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The English Language in Ireland:An Introduction

Article in International Journal of Language Translation and Intercultural Communication · July 2012
DOI: 10.12681/ijltic.8

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International Journal of Language, Translation and Intercultural Communication

Vol. 1, 2012

The English Language in Ireland:An Introduction

Kallen Jeffrey L. Trinity College Dublin

http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/ijltic.8

Copyright © 2012

To cite this article:

Kallen (2012). The English Language in Ireland:An Introduction. International Journal of Language, Translation and
Intercultural Communication, 1, 25-41.

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 IJLTIC 2012 1 (1), 25-41

The English Language in Ireland:

An Introduction
Jeffrey L. Kallen, Trinity College Dublin

Abstract

I rish English, as the oldest overseas variety of English, displays a number

features which are unique to Ireland or which show characteristic patterns in
the use of variation within English more generally. Many of these features reflect
the interacting influences of settlement from England and Scotland, bringing with
it elements from British dialects as well as elements now considered obsolete in
British English, and transfer (via intergenerational bilingualism and language shift)
of elements from the Irish language. Some features of this mix have continued from
early times to the present, others have died out with the increasing homogenisation
of Irish English, and still new elements, from internal change and other linguistic
influences, continue to develop the language.

Keywords: Irish English, Hiberno-English, Irish language, dialectal syntax,

phonological variation, dialect lexicon

1. Introduction

I n an era in which the globalisation of the English language has become a topic
of considerable importance, there is much to be learned from the study of Irish
English, which can be considered as the oldest of the ‘overseas’ varieties of the
English language. Different names have been used to denote the English language
in Ireland – chiefly Hiberno-English, Anglo-Irish, and Irish English – and though
motivations have been proposed for each of them, the term I will use here is simply
Irish English. This term is intended to denote the geographical location of this
complex variety of English, following parallels with Indian English, British English,
American English, and so on. The name controversy, which has been reviewed,
for example, by Croghan (1988), Kallen (1999: 73–74), Dolan (2006), and Hickey
(2007: 3–6) inevitably turns our attention to the two main historical influences on
Irish English: settlement and linguistic relations set up by English colonisation, and
contact with the Irish language, which was for many years the dominant language of
the majority. We will start this review with a brief look at the historical background
to the establishment of Irish English, and then consider aspects of Irish English
grammar, phonology, and vocabulary. For the latter, we will rely on four types of
data: (1) the published record of dialect studies; (2) corpus data as attested in the
International Corpus of English for Ireland (ICE-Ireland), for which see Kirk et al.
(2011) and Kallen and Kirk (2008); (3) my own field notes, denoted here with (JK),

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followed by the provenance of the speaker who is being quoted; and (4) literary
examples where authors have reflected aspects of the spoken language.
The external history of Irish English – how English was introduced to Ireland
and came to be the dominant language over a period of more than eight centuries
– is a complex topic, which we can only summarise here. More detailed accounts of
this external history are given in sources such as Hogan (1927), Bliss (1977, 1979),
Barry (1982), Kallen (1988, 1994, 1997b), Hickey (2007), Amador Moreno (2010),
and, specifically for Northern Ireland, Braidwood (1964) and Corrigan (2010).
Nevertheless, it will be instructive if we keep in mind a general linguistic chronology
which may be divided as follows: (1) languages before English, including (a) Irish,
the first evidence of which dates from around the 4th century (though cultural
artefacts suggest the coming of Celtic civilisation at least 700 years before this
time), (b) Latin (brought through early contacts with the Roman world and later
Christianisation in the 5th century), and (c) Scandinavian languages, of particular
importance during the period from the end of the 8th to the early 11th century, when
Ireland was involved in trade, conflict, and political association with the Viking
world and its network of associations; (2) the introduction of English colonisation,
which stemmed from a military expedition sanctioned by Henry II of England and
lasting over a series of events between 1167 and 1171; (3) an era of Gaelicsation,
which parallels a decline in the Anglo-Irish colony due to a variety of economic and
political causes (as well as the effects of a 14th century plague), during which the
descendants of the Anglo-Norman colonisers became at least partially assimilated
to the cultural and political loyalties – as well as the linguistic preferences – of the
Gaelic majority; (4) a rise in the status of English, following the revival of English
colonial interests which started in the efforts of Henry VIII to unite Anglo-Irish
and Gaelic society into one polity firmly under English rule, and continued with
plantation and resettlement schemes in the 16th and 17th centuries whose aim
was to anglicise and subdue the land by settling large numbers of loyal English
and Scottish colonists; (5) a popular shift to English, which began to spread among
Irish-speakers in the 18th century, but which gathered momentum via generations
of transitional bilingualism during the 19th century, and (6) the current regime,
stemming from the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921-22, which ultimately led to the
present day 26-county Republic of Ireland and the six counties of Northern Ireland
within the United Kingdom. Though English is extensively used in both jurisdictions,
and Ó Riagáin (2007: 229) estimates that no more than 5% of the population in
the Republic ‘use Irish as their first or main language’, the association between
Irish and national identity has been enshrined in civil and educational policy in
the Republic, and maintains a value, alongside Ulster Scots, in discussions over
language and identity in Northern Ireland: English is so widely used in Ireland that
it is not even mentioned in the cultural sections of the 1998 Belfast Agreement, or
Good Friday Agreement: see Agreement (1998) and Kirk and Ó Baoill (2000).

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2. Irish English syntax

2.1 Clause-level syntax

S everal features distinguish Irish English with regard to the order of information
in the sentence, and to the way in which clauses are combined. The use of
sentence clefts, in which new information is placed initially following it is, it’s,
‘tis, or is it, and the use of initial position for new information (often referred to
as topicalisation) are illustrated by the examples in (1) and (2) below. In these
sentences, the material in cleft position appears in italics.
(1) a. It is more English they are speaking now (Filppula 1999: 247)
b. It’s looking for more land a lot of them are (Filppula 1999: 250)
c. It’s Guinness <,> are arranging it anyway (ICE-Ireland S1A-086)
d. Is it racing they are? (Synge [1907] 1941: 150)
(2) a. He is workin’ over there. In some building he is workin’ with [‘for’] the
couple of weeks (Filppula 1999: 261)
b. And she was always sitting in the corner [...] not speaking, but a kind of a
sound like moaning she’d make to herself (Gregory [1920] 1970: 131).
c. And eventually come along the Summer Project and we put it on the
programme, and they couldn’t say no (JK; Dublin)
d. Hay mostly, we grow, and barley (Hickey 2007: 267).
Many constructions of this kind are not unique to Irish English, yet patterns
of usage show distinctively Irish features. In particular, we should note that the
examples cited above do not involve emphasis or contrast as they usually do in
other varieties of English. Not surprisingly, then, word order of this kind appears
more frequently in Irish English than in many other varieties. Filppula (1999: 260-
261), for example, demonstrates that the frequency of topicalisation (measured
in instances per 10,000 words) across different sets of data ranges from 15.9
occurrences in Co. Kerry to 8.6 in Dublin. These figures contrast with a frequency
of 4 occurrences per 10,000 words in a corpus of educated British English. Thus
while Irish English to some degree simply exploits word order flexibility that is
available in English generally, close inspection and quantitative analysis show
features that can distinguish Irish English in subtle yet definite ways.
Other clause-level features which we mention here include the use of what is
generally referred to as ‘subordinating and’ to join clauses, and ‘contact relative’
clause constructions, which lack a complementiser to introduce a relative clause.
These types are exemplified in (3) and (4) below. The conjunction and as shown
in (3) is used to join two clauses into different kinds of relationship. In (3a), for
example, the second clause depicts a situation which is ongoing at the time of the
event denoted by the first, while in (3c) the second clause poses a contradiction to
the state of affairs depicted in the first clause. We can paraphrase subordinating
and with although, while, or other conjunctions in other Englishes, but the precise
function of and depends very much on the discourse context of the utterance. The
‘contact relative’ clauses of (4) have been marked with Ø to indicate the position
of the complementiser which is missing at the start of the relative clause. Note

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that while who or which could readily fill this gap, examples as in (4d) show that,
particularly with the copular verb be, it is more than just the complementiser
which may be deleted.
(3) a. You put in your nose ['appeared'] an' us churning (Henry 1957: 206)
b. He was talking to me and he all the time bouncing the ball (JK; Dublin)
c. How could that madman have his senses and his brain-pan slit? (Synge
[1907] 1941: 153)
d. And there was your man and he putting ridge tiles on a roof (ICE-Ireland
S1A-083)
(4) a. Never eat pork Ø is not well done! (Moylan 1996: 361)
b. It was my own son Ø hit me (Synge [1907] 1941: 148)
c. And then I was reading there’s a few of the other lads out of fifth year Ø
might be called in to do the ushering (ICE-Ireland S1A-072)
d. I had three aunts Ø nurses (‘who were nurses’ [JK; Kerry])

2.2 The verb system

No doubt the single most commonly-discussed feature of Irish English is the verb
phrase. In particular, the different ways in which Irish English realises what we
might call perfect aspect (realised in general English with have + VERB -en, as in
John has eaten the beans) has attracted scholarly attention since the 19th century:
overviews include Harris (1984), Kallen (1989: 7–22), Filppula (1999: 90–130),
Hickey (2000, 2007: 193–213), Corrigan (2010: 61–63), and Amador-Moreno
(2010: 37–43). These reviews, and the sources they discuss, show that there is
considerable flexibility between the formal realisation the perfect and the meaning
relationships which trigger the use of one form or another. The range of alternatives
to the general English perfect has also given rise to a view that this form, as Harris
(1984: 307) puts it, ‘rarely occurs in basic H[iberno]-E[nglish] vernacular’. Space
limitations preclude a detailed discussion of all of the relevant forms here, but the
following account gives a brief profile of the most characteristic types.

2.2.1 Perfect aspect

The most distinctive of the Irish English perfect forms, the after perfect, appears
to have undergone a transformation from its earliest attested usage to the pattern
which holds today. Early examples appear to refer to events in the future, though the
more recent structure, which became robust in the 19th century and is illustrated
in (6) below, unambiguously functions as a perfect in taking a retrospective view
of events initiated in the past which have relevance at the moment of speaking.
Harris (1984) has used the label ‘hot news’ to denote the semantics of this form, yet
studies such as Kallen (1991), Ronan (2005: 262–263), and McCafferty (2006: 135–
139) show that for many speakers, the after perfect, while often co-occurring with
adverbs of recency and rarely used to refer to remote or counterfactual events,
is not restricted to ‘hot news’. In Kallen (1991: 66) I also argue that speech act
status and social closeness have a role to play in uses of the after perfect, since
after perfects frequently occur in situations where the speaker draws attention to

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an event that is known to the listener but which forms the focus of chastisement,
e.g. You’re after breakin the gate!. O'Keeffe and Amador Moreno (2009) similarly
emphasise the function of “scolding”, including “self-inflicted or self-deprecating”
utterances with the after perfect. Thus while (6a) uses after to point to an event
which has occurred only recently before the moment of speaking, (6b) offers the
speaker’s view of unnecessary killing which took place over an extended time in
Northern Ireland which was still going on at the moment of speaking, and (6c)
shows what McCafferty (2006: 142–144) calls the ‘preterite use’ of the after form to
bring a more remote past into a current narrative; (6d), spoken between sisters at
the family dinner table, and (6e) demonstrate respectively the chastising and self-
critical functions of after. These latter forms, particularly, would not have the same
pragmatic effect if rendered with the regular English have perfect.
(6) a. I’m after spilling a drop of that in the saucer (Kallen 1991: 66)
b. Over the 2000 people that’s after bein murdered and killed there – it could
never have happened (Kallen 1989: 10)
c. I’m after paying £12 for a pram for Tony forty-seven years ago that wasn’t
worth £1! He was a robber. (Kearns 1994: 190)
d. Julie you're after kicking my bare foot, you fuckin bitch! (JK; Dublin)
e. Must go back to it again oh I don’t know what I’m after doing now at all
[sound of cutlery hitting plate] see I don’t know what we have I’ll just save it
all (O'Keeffe and Amador Moreno 2009: 528)
The perfect can also be expressed in Irish English using a tensed form of the
verb, extended with adverbial reference so as to cover a time from the past which
includes the moment of speaking or a past-tense point of reference. Harris (1984)
labelled this form as the ‘extended now’ perfect, borrowing a term from McCoard
(1978), but since McCoard uses this phrase in his analysis of the English perfect in
general, I suggest that ‘extended tense form’ better captures the essential dynamic
in which a simple tensed form (either past or present) is extended to take on perfect
reference. Examples are found in (7), where the relevant verb and adverbial are
italicised. The commonly-used question form in (7d) is frequently misunderstood
by those unfamiliar with Irish English to be a question about future intentions, but
the Irish English sense of a retrospective perfect (as in ‘How long have you been
here?’) clearly follows from the pattern in (7).
(7) a. He’s working these years on it (Henry 1957: 172)
b. I’m here since 1927 and I’m very proud of Marino (JK; Dublin)
c. She has her eye on it for ages (JK; Galway)
d. How long are you here?
A further Irish English verbal category – which is restricted to transitive
verbs and includes an object between the auxiliary and the main verb – has often
been treated as an example of the perfect. Some definitions are structural, as in
Filppula’s (1999: 107–116) account of the ‘medial object perfect’, while semantic
definitions are suggested by the label ‘accomplishment perfect’ in Kallen (1989:
16–18) and ‘resultative perfect’ given by Hickey (2007: 208–210). Examples are
seen in (8): the Irish English form should not be confused with causatives such
as I had a dress made [for me] or the malefactive passive as in I had my windows

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broken [to my cost], which it superficially resembles. Here the verbal construction
is italicised, and the object is in bold.
(8) a. I have it pronounced wrong (Harris [1983] 1985: 5)
b. I'm sure you have the other lot corrected already (JK; Dublin)
c. Bill had sweets bought for them (JK; Dublin)
d. But sure we have it heard from olden times that they [fairies] were there
(Filppula 1999: 302fn)
Though it is tempting to see the forms in (8) as re-orderings of the regular
English perfect, Henry (1957: 177–179) argues instead that this ‘retrospective’
construction shows ‘a clear preoccupation with state’ rather than action. Harris
([1983] 1985: 35) goes further, in stating that this construction should not be
treated as a form of the perfect, but as ‘a complex construction consisting of a
main have clause and an embedded clause containing an -ed participle’. In this
case, he argues, have is ‘not a grammatical formative’, as would be the case in
general English, ‘but a lexical verb denoting possession’. A biclausal analysis is
also suggested in Kirk and Kallen (2007: 278–282), where this form is called the
‘pseudo-perfect’, based on the analysis of sentences, as in (9), in which the subject
of the main (have) clause is not the agent of the conjoined clause. An example
such as (9c) is particularly instructive, since the speaker here does not state that
the Taoiseach (the head of government in the Irish parliamentary system) had
not requested information, but, rather, that the Taoiseach was not in possession
of information which had been requested by others. Changing the word order to
*The Taoiseach hadn’t requested the full information would change the meaning
completely. Such examples give further support to a biclausal analysis which would
apply to sentence types in both (8) and (9).
(9) a. I've two daughters married today <,> and they are carrying on that tradition
still that the sitting room door is locked until Christmas morning and then in
and presents are opened (ICE-Ireland S1B-035)
b. You've a lot of people who've cows calved already at this time of the year
(ICE-Ireland S1B-035)
c. The Taoiseach hadn't the full information requested in the House earlier
this morning (ICE-Ireland S1B-058).
A final point in relation to the perfect concerns the view that the English
perfect with have is not a part of the Irish English verbal system. There is no
parallel structure in Irish, and the alternative structures discussed above may give
weight to the view that uses of have perfects lie outside the Irish English system.
Even literary representations such as those analysed by Amador Moreno (2006),
however, show the unmarked use of have perfects alongside the forms discussed
above. Fieß (2000: 200) shows have perfects to be robust in her East Galway dialect
sample, representing 43 out of the 92 tokens of the present perfect under analysis.
Kallen and Kirk (2007) point out that while ICE-Ireland contains five examples of
the after perfect in the entire corpus, standard have perfects predominate: within
one subcomponent of conversational texts alone (representing 90,000 words), ICE-
Ireland shows 44 have perfects just with the main verb been.

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2.2.2 The generic/habitual category

The other widespread distinctive feature of the Irish English verbal system concerns
the marking of generic qualities and habitual actions. Three different generic or
habitual markers are found in (10) below: do, be, and a combination of do + be,
with the main verb in progressive form. Note that in the second of these categories,
be is relatively invariant, almost always occurring as bes (sometimes spelled as
be’s or bees) and never using regular morphology as in *I am. Uses of do here are
not to be confused with emphatic or contrastive do as found elsewhere.
(10) a. Did you never read in the papers the way murdered men do bleed and drip?
(Synge [1907] 1941: 129)
b. If I go in to meet a spark [‘electrician’], I do find a carpenter (Kallen 1989: 6)
c. He bes always joking (O'Neill 1947: 264)
d. She does be sitting there at nights watching Seven Days (Kallen 1989: 7)
One unsettled question on generic/habitual verb forms concerns the
differentiations which can be made within sets such as (10). Semantic differences
can be suggested – as between the recurrence of discrete events seen in (10b)
versus more extended states of affairs as in (10d) – but existing evidence does not
give us a clear pattern. It is sometimes suggested that be forms are more specifically
associated with the Ulster dialect area. As noted in Kallen (1994: 180), however,
various dialectal accounts cite the be form in counties Meath, Roscommon, and
Dublin, while Hickey (2007: 231–232) cites recessive dialectal evidence of the form
in Wexford. Fieß (2003: 176-177) shows that contrary to expectations, the generic/
habitual be form is the single most common of those she found in fieldwork in
East Galway, further suggesting that the geographical breakdown between the two
forms is far from clear.

2.3 Phrase level syntax

The dialectological record provides ample evidence of distinctive features in the
Irish English use of prepositions and in the structure of noun phrases. We will
illustrate prepositional usage here with the preposition on. As seen in (11a), on can
act as a dative of disadvantage to mark a noun phrase as the recipient of negative
consequences, and to denote a variety of what Filppula (1999: 219-223) calls ‘various
physical and mental sensations, states or processes’, illustrated in (11b). Possession
is shown as in (11c), while a construction referring to newspapers is in (11d).
(11) a. And what really scared her then was she went to kind of put her arm
forward and the arm locked on her (ICE-Ireland S1A-053)
b. What hurry is on you? (Joyce 1910: 31, Moylan 1996: 342)
c. That one has a lug ['ear'] on her like a snipe (Henry 1957: 148)
d. They're only on the paper for being famous because they're on the paper
(JK; Galway)
Use of the definite article the in Irish English provides a further point of
contrast and overlap with other varieties of English. We find a range of usages that
include possession and personal reference, generic features, academic subjects,
and more abstract types of reference. Influence from Irish, which has no indefinite

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article and has different rules for use of the definite article, is often suggested as
an source for Irish English patterns, and is reviewed by Filppula (1999: 64–68).
(13) a. That was the dear journey to me ['I paid dearly for it'] (Joyce 1910: 83)
b. I want to destroy him for breaking the head [‘my head’] on me with the
clout of a loy (Synge [1907] 1941: 141)
c. She couldn’t make the priest o' the two of them ['couldn’t afford to educate
both of them for the priesthood'] (Henry 1957: 118)
d. But America is a better country in that line of the labouring. B’cause you
are, you are paid for rough sweat there (Filppula 1999: 62).

3.1 Phonology
No less than with syntax, the development of the sound system of Irish English
shows a mixture of influences from early settlement patterns, contact with Irish,
and subsequent developments with the grown and internationalisation of English
in Ireland. A major split occurs along the lines of the Ulster dialect zone, with
certain features of phonology in Ulster English clearly related to Scottish English,
though there are other features which may be organised more on an east-west
division than the north-south division implied by taking Ulster as a focal point.
Though a detailed description of Irish English phonology is outside the remit of this
paper, the following sections discuss some of the most salient features.

3.2 Consonants
Dental and alveolar sounds show recurring themes in Irish English, particularly in
the loss of phonetic  or , where use of a purely interdental fricative is often
found regularly only in Ulster English. Outside of Ulster, the alternatives to  and
 are phonetically varied, including alveolar stops, dental stops, and a widely-used
affricate which includes a dental stop a secondary non-strident fricative element,
as in 
 and  . Thus Henry (1958: 123) gives examples with pure stops as in
 ‘thought’ and  ‘thatch’ and, drawing a parallel with dental stops in Irish
(where the modern language has no or sounds),   ‘those’ and ' 
‘brother’ (Henry 1957: 57). Lack of a clear contrast between  and orand
 means that oppositions in pairs such as tin and thin or death and debt may be
neutralised for some speakers.
The phonetic realisation of  and  provides a great deal of variation in Irish
English. Unstressed vowels followed by  often trigger dentalisation, as seen in
[']
 ‘splendour’,'
 ‘ladder’, and [']
 ‘modern’ (Henry 1957: 57),
'
though it can occur in other environments as well. A signature feature of Irish
English, especially outside the Ulster dialect zone, is the use of an alveolar fricative
realisation for alveolar stops in syllable-final position when preceded by a stressed
vowel in the same metrical foot. Pandeli, Eska, Ball, and Rahilly (1997) have given
a detailed phonetic description of the voiceless sound, and note a diversity of
transcription symbols for it. Following Ó Baoill (1990: 161) I treat the sound as a
 Typical sites for what is commonly
lowered version of  and transcribe it here as .
referred to as the lenition of  include word-finally (as in  ‘cat’ and '
‘rabbit’); between two vowels, shown in '  ‘butter’ and' 
 ‘irritated’.
'

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This process does not occur word-initially or before stress in words such as attack
or pretend; an immediately preceding consonant usually blocks the use of lenition,
though some speakers will use  following, especially, , as in  ‘mart’ and
 ‘party’. The voiced counterpart  is also found in Irish English, though not
'
as frequently; it has not been studied in as much detail. Yet  and  are not the
only realisations of alveolar consonants which give a characteristic flavour to Irish
English: the full range of realisations for  includes the tap , glottal stop ,
and , as well as  and , which can occur in syllable-initial position. Henry’s
(1958: 123-127) picture of traditional dialect captures the variation well, citing
examples such as  ‘stroke’, ,   ‘butter’,  ‘letters’, and
 ‘soot’. Contemporary urban vernaculars do not show quite the same patterns
as in traditional dialect, yet, as reported in Kallen (2005), data files from a study
of working class speech in Dublin include examples such as  ‘legged it’ 
,  ‘that’,  ‘got out of’,  ‘met’,  ‘about’, and 
‘street’. Though the use of  and  may not be unique to Irish English,  is much
less common, since it violates a general constraint in English phonology against the
use of  in a syllable coda. The influence of Irish may be suggested here, since
Irish does allow for  in coda position, though it does not have the  sound in
its phonetic repertoire. The total pattern of realisations may thus include elements
that show convergence with Irish, convergence with other English dialects which
use , , and , and phonological universals.

3.3 Vowels
Ulster English can be characterised by its points of similarity to Scottish English
and Scots, especially in the use of central or front vowels in the GOOSE and FOOT
lexical sets as defined by Wells (1982). Centralisation of the vowel can lead to the
neutralisation of vowel quality contrasts between, for example, foot  and food
, but vowel length differences, which often reflect the Scottish Vowel Length
Rule (Aitken 1981), may establish contrastive sets. Outside of the Ulster dialect
zone, GOOSE words are a well-defined class with , but the FOOT and STRUT
lexical sets show the variable assignment of , , and intermediate vowels such
..
as  in words such as bush, push, cushion, pudding, foot, soot, and stood.
Geographical tendencies are seen in raising of the  vowel in words of the
DRESS lexical set, particularly, though not exclusively, before nasal consonants.
Henry (1958: 111) cites realisations such as  ‘pretending’,  ‘when’,
 ‘bench’,  ‘devil’, and  ‘next’ from a range of data points, though his
evidence and the view of Ó Baoill (1990: 159) suggest that raising is less common
in Ulster dialects. In the case of , the pronunciation has become lexicalised,
so that divil, which can be used as a negator (as in divil the bit of news meaning
‘no news’), constitutes a separate lexical entry from devil. By and large, raising to
is now a recessive feature, though for some speakers it is still quite productive:
I cite a speaker from the southwest of Ireland who had recently returned from
Japan, and who used the pronunciation  to refer to the Japanese packed
meal commonly known as a bento. Raising of DRESS words to  provides many
possible homonyms, such as pen and pin, ten and tin, or mess and miss.

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4.1 Lexicon
Distinctive features of the Irish English lexicon arise from its historical development,
and are usually classed in three groups: (a) words which have been incorporated
from Irish, (b) words from English and Scottish dialects or words from British
English which have become obsolete or otherwise restricted in Britain, and (c)
innovations which arise internally or from other loanword sources. Because of
the long history of contact between Irish and English, it is not always possible
to differentiate clearly between words of the (a) and (b) groups: some words are
better described by Wigger’s (2000: 187) term ‘interlingual lexeme’, indicating
that, especially for bilingual speakers who were crucial in the formation of Irish
English in the 19th century, it was, as Wigger says ‘irrelevant in many common
instances’ to consider a word as English or Irish. In the following sections, we will
give an overview of these types of words. Since this overview can only provide a
limited sample, dictionaries such as those of Ó Muirithe (1996, 2010), Macafee
(1996), Moylan (1996), Wall (2001), Dolan (2004), and Share (2008) are particularly
recommended.

4.2 The Irish lexicon

Though examples of borrowing from Irish into Irish English are seen in our earliest
records, we will concentrate here on words which feature in the modern dialectal
record and the standard language. The pace of language shift made its impact on Irish
English not just by limited borrowings, which frequently fill lexical gaps for which
there is no word in other varieties of English, but by the importation of Irish words
in a process that led to the continued use in the new language of words which had
salience in the old. We could suggest the following examples (given in Irish or in a
conventional Anglicised form), organised into themes to give the flavour of this part
of the lexicon. People and conversation: amadán ‘fool’; bodhair Uí Laoire, literally
‘deafness of Laoire’, used to refer to a person who hears only what they wish to hear;
flahoolagh ‘generous, good-hearted’, sometimes to an overly-generous degree; ráiméis
‘nonsense’, also ‘talk nonsense; plámás ‘smooth talk, flattery’; and discourse markers
such as a mhic (literally ‘son’ in the Irish vocative case) and the ironic moryah. The
latter term is used to express a possible contrary interpretation to an assertion, as in
‘He was helping her with her homework mar dhea’ (JK; Cork). Food and drink: boxty,
a food made from grated potatoes, eggs, flour, and salt, fried or baked on a griddle;
crubeen, a boiled pig’s trotter, narrowed in meaning from the more general Irish
word for a (little) claw or hoof; and drisheen, commonly used to refer to a boiled meat
pudding, narrowed in meaning from Irish drisín ‘intestine’. Miscellaneous words:
bata ‘stick’ (especially, as used in schools before corporal punishment was abolished);
bacaidí ‘lame, unsteady, crooked’, applied to people as well as inanimate objects, and
related to Irish bacach ‘lame, defective, imperfect’; mi-ádh ‘bad luck’; and traneen ‘a
straw’, and by extension ‘something worthless, of no value’.

4.3 The English and Scots lexicon

Itt is difficult to know when the English sub-lexicon of Irish English started to
distinguish itself from the founding dialects of Britain. Some English words of Old

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English or French etymology occur only in Irish English texts; others known more
generally are first recorded in Irish English, though we cannot be sure if these
words originated in Ireland or if they simply represent chance attestations. Words
of this kind include horyness ‘filth’ (based on hory ‘foul, filthy,’ but only cited in the
nominal form by the OED from a 15th century Irish English text); swagger (first
cited in the OED from 1598, but appearing in an Irish English text from 1518);
and voucheous, possibly meaning ‘boastful’ or ‘arrogant’. Borrowings and multiple
influences make simple etymologies in Irish English difficult, even in this period:
Lucas (1995: 42), for example, notes etymologists’ uncertainty in deriving the word
russin ‘lunch’ in a 14th century Anglo-Irish poem from Irish ruisín or suggesting
that the Irish word may ultimately come from English. Though many words of this
period became obsolete as Irish English modernised, some continuity is suggested
in analyses of the archaic dialect of the baronies of Forth and Bargy, in Co. Wexford.
Words considered archaic by the OED but found in the 19th century dialect glossary
compiled by Jacob Poole (Dolan and Ó Muirithe 1996) include attercop ‘a spider’,
hence also a ‘small, insignificant person’, poustee ‘power, ability, bodily strength’,
and hachee ‘cross, ill-tempered’. Though the dialect is no longer spoken, some
words from it are still used in the region: here we may cite chi  ‘an armload’,
‘small quantity’ (JK; Wexford); backstir ‘plough a patch of land for a second time’
(Byrne 2002: 80), also listed by Ó Muirithe (1990: 154); and vanged ‘sprained, stiff ’
(Ó Muirithe 1990, Byrne 2002).
The modern period of settlement brought with it new sources of English
dialectal material. The Plantation of Ulster naturally introduced many new linguistic
elements: see the dictionary edited by Macafee (1996), a subsequent review by
Kirk (1999), and discussion by Corrigan (2010: 79–99). Corrigan (2010: 84) points
out that the years of conflict known as the Troubles in Northern Ireland have
hardly been considered as a feature of Ulster dialect, yet this period has spawned
many lexical items, such as sally ‘Saracen tank’ (JK; Newry) and Corrigan’s lift
‘detain for questioning’. Much of the Ulster lexicon, though, reflects more general
affiliations to Scotland and the North of England: illustrative examples include boke
‘vomit’, ferntickles ‘freckles’, skelf ‘splinter’, and thole ‘endure, tolerate, suffer’.
The boundary between usage in Ulster and the rest of Ireland is not necessarily
absolute, and sometimes calls for a quantitative assessment. ICE-Ireland, for
example, shows 394 examples of aye ‘yes’ in the Northern Ireland spoken material,
as well as 28 examples in the Republic. Bearing in mind that the Republic includes
three counties of historical Ulster, these figures broadly confirm that the Ulster
dialect lexicon does not stop at the political border.
Considering the more general English dialect lexicon in Ireland, we may use
the same categories as we did for Irish in order to illustrate common usage. People
and conversation: ABCs (with the first letter pronounced , as in traditional Irish
English) ‘mottled red lines on the shins caused by sitting too close to a fire’; chisler
‘child’; latchico ‘disagreeable, unpleasant, untrustworthy person’; mot ‘girlfriend,
girl’; pooley ‘urine’, especially used in connection with children; sca ‘gossip, news’,
shortened from scandal; shift ‘kiss’ in a romantic or sexual sense; and stroke ‘appetite’.
Food and drink: coddle or Dublin coddle denotes a stew made by boiling sausages,
bacon rashers, onions, and potatoes together; gur cake refers to a cake made with

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fruit and cake scraps baked between two layers of pastry; stirabout ‘porridge’.
Miscellaneous words: airy ‘lively, fond of pleasure’; anymore, used in positive senses
to mean ‘from now on’, ‘nowadays’, and ‘still’, discussed in Kallen (1997a: 153) with
examples such as Wool is so expensive anymore (JK; Galway); cog ‘cheat in school,
examinations’; eccer ‘homework, school exercise’, cited by Partridge (1972) as
Oxford slang of the late 19th and early 20th centuries but apparently not now used
outside of Ireland; power ‘large quantity’, and powerful ‘very good’, formerly widely
used in English, but now considered by the OED to be regional or associated with
Irish English. Other words with English etymology demonstrate innovative meanings,
such as yoke, whose core meaning in the OED refers to a device for joining animals
together for ploughing, but which in Irish English is widely used to refer to ‘a thing
in general’ or as a mildly derogatory term for a person.

4.4 Mixed and other lexical sources

Some words of the Irish English lexicon have an identity in both languages, making
etymology complex. A word like fooster ‘bustle; act in a fussy, ineffectual manner’,
for example, can readily be related to Irish words such as fústrach ‘fussy, fidgety’
and fústaire ‘fussy, fidgety person’, thus suggesting an etymology from Irish. Yet the
EDD also cites foochter  ‘confusion, turmoil; a bustling confused method
of work’ in Banffshire in Scotland, as well as fooch in Devon and Cornwall to mean
‘disorder, confusion’. The general sense and geographical distribution of these
items could also suggest an English etymology for the Irish English term. Dual
etymologies are not necessarily in competition: an Irish English term can arise from
convergence between the two possible source languages, or, via bilingual contact,
can be taken into one language and then recycled back into the other language.
Other such words with similar dual etymologies include gombeen, which absorbs
the meanings ‘fool’, a ‘profiteer’, and a ‘piece of something, especially a lump of
tobacco’ from a variety of sources (see discussion in Kallen 1997a); crack/craic
‘talk, conversation, fun, news’; blather/bladar ‘nonsense, talk nonsense’; bother
‘deafen with noise’; and grig/griog ‘make envious’, ‘irritate’. Loan translations play
a role as well, and sometimes give new meanings from Irish to words that are
otherwise well known in English. Irish English weather, for example, can be used
both to refer to climate, as in general English, and to time (as in How are you this
weather? ‘these days’), capturing the two primary meanings of Irish aimsir.
Finally, we note that other words in the Irish English lexicon come from
other sources, unknown etymologies, and novel coinage. Gazebo  ‘tall or
awkward strange object or person’ appears to combine both an uncertain etymology
for the architectural sense (see OED) and an uncertain history in the sense of
personal reference, which Partridge (1972) relates to 19th century Australian and
American slang, with possible influence from Spanish gazapo ‘a shrewd fellow’.
Grush, gushie ‘scramble for money, food, or other small items or gifts’ is a word
with an unknown etymology. Tallyman appears at first to be a regular English word
referring to a person who tallies, but in the Republic, this word refers specifically
to someone who observes the counting of ballots in elections and is typically called
on to make predictions as the count proceeds: this meaning is not given in the OED.

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5. Conclusion

T he preceding discussion has been designed to survey a range of features –

whether in syntax, phonology, or lexicon – which distinguish Irish English from
British or the later overseas varieties of English. Some of these features may reflect
the influence of the Irish language through generations of bilingualism and language
contact, others may reflect founding influences from British dialects, and still others
may arise from an interaction between these two influences, or from other sources.
Our presentation touches on a certain contradiction when we consider the life of
language in society. As noted in the introduction, the colonial history of English in
Ireland and its co-existence with Irish Gaelic have kept a distinctively Irish form of
English apart from the core elements of Irish linguistic ideology. In the Republic
of Ireland, Irish retains a special position as the ‘first official l anguage’ i n t he
Constitution (see Article 8, Bunreacht na hÉireann), while in Northern Ireland,
where many more English and Scots speakers settled in the 17th century, it is Ulster
Scots rather than Ulster English that has figured in public debates over language
and identity. Yet there is no doubt that the distinctive features of Irish English, only
a sample of which can be discussed here, have created a variegated language that
has retained its distinctiveness over generations. In this way, despite potential
ideological qualms or the influences of international English more generally, Irish
English continues to play a role – well recognised in literature and film – in the local,
regional, or national identities of speakers from throughout the island.

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