: Andy Kirkpatrick (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes (London: Routledge, 2010, 76-95).  

This paper offers an outline of the development of the English language in Ireland from its earliest stages with particular emphasis on the language shift which has characterised the emerging forms of English in Ireland over the centuries. The influence of the Scots input on English in the north of Ireland is also be considered. The representation of different forms of Irish English in writing is also examined as well as the language of the capital Dublin (Hickey 2005). The chapter has furthermore two additional foci 1) The spread of English from Ireland during the colonial period. Since the mid 17th century forms of Irish English have been transported to overseas locations and have provided an input into new forms of English developing at these external locations. 2) The development of supraregional Irish English, an embryonic standard of English in Ireland. The features of this non-local English are examined and compared with other similar varieties across the anglophone world. In particular, the question of mutual intelligibility is examined and the place of Irish English in the arena of World Englishes is considered.

48)  ‘English in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Eighteenth-Century English. Ideology and Change. (Cambridge: University Press, 2010, 235-268)  

This chapter provides an overview of the development of English in both the north and south of Ireland during the eighteenth century. It looks in detail at the textual records for Irish English in this period as well as considering the rise of Ulster Scots. Furthermore, other forms of English in eighteenth-century Ireland, notably the extinct dialect of Forth and Bargy, are considered. The significance of English in eighteenth-century Ireland is that this is the period before the upheavals of the nineteenth century and before the last great push of language shift.

47)  ‘Modal verbs in English and Irish’, in: Esa Penttilä and Heli Paulasto (eds) Language Contacts meet English Dialects. (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 259-274).   

This article presents an overview of modality types in English and how they are expressed in Irish. The contrast of the two languages is important given that there was a major language shift from Irish to English over the past few centuries. However, it would appear the modal system of Irish did not have any significant influence on English in Ireland, probably because the means for expressing modality in Irish as very different from English and usually avail of prepositional pronouns with the verb tá ‘be’, e.g. Tá fúm dul ann [is under-me go.NON-FINITE in-it] ‘I must go there’.

46)  ‘Weak segments in Irish English’, in Donka Minkova (ed.) Phonological Weakness in English. From Old to Present-day English. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 116-29).  

The varieties of English spoken in southern Ireland are noted for the reduction in the articulation of alveolar segments, chiefly /t/. This has a long history and is amply attested in the textual record. Vernacular speech in the capital Dublin shows alveolar stop lenition to a more considerable degree than do less regionally bound varieties of Irish English. This lenition is clearly organised as a cline on which lenited segments increase in sonority. The precise manifestation of lenition depends on syllable position, being disfavoured in onsets but also in covered positions such as immediately before stops. There are also manner restrictions on lenition prohibiting it before /s/ because sequences of two fricatives are not legal. On the cline of lenition there are different realisations and the extent to which a variety shows these depends on its degree of vernacularity. The range is from non-lenition (faithful representation of segments from the lexical input) to deletion of segments. There are furthermore lexicalised instances of advanced lenition which occur in the supraregional variety of English in Ireland which normally only shows the first stage of lenition, i.e. frication of stops with the retention of all other articulatory features. In this contribution both a phonetic analysis of lenition and a consideration of the external factors (degree of vernacularity) which determine the range of lenition is offered.

45)  ‘Feature loss in 19th century Irish English’, in Terttu Nevalainen, Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta and Minna Korhonen (eds) The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008, 229-43).  

The current contribution is concerned with the disappearance of a number of dialect features from the English language in Ireland during the course of the 19th century. At the outset of this century there were many archaic and dialectal features from earlier input varieties of English as well as transfer features from Irish which had been carried over by bilinguals during the language shift to English. In the course of the 19th century a native middle class arose in Ireland due to the emancipation of, and general education for the Catholic population. This in turn led to the emergence of a supraregional variety of English in which many of the earlier features were removed and/or replaced by more mainstream ones, stemming from southern British usage. Developments were not always straightforward and many features were relegated to vernacular varieties or to positions of slighter salience, thus escaping censure by later generations. The consideration of just what paths was taken by what features forms the backbone of this contribution.

44)  ‘“What strikes the ear” Thomas Sheridan and regional pronunciation’, in Susan Fitzmaurice and Donka Minkova (eds) Studies in the History of the English Language IV: Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008, 385-411).  

The role of the elocutionist and grammarian Thomas Sheridan in the rise of sociolinguistic censure is considered in the present contribution. Sheridan's attitude to non-standard features in Irish English in the late 18th century is examined to see how prescriptive notions of language use seemed to be fleshed out during this time. The negative comments by Sheridan on the speech of his fellow Irishmen is considered in some detail to see to what extent prescriptive remarks such as these can be used to gain a glimpse of regional pronunciations at the beginning of the late modern period. The possible influence of Sheridan’s strictures on the development of Irish English during the 19th century is also considered.

43)  ‘Southern Irish English’, in: David Britain (ed.) Language in the British Isles. 2nd edition. (Cambridge: University Press, 2007, 135-51).  

Following on the article by Alan Bliss in the first edition of Language in the British Isles (1984) the present article attempts to offer an update by taking into account the very considerable research done in Irish English studies in the two decades since this volume originally appeared. Particular emphasis is placed on sociolinguistic developments in Dublin English and on issues in the study of Irish English which are of general interest to variety linguists.

42)  ‘Dartspeak and Estuary English. Advanced metropolitan speech in Ireland and England’, in Ute Smit, Stefan Dollinger, Julia Hüttner, Ursula Lutzky, Gunther Kaltenböck (eds). Tracing English through time: explorations in language variation. (Vienna: Braumüller, 2007, 179-90).  

The present paper is concerned with two putative varieties of English in London and Dublin, namely Estuary English and Dartspeak. It considers what linguistic features can be associated with these labels and examines the parallels and differences between the two forms of English, both from an internal linguistic and an external sociolinguistic point of view. In particular the motivation for the rise of these varieties is considered. The comparison between Dublin and London shows that the new variety of Dublin English has been triggered by the desire of the non-local speakers in the capital to dissociate from those who have a strong local identification and accent. The developments in and around London are more of a compromise between strongly local forms of English and a standard - Received Pronunciation - which has been perceived in recent decades as increasingly stand-offish and class-conscious.

41)  ‘Irish English, research and developments’, in: Études Irlandaises. Special issue Irish English. Varieties and Variations, edited by Maryvonne Boisseau and Françoise Canon-Roger, pp.11-32.  

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. After an introduction, 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, 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. The last section looks at recent changes in Dublin English (Section 7) which are having a profound influence on the course of non-local varieties of English in the south of the country. A conclusion summarises these developments and points to other areas of interest in the field of language studies and English in Ireland.

40)  ‘Contact, shift and language change. Irish English and South African Indian English’, in Hildegard L. C. Tristram (ed.) Celtic Englishes IV. (Potsdam: University Press, 2006, 234-58).  

In order to determine the likelihood of sources, the salient features of Irish English and South African English are compared with each other. Both varieties owe their existence to a shift from an original indigenous language to English. The relevant populations in both countries initially acquired English in manners which were largely similar, i.e. in a process of imperfect second language learning in adulthood. For these reasons the structures in both kinds of English are considered with a view to whether they might have their source in the background languages (substratum interference) or in the nature of the sociolinguistic situation in which the shift took place. As always, multiple causation must be considered. In the case of Irish English, archaic and/or regional input from Britain must also be allowed for as a possible source.

39)  ‘Irish English in the context of previous research’, in: Anne Barron and Klaus Schneider (eds) The pragmatics of Irish English. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005, 17-44).  

This overview article opens with a sketch of the history of Irish English studies and an outline of the issues in this field as well as a brief discussion of terminology. An historical sletch traces the origins of English in Ireland through to the present-day, dealing essentially with the language shift from Irish to English which is responsible for many of the salient features of Irish English. The article also looks at areal features and attempts an interpretation of features which could either have a contact or an English regional source.

38)  ‘English in Ireland’, in: D. Alan Cruse, Franz Hundsnurscher, Michael Job and Peter R. Lutzeier (eds) Lexikologie-Lexicology. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005, 1256-60).  

This handbook overview begins with some historical remarks concerning the development of Irish English, distinguishing between retentions from regional English input and borrowings from Irish, the author then looks at the function of specifically Irish English lexis on different levels of formality and in public contexts in Ireland. The question of Irish loans outside of Ireland and some onomastic matters are also dealt with.

37)  ‘Development and diffusion of Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey (ed.) Legacies of colonial English. (Cambridge: University Press, 2004, 82-117).  

This chapter from the volume on transported dialects is concerned with offering a fresh assessment of both the development of Irish English since the late Middle Ages and of its role as dialect input to extraterritorial varieties of English which have developed throughout the world in the last four centuries. A series of phonological and morphosyntactic features are examined and the sources for these which have been suggested in the literature on varieties are weighed up against the possibility of Irish English origin. The likelihood of Irish input is regarded as dependent on the nature of the community at the new location and the period at which this input was prevalent, thus in Newfoundland the influence from Irish English was considerable but for general American English it is slight as the large numbers of (southern) Irish immigrants arrived after the formative period of English there.

36)  ‘The phonology of Irish English’, in: Clive Upton (ed.) Handbook of Varieties of English. The British Isles. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, 47-76).  

An overview of the sound systems of the main varieties of Irish English is to be found in this article. It deals with English in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland and examines both rural and urban varieties in both these regions. Special attention is given to change in southern Irish English. The treatment of all varieties uses lexical sets to discuss individual features. There are a number of sound files on the CD-ROM accompanying the book which provides acoustic illustrations of the different forms of Irish English.

35)  ‘What’s cool in Irish English? Linguistic change in contemporary Ireland’, in: Hildegard L. C. Tristram (ed.) Celtic Englishes III. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003, 357-373).  

The subject of the present paper is the set of changes in the sound system of Dublin English which have been in evidence in the past ten years or so and which are spreading quickly throughout the entire country. What one is dealing with here are shifts in the phonological space of vowels which have already led to a major re-alignment of the vowel system of mainstream Dublin English with a retraction of low vowels and a raising of back vowels. These changes are, however, part of a larger scheme in which the phonological profile of Dublin English is being radically altered on a broad front. The changes are of general linguistic interest because they represent a case of dissociation as a type of change, that is the motivation for the shifts would appear to be a distancing on the part of fashionable Dublin English speakers from those who speak the colloquial form of English in the capital. Given the social dominance of Dublin over the rest of the country, the changes in English there are being adopted in the rest of the Republic of Ireland and a new form of supraregional English is establishing itself rapidly.

34)  ‘Dublin and Middle English’, in: Peter J. and Angela M. Lucas (eds) Middle English. From tongue to text. Selected papers from the Third International Conference on Middle English: Language and Text held at Dublin, Ireland, 1-4 July 1999. (Frankfurt: Lang, 2002, 187-200).  

This article is concerned with examining Dublin English from the point of view of its considerable vintage. The metropolitan variety of English in Ireland goes back to the late 12th century and has survived ever since, albeit with periods (the 15th and 16th centuries) in which the Irish language made serious inroads into the capital. Many archaic features can still be discerned in Dublin English, especially in phonology and to a lesser extent in grammar and vocabulary. Such characteristics as the use of alveolar stops for dental fricatives, the distinction of short vowels before /r/, the existence of unshifted /u/ as well as a centralised onset for /ai/ and unshifted values for Middle English /e:/ offer evidence of the archaic nature of (local) Dublin English.

33)  ‘Historical input and the regional differentiation of English in the Republic of Ireland’, in: Katja Lenz and Ruth Möhlig (eds) Of dyuersitie & chaunge of langage. Essays presented to for Manfred Görlach on the occasion of his 65th birthday.. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002, 199-211).  

Although the north of Ireland has been described exhaustively from the point of view of regional distinctions, the Republic of Ireland has not experienced anything like the same degree of attention from linguists, despite promising beginnings like that of Henry (1958). The present article is a modest attempt to redress this imbalance by considering the salient features of English in the east, south/south-west and west of Ireland along with the large midland area. The differences are seen in relation to English settlement patterns and the presence of Irish in many areas outside the east until fairly recent times.

32)  ‘The Atlantic edge. The relationship between Irish English and Newfoundland English’, English World-Wide, 23:2, 281-314.  

The intention of the present article is to examine the linguistic features of the Irish-derived community in contemporary Newfoundland and relate these to the varieties of Irish English in the south east of Ireland, the region from which most of the Irish settlers emigrated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The nature of South-West English — the second area of the British Isles which provided input to Newfoundland — is also considered and contrasted with south-east Irish English. The body of the article consists of a description of key features from phonology, morphology, syntax and lexis which are suspected of occurring in both Ireland and Newfoundland. In addition the possibility of retentions and of independent developments in Canada are also considered.

31)  ‘The South-East of Ireland. A neglected region of dialect study’, in: Kirk, John and Dónall Ó Baoill (eds) Language links: the languages of Scotland and Ireland. Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, 2 (Belfast: Queen´s University, 2001, 1-22).  

There are several reasons why the study of the south-east of Ireland is a rewarding enterprise. From a historical point of view one can recall that the first settlers from England in the late 12th century arrived in this corner of the country and that English probably never died out here, certainly not in the cities from Dublin to Waterford which were inside the medieval Pale and where there is a continuity of English into the modern period. Another important reason for studying the English of this region is that the south-east, specifically the counties of Waterford, Wexford and south Kilkenny were the catchment areas for those migrant fishing labourers who went to Newfoundland in the 18th and early 19th century and whose speech formed the basis for that of the Irish community there.

30)  ‘Language contact and typological difference. Transfer between Irish and Irish English’, in: Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds) Language contact and the history of English (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001, 131-69).  

Treatments of contact-induced change do not always take the typological makeup of donor and receiving languages into account. If this is done, however, then the nature of the contact process (at pivotal points in the structure of the donor language) and the likelihood of the successful transfer can be better described. A variety of well-known features from the phonology and morphosyntax of Irish English are examined from this typological perspective to see if this approach can further our understanding of how these features arose. The article also contains a general discussion of examples of contact-induced change which have appeared in linguistic literature in the recent past.

29)  ‘Dissociation as a form of language change’, European Journal of English Studies (4:3), 2000, 303-15.  

The desire of speakers to separate themselves linguistically from another adjacent group of speakers is considered in the present article. The group which is active is normally that with higher social status and power and a characterisation of the situation in contemporary Dublin is offered to illustrate a typical dissociation scenario. A holistic interpretation of the current changes in English in the capital is offered which furthers the understanding of the motivation and patterning of these changes.

28)  ‘Salience, stigma and standard’, in: Laura Wright (ed.) The development of standard English 1300-1800. Theories, descriptions, conflicts. (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 57-72).  

The concern of the present article is to consider how features come to be viewed as salient (noticeable) for speakers of a dialect and then how such features are either eradicated in a process of supraregionalisation or relegated to the vernacular mode. Examples are given from the history of Irish English to illustrate the points made and a series of general criteria for salience are listed and discussed with regard to varieties of English as a whole.

27)  ‘Models for describing aspect in Irish English’, in: Hildegard L. C. Tristram (ed.) The Celtic Englishes II. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2000, 97-116).  

After beginning with a review of different approaches to describing aspect put forward by Filppula, Harris, and Kallen in particular, this paper then offers an alternative method of dealing with the immediate and resultative perfectives in Irish English: a prototype interpretation in which the distinctions between the two aspectual types are not binary but scalar with examples representing good or bad fits of the prototype. The habitual aspect is also treated and the view that, historically, Irish speakers, engaged in shifting to English, refunctionalised periphrastic do is put forward. Originally delivered as a paper at the Second International Colloquium on Celtic Englishes, University of Potsdam, 23-27 September 1998.

26)  ‘Ireland as a linguistic area’, in: James P. Mallory (ed.) Language in Ulster. Special issue of Ulster Folklife (45), (Holywood, Co. Down: Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, 1999, 36-53).  

An attempt is made here to list features which occur across the island of Ireland both in the northern and southern parts. The emphasis is on the commonalities in varieties of Irish English rather than on differences. The question of Irish as a possible donor source for key features of English is considered. There is a detailed discussion of features from various linguistic levels along with a weighting of these features in terms of linguistic significance to see to what extent the entire island could be considered a linguistic area.

25)  ‘Dublin English: Current changes and their motivation’, in: Paul Foulkes and Gerry Docherty (eds) Urban voices. (London: Edward Arnold, 1999, 265-81).  

As one of a series of articles in a volume on urban varieties of contemporary English the current article offers a synchronic description of Dublin English and the major changes it is going through. The independence of Irish English from other varieties elsewhere in the British Isles is stressed and the changes are seen as separate developments motivated by the desire of fashionable Dubliners to dissociate themselves from lower-class speakers and not by a putative standardisation process in Dublin English.

24)  ‘Development and change in Dublin English’, in: Ernst Håkon Jahr (ed.) Historical sociolinguistics. (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1999, 209-43).  

The historical development of English in the capital of the Republic of Ireland and the current changes which it is undergoing are the topic of the present article. The author starts with a consideration of previous stages of Dublin English, especially what we know from the 18th century through the comments by Thomas Sheridan in his Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language of 1781. The contrast between strongly local forms of English in Dublin and that of more fashionable quarters of the city is dealt with in detail and the changes are seen as an attempt by the latter to dissociate themselves from the former in the manner in which they pronounce English.

23)  ‘The Dublin vowel shift and the historical perspective’, in: Jacek Fisiak and Marcin Krygier (eds) English Historical Linguistics 1996. (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1998, 79-106).  

A systematic description of the set of current changes in Dublin English — the Dublin vowel shift — is offered to begin with here and these are considered as a reaction to the historical development of local Dublin English from at least the beginning of the early modern period. The manner in which the current change is taking place, the precise nature of those participating, the relationship between Dublin English and that outside of the capital are just some of the issues dealt with in detail. The article closes with a consideration of the vowel shift within the framework of different theories of language change.

22)  ‘The computer analysis of medieval Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey, Merja Kytö, Ian Lancashire and Matti Rissanen (eds) Tracing the trail of time. Proceedings of the conference on diachronic corpora, Toronto, May 1995. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997, 167-83).  

On the basis of an electronic version of the Kildare Poems — compiled as part of the Corpus of Irish English — an analysis of lengthening environments was undertaken. The aim was to determine to what extent Middle English open-syllable lengthening could be assumed to have taken place in late medieval Irish English. The results suggests that the most important factor in Ireland was vowel height, the low vowel /a/ undergoing the lengthening but the mid and high vowel retaining a short articulation assuming that the orthographic interpretation of vowel values can be relied upon.

21)  ‘Assessing the relative status of languages in medieval Ireland’, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Studies in Middle English linguistics (Berlin: Mouton, 1997, 181-205).  

The concern of the present paper is to examine the status of Middle English and Anglo-Norman at the beginning of the settlement of Ireland from Britain in the late 12th century. Both of these languages were introduced after the first invasion from England in 1169. The assessment takes into account the ethnic composition of the newcomers, their internal relations and their relative social position in Ireland. The linguistic argumentation includes examining loanwords into Irish (the number is far greater from Anglo-Norman than from English in the early period) and the change in stress patterns in southern Irish, possibly under influence from Anglo-Norman. The conclusion drawn is that for the first two centuries at least English was not anything like as significant as Anglo-Norman and that its strongholds were the towns on the eastern coast.

20)  ‘Arguments for creolisation in Irish English’, in: Raymond Hickey and Stanisɫaw Puppel (eds) Language history and linguistic modelling. A festschrift for Jacek Fisiak on his 60th birthday (Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 1997, 969-1038).  

Although the external history of Irish English is quite different from that of acknowledged creoles like those in the Caribbean area the question is nonetheless valid to what extent Irish English, as a variety which arose throughout a long period of imperfect bilingualism, shows features which are prototypical of creoles. The paper contains surveys of previous treatments, direct or indirect, of the subject and presents all the possible arguments for and against, providing in the process alternative interpretations of such central features of Irish English as the set of aspectual distinctions. Much space in the article is devoted to assessing the putative creole status of features of Irish English. The conclusion arrived is that while this set of varieties does not – and most probably did not – meet the necessary criteria for classification as a creole (above all there is no grammatical restructuring in Irish English), it nonetheless represents a linguistic type which, among extant varieties of English, is closest to creoles in its structure.

19)  ‘Lenition in Irish English’, in: Alison Henry, Martin Ball and Margaret MacAliskey (eds) 1996 Papers from the International Conference on Language in Ireland. Belfast Working Papers in Language and Linguistics, 13 (Belfast: University of Ulster, 1996, 173-93).  

This article is an attempt to put the lenition which is characteristic of alveolar stops, intervocalically and word-finally before a pause in southern Irish English into a broader framework, i.e. that of the weakening of alveolars — involving tapping or glottalisation — in other varieties of English. It looks at lenition in Scouse which encompasses all voiceless stops (although recessive nowadays) and suggests that this was the original scope in Ireland. The question of a possible contact source is also addressed.

18)  ‘The acquisition of Irish English phonology’, in: James Daw and Michèle Wolff (ed.) Language and Lives, Festschrift for Werner Enninger (New York: Lang, 1996, 171-87).  

The acquisition of the specifically Irish pronunciation of English is of particular interest when considering oppositions in the area of obstruents. It can be seen that children in the first few years do not distinguish dentals from alveolars and show the allophony of alveolars with dentals such as mouth with a final fricative /t/ which suggests that they regard the alveolar point of articulation as primary, the dental one being secondary and acquired later.

17)  ‘Identifying dialect speakers: The case of Irish English" in: Hannes Kniffka (ed.), Proceedings from the Third International Conference on Forensic Linguistics (Frankfurt: Lang, 1995, 217-37).  

The concern of the present paper is to outline those segmental phonological features of Irish English which, alone or in combination, are unique to Irish English and which are of assistance when trying to identify a person as Irish. The examination shows that only the fricativisation of alveolar stops (/t, d/ to corresponding fricatives) is an absolute identification criterion. Other features are in combination good indicators such as dental realisation of interdental fricatives along with phonological processes like vowel epenthesis (film [fɪləm]) and V-/r/ metathesis (modern with /drən/).

16)  ‘An assessment of language contact in the development of Irish English" in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Language Contact and Linguistic Change (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995, 109-30).  

This paper seeks to weigh up the twin factors of contact and conservatism in the genesis of Irish English by considering on the one hand the external history of the switch-over to English by the native Irish and on the other by contrasting the structures peculiar to Irish English with those in Irish and with early modern nonstandard forms of English. For this assessment the distinction between low-level transfer and systematic transfer is central. The author scrutinises the latter and introduces the notion of ‘usurpation’ whereby speakers in a situation of uncontrolled second language acquisition use afunctional elements in the target language (here: do as the expression of an habitual aspect) to reach equivalents to grammatical categories which they have in their own native language.

15)  ‘The beginnings of Irish English" Folia Linguistica Historica (14), 1993, 213-38.  

Irish English is unique among non-mainland varieties of English in reaching so far back in time. The earliest documents from the 14th century form the point of departure for the present investigation in which both the general Middle English characteristics and the specifically Irish traits of this early variety are examined. The essential question of the influence of the Irish language on medieval Irish English occupies a central position and parallels are drawn with the type of English which emerged later in the early modern period and with the attested forms of present-day (southern) Irish English.

14)  ‘Suprasegmental transfer: on prosodic traces of Irish in Irish English’, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Further insights into contrastive linguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990, 219-29).  

In the present paper various cases of possible interference from Irish in Irish English, which are to be found in the area of suprasegmental phonology, are examined. Three aspects of syntax which are influenced by sentence melody, namely the formation of the habitual aspect, topicalization structures and sentence coordination, and which in Irish English are deviant with regard to Standard English, are considered to be the result of transferral of prosodic features from Irish syntax. The distribution of syntactic stress is also considered with questions and answers in Irish and Irish English.

13)  ‘R-coloured vowels in Irish English’, Journal of the International Phonetic Alphabet, 1989, 44-58.  

Due to the preservation of tautosyllabic /r/ in Irish English a large number of contrasts are found which are no longer present in Standard English (Southern British English). An analysis of the long vowel and short vowel phoneme inventories in Irish English is given, with particular emphasis on the realization of vowels before /r/. Additionally, processes such as suffixation and epenthesis are considered inasmuch as they affect vowel realization. Attention is also devoted to the possibility of Irish influence on this area of Irish English phonology.

12)  ‘A lost Middle English dialect: the case of Forth and Bargy" in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.) Historical dialectology. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988, 235-72). [See chapter 2 of Hickey 2007 Irish English. History and present-day forms. for an updated presentation of the material from this paper.]

Up until the beginning of the 19th century a variety of English survived which is a remnant of the language brought to Ireland in the late medieval period. This is known from the two baronies of county Wexford in the extreme south-east corner of Ireland where the dialect was spoken. The remains are contained in glossaries collected at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century and in a small number of songs. The phonetics of this archaic form of English is quite unusual, going on the orthographic representation used by the collectors of dialect material. The present article is an attempt to arrive at a plausible conjecture for the sound system of the dialect by using comparative evidence (stemming mostly from Irish) and by examining internal developments in Irish English in general.

11)  ‘Standard English, deviation and interference. A reply to Roger Lass’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 1988, 11-14.  

In this reply to an article by Roger Lass (1985), itself a response to two articles by R. Hickey (1983a,b) the position of the interference hypothesis with regard to Irish English is defended. Lass’ criticism is seen to be partly founded on a misunderstanding of Hickey’s standpoint which does not claim to prove interference but merely to make it appear more likely to have taken place in the history of Irish English. The notion of Standard English is also discussed and defended as it is needed as a yardstick against which to measure the ‘deviance’ of Irish English.

10)  ‘Length and frontness with low vowels in Irish English’, Studia Linguistica (39:2), 1986, 143-56.  

The manifestations of low vowels in Irish English present some variation in terms of frontness and length, furthermore there appears to be a correlation between these two parameters such that the characterization of low vowels as either non-long and front or long and non-front would seem to hold not only for Irish English but for a series of other languages which are also considered. Exceptions (Hungarian and Dutch) are seen not to contradict this but to show the operation of coarticulation which results in different patterning. Additionally the interrelationships of the set of low vowels in Irish English with each other on a systematic level are examined.

9)  ‘Possible phonological parallels between Irish and Irish English’, English World-Wide (7:1), 1986, 1-21.  

The question as to whether the sound system of Irish exercised an influence on the development of Irish English in its phonological aspect is investigated here. Alongside the possibilities of interference the role which the conservative nature of English in Ireland plays has been considered and the two sources for the characteristics of present-day Irish English are weighed up one against the other. The investigation is divided into two broad categories, vowels and consonants with the additional examination of some phonological processes such as epenthesis, consonant weakening, etc. Conservative features of Irish English phonology such as the voiceless labio-velar continuant and post-vocalic /r/ are considered from the point of view of possible preservative interference from Irish.

8)  ‘Kontinuität und Erneuerung im Vokalsystem des irischen Englischen’, Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik (52), 1985, 324-40.  

Abstract, English Title means ‘Continuity and innovation in the vowel system of Irish English’. The history of the vowel system of southern Irish English is the topic of this article. The view, found for instance in Bliss (1972), that the vowel system is that of Elizabethan English is found to be too simplistic as it has been influenced by later superimposed, more standard varieties of English which have contributed to the values found in the supraregional standard of the south today.

Abstract, German Das Vokalsystem des Irischen Englischen weist eine Reihe von Unterschieden auf, wenn man es mit dem des Standard-Englischen vergleicht. Das Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, die Frage zu erörtern, ob diese Tatsache auf den Konservatismus (d.h. auf eine Kontinuität) oder auf den Transfer aus dem Irischen bzw. auf eigene Entwicklungen des Irischen Englischen (d.h. auf Innovation) zurückgeht. Die Argumente, die für eine Interferenzhypothese sprechen, werden durch einen Vergleich zwischen dem Vokalsystem des Irischen und dem des Irischen Englischen, dargestellt und diejenigen Argumente, die für eine Konservatismushypothese sprechen, werden durch einen Vergleich mit dem Vokalsystem des Frühneuenglischen veranschaulicht. Bei der Untersuchung einzelner Vokale werden diese beiden möglichen Quellen gleichermaßen berücksichtigt. Unterschiede zwischen Varietäten des heutigen Irischen Englischen werden auch erläutert.

7)  ‘Phonotactically conditioned alternation: instances from Old High German and Irish English’, Linguistics (22), 1984, 673-86.  

Part of the High German consonant shift involves the shift of /t/ under certain circumstances to a sound which was orthographically represented as ʒ. The circumstances under which it appears are closely examined and the views in the relevant literature on what sound value ʒ had are recapitulated. A sound in Irish English which has an identical distribution to ʒ and which also derives from /t/ is regarded as being the same as the result of the shift in pre-Old High German, this then being a voiceless apico-alveolar fricative in favour of which various phonological arguments are forwarded. The position of ʒ in loan-words and the later development of it and /s/ in German are also considered.

6)  ‘Syllable onsets in Irish English’, Word (35), 1984, 67-74.  

Two respects in which Irish English differs from Standard English are investigated here. The first concerns the deletion or retention of /j/ before /u:/ when this is preceded by a further segment. The second concerns the systematic nature of the (phonetic) voiceless palatal fricative and the voiceless labio-velar continuant in Irish English. In both cases the phonetic facts are used to show the operation of regularities on a phonological level (particularly the position of glides in the phonemic system) and to demonstrate with these instances the complex relationship of phoneme affiliation to sound substance.

5)  ‘Coronal segments in Irish English’, Journal of Linguistics (20), 1984, 233-51.  

The main differences between Irish English and Standard English in the area of consonants lies with those segments which can be grouped together as being coronal. The peculiarities considered in the present article are the fricative realization of post-stress alveolar stops in a continuant environment, the dental stop realization of Standard English ambidental fricatives and the dentalization of alveolar stops before /r/. After providing a full phonetic description, a phonological classification of coronal segments in four main varieties of Irish English is given. In conclusion the difficulties of describing the distinctions resulting from the Irish English peculiarities of consonant realization within the framework of generative phonology are discussed.

4)  ‘Towards a contrastive syntax of Irish and English’, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), Contrastive linguistics, prospects and problems. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1984, 187-203).  

In this article an outline is given of the more salient differences between Irish and English. Word order, in particular positioning of complements and the means for fronting topicalized elements in Irish, is treated to begin with. Ambiguity in Irish due for example to clause subordination procedures, and the equivalents of the passive in Irish along with Irish English correspondences to the perfective of Irish are also examined. Other elements dealt with are verb concatenation, prepositional usage, prepositional pronouns and polyfunctional forms in Irish. The conclusion is formed by a brief discussion of interference types.

3)  ‘Syntactic ambiguity in Hiberno-English’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia (15), 1983, 39-45.  

Due to transfer from Irish during the development of English in Ireland various constructions which already exist in Standard English have equivalents in Hiberno-English with different meanings. This gives rise to syntactic ambiguity, the nature of which is analysed. Attention is given, by comparison with Irish syntax, to the mechanisms of transfer from which the ambiguity arose and the strategies of contextualization which can be used to resolve it are mentioned.

2)  ‘Remarks on pronominal usage in Hiberno-English’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia (15), 1983, 47-53.   

In the course of its development Hiberno-English has come to possess a system of personal pronouns quite different from that of Standard English. The differences centre around the second person pronoun which, for reasons of probable interference from Irish, distinguishes between the singular and plural. This distinction is however not simply that which formerly obtained in English (you # ye) but consists of using additional phonetic possibilities in the inflectional system of English, the description and operation of these forming the core of the analysis.

1)  ‘The phonology of English loan-words in Inis Meáin Irish’, Ériu (33), 1982, 137-56.  

The systematic alterations in the structure of English loan-words in a practically homogeneous Irish-speaking linguistic community are considered. The Irish English realizations of the English phoneme inventory are discussed as the carriers of English loan-words into Irish. An examination is given of vowels and consonants with particular attention given to the influence of the Irish phoneme system on the form of loan-words, for example in the area of vowel substitution, palatalization or velarization of consonants (and possible lengthening) and the introduction of extraneous sounds, for example affricates. In conclusion, epenthesis, stress and phonotactics are considered briefly.

   General linguistics