A Sound Atlas of Irish English offers a unique and comprehensive audio overview of the English language as spoken in present-day Ireland. In all, there are over 1,500 recordings which were made between the mid 1990s and 2002. The recordings cover both genders and all ages (from 11 to over 80). Each county of the 32 in Ireland is represented and there is a proper spread according to population. The capitals, Belfast and Dublin, have large numbers of speakers, making the Sound Atlas particularly suitable for sociolinguistic work within a variationist framework.

All the data can be accessed easily from the supplied DVD by means of a Java application which allows the user to browse among the data by county and to view and listen to lexical set realisations and free text. The DVD contains much additional information about Irish English - varieties, historical development, current distribution, etc. - as does the accompanying book which offers many details concerning specific features of forms of Irish English and information on the methodology used for the sound atlas.

A Sound Atlas of Irish English has a twofold purpose. It is on the one hand a research tool for those scholars who are interested in Irish English from an internal point of view, so to speak, and on the other hand it is a source of reliable and up-to-date information on the kinds of English spoken in Ireland and which can be used for comparative work, e.g. when looking at the sources of features found in varieties around the world, such as US English, Canadian, Australian/New Zealand English and the like. The Sound Atlas can be used by academics and students alike. With the Sound Atlas, students can gain a much clearer picture of Irish English by listening to the sound files.

The sound atlas is supplemented by A Survey of Irish English Usage which consists of over 1,000 questionnaires from speakers with information on the acceptance of grammatical features specific to Irish English. The data of the survey, along with analytical software, is contained on the DVD and discussed in the book.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Windows PC: Pentium PC, Windows 2000/2003/XP, at least 128MB RAM, DVD-ROM Drive, 16 Bit Soundcard, XVGA (1024 x 768 resolution). Apple MAC: OS 9 or higher, 16 Bit Soundcard, at least 128MB RAM.

OF INTEREST TO: Students and Researchers working on Varieties of English, Dialectology, Language Variation and Change; American and Canadian Scholars Looking at the Roots of New World English; Teachers of Sociolinguistics looking at the Methodology of Data Collection

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Raymond Hickey is Professor of English Linguistics at Essen University, Germany.

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