The Unique Development of Ireland and its Impact on Irish English

   So we may notice that the consequences of this revival was the division of Ireland into two regions, the Irish Free State, given Commonwealth status and Northern Ireland which remained part of the UK according to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.

  But if we return to the religious issue, we might notice that still after the division the religious conflict was not over. The Catholics were discriminated in Northern Ireland that gave the Catholics of the south a feeling that they betrayed their Catholic brothers in the North. In 1921-1922 Ireland was ravaged by civil war. Irishmen who fought together against the British in the War of Independence now took up arms against each other. In 1922 the Republicans gave up fighting and the division of Ireland was brought into effect.

  As a result of this fighting in 1949 Ireland  became an independent republic - The Republic of Eire and although the Unionist Protestants would have wished for the power of the whole of Ireland they felt they had no choice but to accept the new State of Northern Ireland. The situation in Northern Ireland was that for many decades the Catholics constituted a discriminated minority.   Thus, there was no proportional representation in the Parliament and the rate of unemployment was much higher among Catholics than among Protestants.

  The relationship between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom has been very tense and complicated for a long period of time. It was characterized by the negative attitude to the Irish culture and traditions by the British government and also by religious discrimination. It was obvious that in the modern world with its peace-oriented policy something should be done to mitigate the situation. And in 1998 British and Irish sides decided to sign the agreement which is also known as the Good Friday Agreement or Belfast Agreement. It was a major political development in the Northern Ireland peace process. It established the Northern Ireland Assembly with devolved legislative powers and started a de-escalation of violence in the north, sometimes referred to as “The Troubles”. On 23 May 1998 the Agreement was endorsed by the voters of Northern Ireland in a referendum. The agreement presupposed: establishment of a Northern Ireland Assembly with devolved legislative powers; establishment of the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission; demilitarization and withdrawal of British troops until reaching peacetime levels; recognition of the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they may so choose; agreement of both countries to refer to each other by their own preferred titles, namely: "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" and "Ireland", replacing the previous practice of "United Kingdom" and "Republic of Ireland".

  All these points succeeded to make the situation in Northern Ireland more peaceful and to establish better relationship with the British Government. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

2. The language issue in Ireland

  2.1. After having a brief look into the history of two countries we should cover the question of the position of the English language in Ireland and its influence on the Irish language.

  English has been spoken in Ireland probably since the 12^th century when English servants and artisans accompanied the French-speaking Normans to Ireland. French ceased to be spoken by the Normans in the 14^th century, and was replaced for official legal purposes by English in the later Middle Ages. The use of English was largely confined to the towns until the collapse of the Gaelic order in the 17^th century, after which by its monopoly in law and commerce it gradually spread throughout the countryside. Its diffusion was particularly rapid after the Great Famine of the mid-19^th century.

  The Irish language was predominant until late in the first half of the majority of the population. Despite periodic efforts to encourage its uses, it has lost ground steadily to English and is now spoken as an everyday language in limited areas, mainly along the western seaboard, known collectively as the Gaeltacht.

  By the beginning of the 20^th century the condition of the Irish language in two parts of Ireland was different. The Irish language in Northern Ireland which began to be replaced by English was called Ulster Irish. The Irish language movement in Northern Ireland after 1921 responded to a lack of establishment support by pursuing a self-help social and recreational movement aimed at preserving Ulster Irish. In contrast to the perception of the Irish Free State's policy of preserving areas of Irish-speaking countryside, activists in Northern Ireland concentrated on ensuring Irish could survive in urban contexts. From the early years of the Northern Ireland government, education in Irish was marginalised. The number of primary schools teaching Irish was halved between 1924 and 1927, and numbers studying Irish as an extra subject fell from 5531 to 1290 between 1923 and 1926. The subsidy for Irish as an extra subject was abolished in 1934. [9, 81-82]

  But it should be noticed that some actions in order to preserve Ulster Irish were taken. For example a co-operative housing scheme in Belfast aimed at creating an urban Gaeltacht opened in 1969 in Shaw's Road. Here in 1970 the first Irish-medium school in Northern Ireland was opened, and in 1984 was granted the status of a voluntary maintained primary school.

  Speaking about the problematic position of the Irish language within a country, we should notice that there exist districts which have preserved the Irish language as the vernacular home language, these districts are known under a common name – Gaeltacht. Here the government recognizes that Irish is the predominant language of the region.

  Gaeltacht came into existence in 1926, its districts were first officially recognized during the early years of the Irish Free State, after the Gaelic Revival, as part of government policy to restore the Irish language. The Gaeltacht districts were initially defined precisely in the 1950s. The Department of the Gaeltacht, established in 1956, has the function of promoting the welfare of the Gaelacht and encouraging the wider use of Irish. Under its auspices there are two statuary bodies, Board of Irish, the role of which is to promote the Irish language and, in particular, its use as living language and Gaeltacht Authority, which encourages the use of the Irish language as the principal medium of communication in the Gaelacht and promotes the general development of the Gaeltacht.

   Many areas which had witnessed a decline in the language ceased to be part of the Gaeltacht. This left Gaeltacht areas in 7 of the state's 26 counties (nominally Donegal, Galway, Mayo, Kerry, Cork and  Waterford). [6, 90] During a period of time the boarders of the territory of Gaeltacht have shortened as we can see at the maps below:

   An Ghaeltacht 1926; areas of the island of Ireland which would have qualified for Gaeltacht status according to the recommendations of the first Coimisiún na Gaeltachta

   An Ghaeltacht 1956

   An Ghaeltacht 2007, zones within Category A

  The results of these actions lay in the official recognition of the Irish language in Northern Ireland in 1998 under the Good Friday Agreement. A cross-border body known as Foras na Gaeilge was established to promote the language in both Northern Ireland and the Republic, taking over the functions of Bord na Gaeilge. The British government ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in respect to Irish in Northern Ireland. By the year of 2000 Irish-medium education began to develop. BBC Radio Ulster began broadcasting a nightly half-hour programme in Irish in the early 1980s, and there is now an Irish language programme on the station every day. An Irish-language daily newspaper called Lá Nua ("new day") folded in 2008 due to lack of readership.

  Completely another situation was in the Republic of Ireland. From the first days of its existence the Irish language has been an official national language with English being a second official language of the state according to the Constitution.

   From the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922, the Irish Government required a degree of proficiency in Irish for all those who became newly appointed to civil service positions. Proficiency in just one official language for entrance to the public service was introduced in 1974, in part through the actions of protest organizations like the Language Freedom Movement.

  The National University of Ireland, Galway is required to appoint people who are competent in the Irish language, as long as they meet all other respects of the vacancy they are appointed to. For a number of years there has been vigorous debate in political, academic and other circles about the failure of most students in the mainstream (English-medium) schools to achieve competence in the language, even after fourteen years. The concomitant decline in the number of traditional native speakers has also been a cause of great concern.

  We should notice that there is, however, a growing body of Irish speakers in the cities. Most of these are products of an independent education system in which Irish is the sole language of instruction. Such schools are known at the primary level as Gaelscoileanna and are supported by a number of secondary colleges. These Irish-medium schools send a much higher proportion of students on to tertiary level than do the mainstream schools, and it seems increasingly likely that, within a generation, habitual users of Irish will typically be members of an urban, middle-class and highly educated minority.

  Thus the close intercourse of the two cultures and languages could not but affect the English language spoken both in Eire (one of the official languages of the Republic) and in Northern Ireland where the English language dominates as the official language of the UK. The English spoken in Northern Ireland not to say in Eire bears distinctive features.

  We have mentioned before that Irish English is one the regional varieties of the English language. But at the same time it also has its own dialect divisions. According to David Crystal Hiberno-English is by no means homogeneous regional variety. A major boundary can be drawn between the dialects spoken in the southern two-thirds of the island and those spoken further north, in the former province of Ulster. Ulster, the more varied linguistic situation, can be divided into two main areas. The dialect spoken in the north-east of the region is known as Ulster Scots, or Scots-Irish, because it displays many features that can be traced back to the speech of the 17^th century immigrants from the Scottish Lowlands. The dialect used elsewhere, known as Mid-Ulster, or Ulster Anglo-Irish, displays far less Scots influence, having been largely settled by immigrants from England.

  With both Ulster and the south, a range of varieties of Hiberno-English can be found. Rural dialects, especially those in the west, display a highly conservative character, much influenced by the speech forms of Gaelic. Urban dialects, especially those of Dublin and Belfast, are more heavily influenced by English, and display many of the nonstandard forms found in the urban dialects of Great Britain. And throughout the country there is an educated variety of Hiberno-English, containing relatively few regional forms – though enough to make such speech ‘sound Irish’ to outsiders.

  As David Crystal notices, there is yet little sign of a regionally distinctive educated standard in Ireland; but there are many cases of words, idioms, and grammatical patterns in informal non-standard speech which are characteristics of the dialects of the area, and which are reflected in a strong regional literature. From the linguistic point of view, Irish English in all its variations is widely referred to as Hiberno-English, though the term Anglo-Irish has a useful role identifying those varieties in which the phonology, grammar, or vocabulary displays a particularly strong Gaelic influence. And we are ready to show you these peculiarities. [3, 337]

  2.2. Several phonetic features distinguish Irish English from Received Pronunciation, some involving subtle contrasts in vowel length, lip rounding, and tongue position. We would like to point at phonemic differentiations of Hiberno-English, which have merged in other English accents.

1. With some local exceptions, /r/ occurs postvocally, making most Hiberno-English dialects rhotic. The exceptions to this are most notable in Drogheda and some other eastern towns, whose accent is distinctly non-rhotic. /r/ after vowels is kept in such words as car and purse.
2. /t/ and /d/ are usually dental (alveolar in RP), and the RP th fricatives / θ, ð/ appear as plosives (thanks /tanks/, this /dis/); some pairs of words for example thin and tin may therefor sound the same.
3. /l/ is always clear and never velarized in such words as full and field.
4. Words such as tea and key tend to be pronounced with /e:/ instead of RP /i:/, as it reflected in such literary spelling as tay, Paycock.
5. RP /ɔɪ/ is often pronounced /əɪ/ in such words as boy and join:as suggested in literary spelling jine for join. [3,337]
6. There are several differences from RP in open vowels: in particular, words like path and calm often have a long front /a:/ used in saw and talk.
7. Some consonant clusters have been influenced by the Gaelic sound system: for example, /s/ may become /ʃ/ before /t, n, l/ as in stop /ʃtop/.
8. The vowels in words such as boat and cane are usually monophtongs: [boːt], and [keːn].
9. The /aɪ/ in "night" may be pronounced in a wide variety of ways, e.g. [əɪ], [ɔɪ], [ʌɪ] and [ɑɪ], the latter two being the most common in middle class speech, the former two, in popular speech.
10. In some dialects, speakers make no distinction between the [ʌ] in putt and the [ʊ] in put, pronouncing both as the latter. As a result of this pairs such as putt and put, look and luck may be pronounced identically.
11. The distinction between w /w/ and wh /hw/, as in wine vs. whine, is preserved.
12. In words like took where "oo" usually represents /ʊ/, speakers may use /uː/.
13. /eɪ/ often becomes /ɛ/ in words such as gave and came becoming "gev" and "kem".
14. Consonant clusters ending in /j/ often change: /dj/ becomes /dʒ/ - words dew/due, duke and duty will sound like "jew", "jook" and "jooty". /tj/ becomes /tʃ/: tube is "choob", tune is "choon"
15. Such words as cat and garden sound like ‘kyat’ and ‘gyarden’: initial /k/ and /g/ with a following semivowel /j/.
16. In such words as pine, time, come, the opening consonant is aspirated, the /t/ in time sounding like a cross between t and the th in three: aspiration of syllable-initial /p, t, k/. [11]

  Having illustrated the differences between Irish variant of English and RP, we should also point out at the peculiarities of its intonation. A noticeable feature of many Hiberno-English accents is the way the chief stress in a polysyllabic word is often different from its location in RP. Stress patterns seem to be more flexible than in RP, especially in the south, and there is considerable variation, but a few general tendencies have been noted.

  Verbal suffixes attract the stress in words with three or more syllables –  educate, advertise, prosecute, along with their inflections – educating, complicated.

  In polysyllabic nouns, a syllable followed by a consonant cluster tends to attract the stress: algebra, architecture, character. This feature is often stigmatized as nonstandard, though such forms as orchestra and discipline may be heard in educated speech.

  The general pattern is one of stress postponement, the primary stress appearing later in the word compared with RP. Many other words show this pattern (triangle, safeguard, diagnose), though there is much variation, especially when people allow their speech to be influenced by American or British models. Many Irish place names also have a final stress, reflecting Gaelic origins, as in Belfast, though anglicization to Belfast now common.

  Postponed stress has been around in Ireland for a long time, as can be seen from the metrical patterns of the pre-20^th –century rhyming verse: “So therefore I awaited with my spirits elevated”. The origins of the effect are unclear, but it is thought that part of the answer may lie with the Irish schoolmasters who became early Agents of anglicization, and who were often unsure how polysyllabic words should be pronounced. [3,337]

  The distinctive feature that characterizes the Irish English intonation is the phenomenon of malapropism, the habit of selecting words whose choice is often slightly, and ludicrously, inappropriate. In Dublin, for instance, the word formularies is used instead of formalities, and declivity for proclivity. [8,179]

  Thus, having analyzed the most essential phonetic differences of the Irish English and the peculiarities of its intonation, we came to the analysis of the Anglo-Irish grammar. It will cover the information about the distinctive features of the verb phrase, nouns, adjectives and pronouns, the use of articles and the certain structures of sentences.

  There are many features affect verbal aspect but we will give you the examples of the most important of them:

1. A wide use of the progressive form and the use of the present tense instead of the perfect: 

  Who is this car belonging to? Who is it you’re wanting?

  She’s dead these ten years. =She has been dead these ten years.

2. One of the most distinctive features of Hiberno-English is the use of after to express such meanings as recency and completed event:

  They are after leaving = They have just left.

  They were after leaving = They had just left.

3. Copular and auxiliary be are used in distinctive ways, chiefly expressing     contrasts of habitual action and continuity: be is found with forms of do: It does be colder at nights. And also with an –s ending: I be walking. She bees walking.

  Some dialects will allow three patterns: She’s tired. She be tired. She do be tired.

4. Auxiliary usages often vary: will for shall, used be for used to be, amn’t for aren’t. Forms of be may replace have with verbs of motion in a past-time context:

  He is gone up for He has gone up.

5. Here are some distinctive imperative constructions:

  Let you stay here a while. Let you be coming up to see me.

  The progressive form is common with negatives:

  Don’t be troubling yourself. [3,338]

6. Some Irish speakers of English, especially in rural areas, especially in the West of Ireland, use the verb to be in English similarly to how they would in Irish, using a does be/do be or bees, although less frequently construction to indicate this latter continuous present: "

  He does be working every day.

  They do be talking on their mobiles a lot.

  He does be doing a lot of work at school.

7. When describing something, rural Hiberno-English speakers may use the term in it where there would usually be used.

         Is it yourself that is in it?