Irish English

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.0, University of Cologne (Englisches Seminar), course: Varieties of English, language: English, abstract: Irish English (IrE) or Hiberno English is a variety of English spoken in Ireland. It has mainly been influenced by vernacular Irish and varieties of English and Scots. At first English was mainly spoken by a few English settlers who lived in the south east of Ireland and during this time their language was exposed to considerable Gaelicisation. Later several political and social changes allowed English to spread across the country and displace Irish as a native language roughly from east to west. This book investigates historical and linguistic influences on different varieties of English spoken in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Irish English shows a wide range of loan words from Latin, Irish, English, and Scots. This work gives a choice of these loan words and traces their derivation. The choice of an accent used by a speaker can depend on various conditions, e.g. social context, educational background, or regional influences. This book discusses several accents spoken in Ireland and compares their phonological features to those of Received Pronunciation. Like the use of phonological features, the syntactic architecture chosen by speakers of IrE depends on the context of use. Written IrE mostly follows the Standard English norm, whereas informal IrE speech shows several differences to Standard English. This thesis takes into account typical grammatical features of IrE and explains where and in which context they occur.