Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35.692

EDITOR: Raymond Hickey
TITLE: The Oxford Handbook of Irish English
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Handbooks
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2024

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson

SUMMARY

Any linguist concerned with varieties of English has reason to be especially interested in Irish English. It has a longer history than any other variety of the language outside Great Britain; and on Bernd Kortmann and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi’s metric of grammatical “non-standardness” (2004: 1160), Irish English ranks as highly non-standard – more so than any other English variety spoken in the British Isles, and surpassed on a world scale only by Cameroon English and certain minority dialects in North America, such as that of Newfoundland (which itself, as discussed by Sandra Clark in Chapter 24 here, was heavily influenced by Irish English). The Republic of Ireland is a thoroughly Anglophone country today (setting aside substantial recent immigration mainly from Eastern Europe), but, unlike other Anglophone countries where the population descends largely from settlers who brought English from Britain, most ancestors of the population of the Republic spoke a quite different language until fairly recently. The editor claims that Irish English has much “in common with second-language varieties of English”, and even “come[s] close to many English-based creoles”.

(I shall abbreviate “Irish English” as IrE, and “English English” and “Standard English English” as EE and StEE. Some contributors call the latter “Standard British English”, but that seems inexact, since the Scots have standards of their own – and Scots English has special importance in the history of IrE.)

The book under review aims to offer a thorough survey of the history, structure, and sociology of IrE. It covers Ulster as well as the Republic – because Ulstermen descend largely from Scots settlers who arrived in the modern period, within IrE the largest contrast is between the speech of the historic province of Ulster (Northern Ireland plus three adjacent counties) and that of the rest of the Republic.

The book contains 30 chapters, seven of which are by the editor Raymond Hickey, who has published widely on Irish English and on dialectology more generally, and who is also general editor of the New Cambridge History of the English Language. Hickey is currently based at the University of Limerick. Among the 25 other contributors, eight work in the Irish Republic, twelve in non-Anglophone Western Europe, three in Australia, and one each in Canada and Scotland. Although no contributor is currently based in Northern Ireland, John Kirk (who now holds a senior research post in Vienna) was for many years at Queen’s University Belfast and is well-known as an expert on Ulster Scots.

The chapters are grouped into five Parts. Part I, “A Framework for Irish English”, comprises six chapters covering the earlier language background within which Irish English emerged, the history of English in Ireland, and the changing relationships within Ireland between English and Gaelic, the Q-Celtic language spoken throughout the island before the arrival of English. (Most contributors call the latter language “Irish”, but in this review the word “Irish” will be used in so many ways that it will be clearer to identify the language by the name Gaelic, which is an Anglicization of the name in Gaelic itself, ‘Gaelige’.)

Gaelic was a language of high civilization in the sixth century, well before Old English could make that claim. English arrived in Ireland with Anglo-Norman invaders in the twelfth century. But contributors point out that the leaders of that invasion, who became the ruling class in Ireland, spoke French rather than English, though many of their foot soldiers will have spoken English. (More than one contributor mentions the IrE word ‘gossoon’ – spellings vary – for “boy”, from French ‘garçon’ via Gaelic ‘garsún’.) Like their cousins in England, the Anglo-Normans gave French up after a few centuries, but in most of Ireland they switched to Gaelic rather than to English – though English was spoken in a “Pale” of territory on the East coast, including Dublin.

After the Middle Ages, the centralizing Tudor dynasty hoped to assimilate Irish culture to that of England, but with respect to language they achieved little. In what is now the Republic, the shift to English was mainly a nineteenth-century phenomenon, with several causes. Nationalists such as Daniel O’Connor (1775–1847) who aimed to liberate the Irish peasantry from the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy saw Gaelic as a factor keeping the population backward. A system of State schools was introduced in 1831, which taught in English. And the Great Famine of the 1840s led vast numbers of Irish to see their best hope as lying in emigration to Britain or the USA, where Gaelic would be useless and English all-important. Liam Mac Mathúna (Chapter 5, “Irish–English bilingualism”) demonstrates the result of these pressures by reference to the district of Kilmallock, co. Limerick, where Gaelic speakers were 100% of the population born between 1811 and 1821, but only 3% of those born 1861–71. Even today there remain a handful of tiny and widely-separated pockets of Gaelic speakers on the West coast, but Hickey says that “in practical terms, Ireland is a completely English-speaking country”.

Part II, “Investigating Irish English”, comprises nine chapters describing IrE at phonological and grammatical levels, and introducing the various types of data available for studying the language as it is now and as it was before the advent of sound recording and other modern technology.

Before independence there were (as there still are) various regional vernaculars, but the only variety of English recognized as an authoritative model was StEE, including the accent called Received Pronunciation. After independence in the 1920s, the Irish ceased to look to England for models to be imitated (unsurprisingly, in view of the sorry history of English–Irish relations), and there developed what Hickey calls “a new supraregional variety of Irish English” which contrasts with StEE in various ways, for instance pronunciation is rhotic. Marije van Hattum (“Irish English in the nineteenth century”) describes this supraregional IrE as an “uncodified” standard, whereas StEE and General American English are codified standards – Ireland does not produce separate dictionaries, grammar books, etc., and according to Marion Schulte (“Dublin English and third-wave sociolinguistics”) “formal written language use in Ireland is ‘virtually identical to written formal British English’ ” (internal quotation from Hickey).

The ten or fifteen years around the millennium saw a period of sudden economic advance – after a long history of relative poverty, for a while Ireland became a “Celtic Tiger” – and this had large impacts on society and on language. Hickey describes “major changes … in non-vernacular Dublin English, essentially making this more different from traditional colloquial speech in the city”; “The new pronunciation [which he calls ‘Advanced Dublin English’] spread quickly throughout the Republic of Ireland and has become the supraregional form of Irish English used by most males and all females under about 40 at present (mid-2022)”.

Part III, “Irish English in use”, contains seven chapters on the language varieties of Dublin and some other Irish cities from both structural and sociolinguistic points of view. (Arne Peters, “Irish English in Galway City”, notes that urban Irish speech varieties other than those of Dublin and Northern Ireland have received little attention in previous sociolinguistic research.) Several contributors to this part note, independently of one another, that a general characteristic of IrE usage is avoidance of “forwardness” or assertiveness; speech includes a high incidence of hedges and avoidance of self-praise – Elaine Vaughan (“Politeness in Irish English”) comments that IrE “favours consensuality and agreement, as well as showing a tendency towards indirectness and tentativeness.”

Part IV, “Language and the Irish diaspora”, has four chapters on the impact of Irish emigrants on English in various overseas colonies. We have seen that IrE played a large part in shaping the English of England’s oldest colony, Newfoundland, where in the 1830s Irish emigrants accounted for about half the total population, and three-quarters of that of the largest town. But the cases of Australia and New Zealand, which also received many Irish, are a different story. Simon Musgrave and Kate Burridge remark that from numbers of emigrants one would expect “that Irish people should have made a substantial contribution to Australian English, but … in fact the contribution was rather small, and … it is very difficult to establish with any certainty.” Dania Bonness reaches a similar conclusion in the case of New Zealand.

Finally, Part V, “The wider context”, comprises four chapters on topics such as Irish Sign Language, and recent non-Anglophone immigrants’ acquisition of IrE.

EVALUATION

This book contains a great deal of information and succeeds in painting a clear picture of a very interesting variety of English. It has weaknesses, however.

The main weakness I perceive is that the book describes present-day IrE almost as if it had been developing in isolation from other varieties of English. Patricia Ronan (“Language in early Ireland”) mentions that at the main period of Gaelic-to-English shift “there was little contact with first-language English speakers”, and at the time of independence that may still have been broadly true. But television and, later, the internet mean that no English-speakers nowadays escape influence from the internationally recognized standards of StEE and General American English. When I last taught students in England I was often startled at how much grammar and vocabulary that was strange to my generation they had adopted from American English. IrE can hardly be unaffected by such influences.

In terms of phonology, Hickey sees Advanced Dublin English as moving young people’s speech further away from the traditional local vernacular, but he says nothing about what it is moving towards. In his Table 7.7 he lists eight innovations characterizing this variety; by my count, six of the eight (e.g. merger of the initial phonemes of ‘which’ and ‘witch’, introduction of a velarized allophone [ƚ] of the /l/ phoneme when not before a vowel, tensing the ‘happY’ vowel from [ɪ] to [i]) amount to eliminating differences between IrE and present-day StEE. (Most of them also eliminate differences from American English, though I am not sure whether [ǝʊ] for the GOAT diphthong occurs in the USA.) This is surely no coincidence, yet Hickey does not remark on it. He has been criticized for this by Robert Moore (2011), who comments that Hickey’s “commitment to seeing these as normal processes of linguistic change-in-progress in autonomous phonological systems … poses problems for his analysis”, and that Hickey implies that in the process of supraregionalization “speakers function as passive and unconscious ‘carriers’ in the wave-like spread of a chain-shift or other regular (exceptionless) phonological change.” Moore, by contrast, wants to emphasize that the changes are caused by speakers’ active (perhaps even conscious?) rejection of an Irish culture which they see as provincial. He makes it clear (in his paper title, for instance) that “Advanced” speakers have been facing serious hostility from non-Advanced speakers whose emotional loyalties presumably remain firmly rooted within their own culture.

Hickey observes that the accents of educated Irish individuals whose early life preceded independence “were distinctly different from the accents of comparable individuals later in the twentieth century [and] much closer to southern British educated accents”. It seems paradoxical for Hickey to acknowledge that IrE shed StEE phonetic influence with the achievement of political independence, yet fail to see that influence as having been reimposed via modern communication technologies at the other end of the twentieth century. (This is not to contradict Hickey’s point that “Despite these changes, a southern Irish English accent can still be easily recognized”. So far as I know, when one speech-community’s pronunciation is influenced through contact with a larger or more powerful community, it is normal for particular phonological features to change but others to be unaffected.)

In the grammatical and lexical domains, a problem is that many contributors appear not to be familiar enough with EE to realize that usages which they describe as distinctively Irish are actually perfectly normal in England. (It may be relevant that, judging by academic affiliation, not one of the contributors is English.)

For instance, Dania Bonness quotes from a letter written in 1881 by “John”, an Irish emigrant to New Zealand: ‘Mamma has had bad health this year, she has been confined to bed often for weeks at a time but she is better now’. Bonness claims that the example “indicates possible difficulties in acquiring the standard perfect form”, perhaps revealing hypercorrection, because “John here uses the present perfect where the preterite would be required in supraregional southern British English, as the action is already completed at the point of writing.” But “supraregional southern British English” is a good description of my native dialect, and I could easily have written John’s words myself (except that I never called my Mum ‘Mamma’). John might have written ‘Mamma had bad health … she was confined to bed …’, which would suggest that his letter was recalling past facts with no current relevance, but he used the perfect because he was still feeling the relief of knowing his mother was back on her usual form. Again, Hickey (in “Contact between Irish and English”) quotes ‘Would you be able to cook if you had to?’ as a case of IrE being influenced by a Gaelic substrate, since he evidently believes that other varieties of English would not use a conditional in an interrogative in this way. But not only is the example absolutely normal in StEE, it seems the likeliest way to ask the question. The conditional means that the speaker makes no assumption either way about whether the ‘if’ proposition is true; the alternative, ‘Will you be able to cook if you have to?’, would suggest that although you might not need to cook, we both know that this need is a real possibility – a more specialized scenario, therefore surely a less common one.

These are two examples, but I could have filled this review with usages that various contributors present as characteristically Irish but which left me wondering “What on earth is supposed to be non-EE about that?” Things become almost comical when John Kirk quotes, as an example of “traditional dialect lexis” from a play by a Southern Irishwoman, the words “Shut your gob”. I can assure Kirk that no EE speaker would find this phrase unfamiliar in the slightest, though a scholarly stranger is unlikely (I hope) to hear it used.

Sometimes the issue is that a usage is common in vernacular EE but deprecated in the standard language, as when Hickey quotes as an Irishism ‘learn’ used for ‘teach’, e.g. ‘That’ll learn yah!’ Those precise words can be heard any day in a London school playground. Or at least, they could when I was of school age: there are a number of examples which the contributors take to be Irish-only because in England they are becoming dated. More than one contributor quotes, as Irish-only, the use of the definite article with names of common diseases, e.g. ‘Mary’s got the measles’. That would be an ordinary thing for me to say, but I was born in 1944; my wife, a younger native speaker of StEE, tells me that it sounds old-fashioned to her.

A related point is that, contrary to a remark by Brian Clancy (“Language and Irish Travellers”), the term ‘motor car’, though it happens to be addressed to a child in Clancy’s data, is not “baby talk”; it was the normal EE name for these machines for much of my life, though it is nowadays invariably abbreviated to ‘car’ (or, jocularly, to ‘motor’).

Alongside examples of usage that is less “Irish” than the contributors suppose, the book of course also includes plenty of examples which genuinely would not be heard from EE speakers. For instance, as well as ‘the measles’, contributors quote other IrE uses of the definite article which would indeed not occur in EE. One example, from Markku Filppula’s chapter “The grammar of Irish English”, would be ‘Now the kids have to do the biology from sixth class on’. No variety of EE familiar to me would include ‘the’ before ‘biology’ in this case. But although contributors identify many real differences between IrE and EE, there are so many examples of the other sort that, overall, the book exaggerates the grammatical and lexical distance between the dialects.

Another recurring weakness arises in connexion with technical matters. Thus, the book contains a great deal of solid information about the phonetics of IrE and its varieties, but some contributors seem rather slapdash about the symbols they include between phonetic square brackets. Joan O’Sullivan (“Irish English in advertising”) discusses a RTÉ radio commercial for Perrier water in which a rural hobbledehoy at a dance puts on a French accent to seem sophisticated when a girl invites him to partner her. In [bœbelz] for ‘bubbles’ the first vowel is very plausible but the second is not; and I feel quite sure that the performer did not pronounce ‘the’ as [ze]. Both vowels ought surely to have been shown as shwas. Even Raymond Hickey, normally careful about phonetic detail, slips when he writes “The mid back unrounded cardinal vowel /ʌ/ has a realization which is further back than that found in RP”. Cardinal vowels do not have realizations; they are fixed reference points against which particular vowel sounds are located, like the grid of latitude and longitude lines which enable a ship’s position to be determined in the trackless ocean.

Contributors who discuss historical IrE phonology sometimes appear to underestimate the difficulty of inferring pronunciations from spellings. Arne Peters takes the spelling <gottes> for ‘goats’ in a 1509 document to imply that the vocalism was a monophthong, [o:] or [ɔ], rather than a diphthong as in modern EE. But surely a single vowel letter could have been a conventional spelling of a diphthong, as is common in modern StEE?

A particularly egregious case of misleading use of technical methods occurs in Brian Clancy’s chapter. Clancy has constructed two speech corpora, representing the English of Irish Travellers (gypsies) and of the “mainstream” settled Irish population respectively. By comparing statistics of various usages in the two corpora, Clancy claims to show how the language reflects different social identities. For instance, he counts instances of inclusive versus exclusive ‘we’ (that is, whether ‘you’ is included within the reference). He finds no instance of exclusive ‘we’ in the Traveller corpus, whereas “exclusive ‘we’ accounts for 13 of 114 instance in [the Settled corpus]” (though in the accompanying Table the latter figure is quoted as 14 of 114). To Clancy this suggests that settled people “identify themselves as members of a wider Irish society” while Traveller society is “more closed”. But whether the figures show anything at all depends on whether there is a significant difference between zero out of 88 and 13 (or 14) out of 114. Clancy quotes these figures as “instances” and shows them as integers, and if they really were raw counts of instances it would be easy to apply a suitable significance test, though Clancy does not mention doing so. But closer examination reveals that these figures are actually “normalized per 10,000 words”, so that it would have been more proper to show them with decimal points. For a significance test one would need raw figures. Furthermore, nothing in Clancy’s chapter tells us the size of the corpora. From Clancy (2010) it seems that what are presumably the same corpora are respectively 12,531 words (Settled) but only 3172 words (Traveller). A corpus as small as 3172 words might serve some purposes but could not support an inference about “closed society”, because that much conversation will deal with only one or a few topics. If I discuss some joint project with you, I will use plenty of inclusive ‘we’; if I tell you about a holiday I took with my family, there will be many exclusive ‘we’s. My idiolect and my social identity have not changed, only the topic of conversation has.

There is also a full share in the book of the straightforward errors and misprints which we have learned to expect these days even from the presses of distinguished institutions. The worst case I noticed was where Patricia Ronan quoted a 26-word extract from the ‘Confessio’ of St Patrick, in Latin and in translation. The translation is rather hit and miss (e.g. ‘vincit’ is present, not perfect) and leaves the last five words entirely untranslated; and the last Latin word, ‘perferre’ “to endure”, has somehow been distorted into the English ‘preferred’. (For a careful transcription and translation see Howlett 1994: 76–7.) The index of the book is perfunctory.

These failings are regrettable. Nevertheless, the book does offer readers a rather comprehensive and readable account of Irish English, its history and its present-day situation.

REFERENCES

Clancy, B., 2010. “ ‘Hurry up baby son all the boys is finished their breakfast’: a socio-pragmatic analysis of Irish settled and Traveller family discourse”. University of Limerick PhD thesis.

Howlett, D.R., ed., 1994. The Book of Letters of Saint Patrick the Bishop. Four Courts Press (Blackrock, co. Dublin).

Kortmann, B. and B. Szmrecsanyi, 2004. “Global synopsis: morphological and syntactic variation in English”. In Kortmann et al., eds, A Handbook of Varieties of English, vol. 2: Morphology and syntax, pp. 1142–1202. Mouton de Gruyter (Berlin).

Moore, R., 2011. “ ‘If I actually talked like that, I’d pull a gun on myself’: accent, avoidance, and moral panic in Irish English”. Anthropological Quarterly 84.41–64.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University, and his academic career was spent partly in Linguistics and partly in Informatics, with intervals in industrial research. After retiring as professor emeritus from Sussex University in 2009, he spent several years as Research Fellow at the University of South Africa. He has published contributions to most areas of Linguistics, as well as to other subjects. “Structural Linguistics in the 21st Century”, a sequel to Sampson’s popular “Schools of Linguistics”, is due out in late 2024.