English in Ireland and Irish in English

Hiberno-English as exemplar of World English1

1.0 Introduction

The history of the English language in Ireland is long and complex; one which, until recently at least, was

tied up with the history of Anglo-Norman, English and then British domination. English has been spoken in

Ireland for at least five hundred years and those varieties that are now native to Ireland are judged to be

largely endocentric2, that is, as Hickey (1993:87) states, “We call it [English as spoken in Ireland] a

standard form of English because its native users look to no other form to imitate or copy, it is politically,

socially or culturally ‘inferior’ to no other variety and it has its own dynamic, generating its own

vocabulary, grammar and idiomatic expressions”.

Today Ireland, and principally that part comprising the Republic of Ireland3 (which covers all but

six of the nine counties that make up the ancient province of Ulster), constitutes linguistically one of the

central hubs of the English language worldwide, both through the fame of Irish literary figures and through

the Irish Diaspora, it having had influence on many other varieties of English around the globe. It has

achieved this status within the English-speaking world without renouncing its deeper Celtic4 roots, as

shown by the continued of use both in private and public life of Irish or Gaelic / Gaeilge (and we will

follow current practice and use the former term as the latter often has connotations of a language with

historical not contemporary relevance).

1 This article appears in slightly modified form “English in Ireland and Irish in English. Hiberno-English as exemplar of World English”, in (eds.) Dolce and Natale (2009) Papers In Memory of Prof Bernard J. Hickey. Udine: A.L.L, 61-83. 2 This method of classifying varieties of English coming originally from Semenets and Rusetskaya (1991). 3 As stipulated by the Irish constitution: "the name of the state is Éire, or, in the English Language, Ireland". Such a usage however may lead to confusion with the island of Ireland: the geographical entity that includes Northern Ireland which is part of the UK. Part of the reason for this discrepancy is the fact that, until 1999, the Irish constitution laid claim to the whole of Ireland (something which successive governments in Dublin did not pursue). An alternative to ‘Ireland’ has been “Southern Ireland”, especially in the UK, but this dates from the original unilateral British partition of Ireland in 1920, prior to the setting up of the Free State in 1922. Similarly, people in Northern Ireland often refer to the rest of Ireland as “South” – even if parts of it, e.g. Donegal, are geographically further north - and likewise, those in the Republic call Northern Ireland “the North”. Following the formal establishment of the “Republic of Ireland” in 1949, this term or plain “Republic”, has been used widely both in Ireland and the UK, as has increasingly ‘Éire’ (often Anglicised to the unaccented ‘Eire’). On adoption of Irish as an official EU language in 2007, the bilingual couplet 'Éire Ireland' is used on various EU labels and signs. 4 There is much disagreement among historians about whether the term ‘Celtic’ is applicable to any particular group inhabiting Ireland or Great Britain (see James 1999). Notwithstanding this, it has long been conventional wisdom that the Irish are descended from people usually identified as Celts who migrated from Europe displacing the original inhabitants around 500 BC. However, an international study of DNA led by Trinity College Dublin (published in the July 2004 issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics) has concluded that most Irish are descended from people who migrated from Galicia in Spain 12,000 years ago, at the end of the ice age. Be that as it may, the traditional culture of Ireland (which, in any case, might still have been acquired from - or imposed by - a much smaller group of settlers of presumed Celtic origin), is one that has, accurately or not, come to typify that which people regard as Celtic.

Like most areas of the world, Ireland is not and has never been truly monolingual. Even before the

Anglo-Norman invasions, the Celts did not have the island to themselves. The Vikings established the first

towns, namely Cork, Dublin, Limerick and Waterford5. Successive centuries saw waves of Anglo-

Normans, English, Scots and diverse groups of Protestant refugees, such as the Huguenots, from

continental Europe. Today, in proportion to its population, the Republic of Ireland is the largest importer of

immigrants in the EU. Migrant workers make up 8% of the workforce. This unprecedented influx of

immigrants from elsewhere in the EU and beyond is leading to the establishment of speech communities

where many different languages are used; according to the Department of Education and Science, among

languages spoken on a “significant scale” in Ireland are Chinese, Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian,

Vietnamese, Yoruba, Albanian, Moldovan, Arabic and Russian, with a total of over 60 languages being

spoken as L1 by various students from over 120 countries attending Irish schools6.

The three main varieties of English spoken on the island of Ireland are Irish English (IE), Hiberno-

English (HE), and Ulster Scots. The last is, as its name suggests, a variety of Scots7 spoken mainly in the

UK province of Northern Ireland8: a dialect brought over by settlers from the Scottish lowlands from the

16th century onwards. In recent years, it has been the subject of considerable research and is being

promoted by Northern Irish authorities as an officially recognised community language alongside both

Irish and HE.

Some treat HE and IE as largely synonymous. Recently, however, a distinction has come to be

made, with HE being reserved for the more marked forms of English in Ireland. There is however no clear

cut-off point between HE and IE and they can be put on a continuum between Irish and standard BE or

Scots9. In this, Ireland is no different to many other parts of the world where often regional varieties differ

from some standard in terms of degree. IE adheres most closely to standard BE. As John Harris (1991)

notes, it used to be widely known as Anglo-Irish. According to McArthur (2002: 117) the latter “is a

socially and historically ambiguous term”. Other objections could be raised by dint of the fact that it is

linguistically ambiguous too, given that its morphology would seem to suggest an Anglicised version of

Irish, which if anything might be applicable to the broadest varieties of HE. HE is associated with more

working class and rural (and Catholic – according to McArthur 2002) contexts, where the influence of

standard BE is much weaker and where that of the traditionally indigenous language of Irish would be

5 It was not long before the Vikings in Ireland developed a separate identity from those elsewhere, coming to call themselves the Gall Gaidel (or Norse Gaels) indicating that they, like the Normans in France, adopted the language and many of the customs of their aquired homeland – see Haywood (1995). 6 These figures from the “Language Policy Profile, Country Report: Ireland”, (Dept. of Education and Science 2005-2006) produced in conjunction with the Council of Europe. 7 Historically, the so-called King’s Scots being an equivalent in Scotland to The King’s English in England and Wales. 8 As regards languages found in the Republic of Ireland, in the “Language Policy Profile” (see footnote above), mention is made of Irish, English, Irish Sign Language, and the Cant a.k.a. Shelta or Gammon (a sub-variety based on Irish and HE and a little Romany used by some in the Irish Traveller community), but not Ulster Scots. 9 Joyce (1910 / 1988: 1) in his classic work on English in Ireland, identifies three sources for what he calls “Anglo-Irish dialectal words and phrases”: “First: the Irish language. Second: Old English and the dialect of Scotland. Third: Independently of these two sources, dialectal expressions have gradually grown up among our English-speaking people, as dialects arise everywhere.”

stronger. In making specific comments about the structure and lexis of the English native to Ireland we will

direct our main focus to HE, as it is this which represents the other extreme to standard BE.

Linguistically, HE differs considerably from standard BE not just in lexis and accent – as could

said to be principally the case with varieties like Australian, South African, Canadian or even US English –

but also in grammar and syntax. Tom McArthur’s reference book The Oxford Guide to World English

(2002), adopts a standard format for the discussion of each variety; the number of distinct grammatical

features for a selection of varieties of World English are set out in Table 1):

Table 1) Number of distinct grammatical features according to McArthur (2002)

Hiberno-English (pp 120-121) 14

Kings Scots (pp 85-86) 12

Indian English (pp 321-322) 11

West African Pidgin English (pp 273) 7

Caribbean English Creoles (pp 233-234) 6

General American (p 173) 5

South African English (pp 291-292) 5

Australian English (p 382) 3

Canadian English none given

Such figures are only indicative and there is no evidence that it was McArthur’s intention to allow a crude

comparison of the kind that we have made here. For one thing, the nature of each grammatical distinction

must be taken into account, not just the number (and, regarding quantity, it should be remembered that

different systems of classifications may separate the same data into different kinds and numbers of

categories); for another, intuition and experience tell us that the figures for West African Pidgin and

Caribbean Creoles are low. Furthermore, McArthur does not provide an exhaustive list of distinctive

grammatical features nor does he claim to. HE contains many more distinct grammatical features than he

lists. In the detailed article on Wikipedia (the online encyclopaedia10), 17 separate features of HE grammar

are listed.

Given these reservations, it can still be concluded that Table 1) does confirm what seems to be a

fair assumption, namely that, of the World Englishes, HE is one of those that differs most from standard

BE and that, in this category, it is closer to the older variety of King Scots and indeed to the so-called new

Englishes from areas like Africa and Asia where the indigenous population is neither so-called White

Caucasian nor traditionally English-speaking. Paradoxically perhaps, HE and Scots share the feature of

being among the closest to standard BE geographically but being among the furthest away as regards

lexico-grammar and syntax.

10 http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English

In section 2.0 below, we discuss some of the main linguistic features of HE. The list of details that

we consider is shorter than that provided by McArthur (2002) or Dolan (1998) – the latter, for many, the

standard work on HE - and is intended not as an exhaustive description but merely as a representative

introduction for those not yet familiar with HE.

In the following section, 3.0, we look at the history of English in Ireland, which is also a history of

the struggle and survival of Irish, looking in particular at how the shifting power relations between the

various speech communities have been reflected in the verbal repertoires11 of people in Ireland.

In section 4.0 we discuss some of the reasons why the varieties of English spoken in Ireland are

significant on an international level.

Finally in 5.0, the conclusion, we examine what the evolution of English in Ireland tells us about

the evolution of local varieties of English elsewhere in the World and how very different languages may

come to interact, coexist and merge.

2.0 A brief outline of the pronunciation and lexico-grammar of Hiberno-English

The Irish influence is felt in both IE and HE at the level of pronunciation and is a major element of the so-

called “Irish brogue”: the accent typical of speakers of English from Ireland. Among the main features, is

the fact that the ‘r’ is rhotic (i.e. pronounced after a vowel); to a greater or lesser degree, there is a merging

of /θ/ and /th/, and of /ð/ and /d/, making thin and tin and then and den near-homophones; and some

consonant clusters have come to resemble those in the Irish sound system, for example /s/ may become /∫/

before /l/, /n/ or /t/, for example slip: /∫lIp/. On the level of intonation, stress tends to come later than in

standard BE (a feature shared by Scots, Caribbean and Indian Englishes); for example in’tresting for

‘interesting, edu’cate for ‘educate, safe’guard for ‘safeguard, al’gebra for ‘algebra. It has been suggested

that part of such postponement of stress in unfamiliar polysyllabic words might be due to locally-recruited

schoolmasters in the 19th century who were themselves unsure of pronunciation (see Ó Sé 1989). Be this as

its may, this phenomenon cannot be put down totally to “ignorance” as even in educated speech, or’chestra

and di‘scipline are found (see Crystal, 2003b). Generally an Irish accent is well regarded by other speakers

of other varieties of English. Indeed some purists have argued that, with its archaic elements which

correspond more closely than standard BE to the spelling of words, it represents a purer more rational

pronunciation. J.Y.T. Greig (1929), the Hume scholar, even advocated the teaching of the Dublin accent as

an alternative to RP (received – standard - pronunciation) or General American (standardized US

pronunciation).

At the level of vocabulary and lexis, the influence of Irish is also strong. Not surprisingly, there are

many words of Irish origin that refer to Irish culture ‘boxty’ (from bacstaidh - a potato dish), and to

institutions of the Republic of Ireland, e.g. ‘Taoiseach’ (the prime minister) ‘Tánaiste’ (deputy prime

minister), the ‘Dáil’ and ‘Seanad’ (the lower house and Senate, respectively), or Gardaí12 (the national

11 This term from Fishman (1997) 12 ‘Gardaí’ (plural) is used to refer to the force, as is the Anglicised form “the guards” (by contrast, “the police” is rarely used). In formal contexts the singular form, ‘garda’, is also used (An Garda Síochána – literally “Guardians of

police service) and these are used even in varieties outside Ireland, such as BE or USE, when referring to

the specific context of Ireland (though often with some explanatory gloss). Other terms refer to more

universal concepts, for which equivalents in BE and other varieties do exist; examples are: ‘ommadhawn’

(a fool), a ‘kitter’ (a left-handed person), ‘mass’ (respect / faith in something), ‘smig’ (chin), ‘backy’

(lame), and ‘sleeven’ (sly person) even the diminutive suffix – ‘een’ as in ‘girleen’ (small/young girl) – see

Dolan (1998).

Apart form Irish sources, it has long been noted that the lexis of English in Ireland also shows

influence of vernacular Early Modern English (A. Hume 1878), including contractions such as ‘tis’ and

‘tisn’t’ for ‘it’s’ and ‘isn’t’ even when used non-clitically or in isolation (i.e. when normal contractions

cannot occur): e.g “Is that a new car?” – “Tis”. Some (Harris 1984, 1987) have argued that at least some of

the features attributed to Irish influences are in fact Early Modern or Middle English or perhaps a

combination of these and Irish. Be that as it may, conservatism is a recurrent feature of English as spoken

in Ireland. Before even Elizabethan times, the English of the settlers came to be known as “Yola”

(according to McArthur 2002, from West Saxon ‘yald’ or old)13, and some terms still found today in certain

areas (as well as in Newfoundland via the Irish Diaspora), such as ‘Gassin’ / ‘Gossoon’(a child), date back

to Anglo Norman.

A major factor in the survival of archaic forms must be the fact that even today, after thirty years of

unprecedented economic growth, Irish society remains predominantly rural. It is well documented in

sociolinguistics that varieties from smaller isolated communities, as opposed to those in urban areas, tend

to be more conservative and slower to evolve. It is a fairly safe prediction that, as society in Ireland

becomes more urbanised, change will be more rapid and thus the life cycle of forms in general will shorten,

meaning that some of the more archaic features will fall into misuse. Indeed certain changes have been

recorded in the Dublin variety of IE that distinguish different areas of the city from each other (notably the

North and South sides and the so-called Dublin 4, after the postal district) and from elsewhere (see Kallen

1991). There is evidence that Dublin English is moving in the direction of similar metropolitan varieties in

Britain (Filppula, 1991); for example, the expression ‘cheers’ used as a greeting or for ‘thanks’ - a recent

development in colloquial British English – is used by some speakers especially in Dublin 414.

Furthermore, even without the urbanisation of sections of Ireland’s society, the numbers of

immigrants arriving in Ireland, whether they be L1 English-speakers or not, will no doubt also make their

presence felt linguistically within IE and HE just as they have in other increasingly cosmopolitan English-

speaking countries like the USA, the UK, Canada, or Australia (see section 3.0). Among the more

cosmopolitan sections of Irish society – and it should also be remembered that Ireland has the largest

the Peace”). ‘Garda’ can also be used as a title for a member of the force of whatever rank e.g. “Garda George Rice” / “Detective Garda Jerry McCabe”. 13 Indeed, Seamus Heaney explains in his “Translator’s Introduction” to his acclaimed translation of Beowulf that he deliberately used the rural northern Irish version of HE dialect of his older relatives as he found that it resembled Old English in many ways and even contained a few similar terms. 14 A factor here may be increased migration in recent years of Britons to Ireland. According to the latest figures given by the UK Institute for Public Policy Research (2006), there are about 291,000 UK citizens currently resident in the Republic of Ireland.

proportion of young people in Europe15 - words like ‘latte’ (for a milky cappuccino-style coffee), ‘bling’

(an opulent display, usually of wealth) or ‘to google’ (to search for something on the internet using a search

engine like Google) are as familiar as they would be to people with similar life-styles and tastes anywhere

else in the English-speaking world, and beyond.

The grammar and syntax of IE is close to that of standard BE while that of HE has characteristics

which are clearly Irish in origin. It should be noted at this point that, while Irish and English are both from

the Indo-European family of languages, they are found in quite separate branches: English in the Germanic

(West); Irish in the Celtic (Goidelic). The Indo-European family is a large grouping of languages divided

into such diverse branches as Italic, Slavic, Anatolian, Indo-Iranian and Armenian. Despite the

geographical proximity of their traditional respective speech communities, the grammar and lexis of

Standard BE and Irish are no more similar than are other Indo-European languages from different branches

(e.g. Portuguese, Albanian or Kasmiri). The dissimilarity between English and Irish is apparent comparing,

for example, the first line of the Lord’s prayer: “Our father, who art in heaven”; “Ár n-athair, atá ar neamh”

(see Crystal 1992: 298).

Many of the main distinctive grammatical and syntactical features of HE can be traced primarily to

Irish. Originally, this must have been much like the L1 interference experienced by the typical L2 or

foreign-language learner. Later, as speakers became gradually bi-lingual, the more dominant of the codes –

obviously Irish for many years – will have imposed its norms on the less dominant one in the mind of the

speaker. The fact that speakers probably had little exposure to more standard models of English and would

have been speaking it mainly to other speakers with similar verbal repertoires, and who were thus subject

to the same subliminal linguistic forces, must have meant that idiosyncrasies would have become the

unmarked forms and thus entrenched.

Among the most obvious distinctive features of HE is a greater use of the continuous / progressive

phase e.g. “What is it that you are wanting?” (coincidentally, something also found in Indian English).

There is also, as in many languages – including the Romance ones - use of the simple present tense instead

of the present tense perfect aspect: “He’s dead these twelve years” for “He’s been dead for twelve years”.

A distinctly Irish feature found particularly in Dublin, and which has few equivalents elsewhere in the

world, is the use of the preposition ‘after’ with a gerund instead of a perfect aspect: e.g. “You look like

you’re after seeing a ghost” for “You look like you have just seen a ghost”. Auxiliary usage in HE differs

from that in Standard BE: for example, ‘will’ for ‘shall’ in offers (“Will I get you another cup of tea?”);

‘used’ for ‘used to’; ‘amn’t’ for ‘aren’t’; and, as in many languages including the Romance, the use of the

verb ‘to be’ with so-called unaccusative verbs (an intransitive verb whose syntactic subject is not a

semantic agent) in the perfect aspect: ‘he is fallen’ for ‘he has fallen’. The verb ‘to be’ especially in

varieties of North Mayo and Sligo also behaves in a way which mirrors its equivalent in Irish e.g. “It does

be cold at nights” and in some areas ‘bees’ substitutes for ‘is’, as in “She bees walking”. The later is also a

feature of English Caribbean Creole and is cited as evidence of influence from Irish (see section 4.0). 15 According to the 1996 census, there were 1.5 million young people in the Republic of Ireland under 25 i.e. 41% of the population. The EU average is 25%.

Some standard BE terms are used in the same way as their counterparts in Irish, one of the most

notable examples of this being bring and take. In HE, their use follows the Irish grammar for beir and tóg

respectively. Whereas BE usage is governed by the concept of direction (towards versus away from); Irish

usage is determined by whether there is a transfer of possession or not: “Don't forget to bring your coat

with you when you leave” or “Watch my bag: I don't want someone to take it”.

A further noticeable characteristic of HE is the existence of emphatic reflexive pronouns: “Is it

yourself who is in that photo?”16 Another distinctive use of pronouns is retention of Middle and Early

Modern English ‘ye’ (also as a subject form). In Shakespeare both ‘you’ and ‘ye’ are found as subject and

object forms, sometimes interchangeably: “Hang ye, gorbellied knaves, are ye undone? No, ye fat chuffs; I

would your store were here! On, bacons, on! What, ye knaves! - Young men must live. You are grand-

jurors, are ye? We’ll jure ye, faith.” (Henry IV pt 1).

A modern development is the form ‘yous’ (spelt also ‘youse’) or the variants ‘ye-s’ / ‘yis’ in some

areas in Leinster, and also north Mayo and Sligo. This has obviously evolved to answer the need for an

unambiguous second person plural caused by the loss of singular ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ and the absorption of

the second person singular into ‘you’ (originally plural and a V-form - i.e. a polite / respectful form of

address). In standard BE, ‘you’ has taken over the function of ‘thou’. In a process resembling some back-

formation in that it is based on a misconception17, HE has reanalysed ‘you’ as a singular form and added

the suffix ‘s’ to create the apparently regular plural form ‘yous’. In less radical ways, other varieties of

English have achieved similar results through various means: Southern and Middle USE have ‘you all’ or

‘y’all’ and, even in standard BE, plural ‘you’ is often clarified by use of modification (e.g. ‘you two’, ‘you

lot’). However, like most backformations, ‘yous’ has a simple logic and is immediately comprehensible

even on first acquaintance. It is gaining in currency even outside Ireland in such places as Liverpool,

Glasgow, Australia and many parts of the USA and Canada (Crystal 2003b: 338).

As in Irish, reduplication18 is fairly common in HE in such frequently used tags as “so it does / is /

has etc.”; “at all at all” or the now lesser used ‘to be sure to be sure” used in expressions like: “It rains a lot

at this time of year, so it does”, “They have no money at all at all” (this occurring in both Highland English

and in Atlantic Canada – McArthur 2003: 121), or “Bring a camera with you on your trip, to be sure, to be

sure”. A similar feature is the avoidance of the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ (although this trait is now mainly

associated with older speakers according to Wikipedia). Irish has no equivalents to "yes" or "no" and verbs

are repeated instead, a practice that leads, in English, to structures like: "Are you from Cork?" "I am”.

Finally, both Irish and Middle English are inflected languages and consequently have flexible word

orders. This trait is carried over into HE, which thus has a more flexible word order than standard BE. This

trait is carried over into HE. For example, in cleft sentences, the word order reflects that in Irish: “It is after 16 Joyce (1910 / 1988: 48) identifies this as an ‘Irish Idiom’ and notes that “Irish Chiefs when signing their name to any document, always wrote the name in this form, Misi O’Neill, i.e. ‘ Myself O’Neill.’” 17 By which a short form of another word is formed by removing affixes from a longer word (even erroneously) e.g. ‘televise’ from ‘television’ or ‘prequel’ from ‘sequel’. 18 This can be linked to a general tendency in Modern Irish (but not in older varieties) for the use of structures which, compared to similar ones in other languages, are less concise modes of expression, amounting to “wordy overflow” see Joyce (1910/1988: 131-132)

money you are?” However, due to the fact, that like modern English, HE has few inflections19, there can be

ambiguity: e.g. “I have my house painted” could, in the absence of further clarification, be taken either as

a causative: “I get someone to paint my house” or as a straight perfect “I have painted my house”.

3.0 The broader context of English in Ireland

English was introduced institutionally into Ireland in the 12th Century, with the first Anglo-Norman

expeditions and settlements, but there must have been contact before then, not least because of the close

ethnic and linguistic ties between the Irish and the Scots proper20, who were originally from Ireland (that is,

the inhabitants of the Western Isles and Highlands, as opposed to the Picts who they had displaced).

The birth of a single recognisable language of English (roughly in the period between the 6th and

10th centuries) out of the amalgam of Germanic dialects coincides with the displacement of Celtic

languages in many parts of Great Britain. Many of those displaced from Britain21, including what is today

England, found refuge in the peninsula of Cornwall, the mountainous areas of Wales, Cumbria and the

Highlands of Scotland and in the various Islands off the North West coast, Brittany and in Ireland itself. It

is the Celtic varieties of English - Gaelic English in Scotland, Welsh English, IE and HE - that could thus

justifiably be called the first of the World Englishes (the main title of the famous journal edited by B.

Kachru and L.E. Smith, since 198522).

The fate of Irish in Ireland is then similar to the fate of the Celtic languages in Great Britain.

Initially, although there was a permanent English- and Anglo-Norman-speaking community in the ‘Pale’

centred on Dublin, the rest of Ireland remained Irish-speaking until after the campaigns of Elizabeth I and

James I, which marked the beginning of the most resolute period of English and British domination. Indeed

as the medieval period progressed, the settlers failed to gain a firm foothold in Ireland and the Irish

language saw a revival even in areas where it had initially been displaced. Anglo-Norman (a variety of

French), although at one time rivalling Irish and English for supremacy in Ireland, ceased to be widely

spoken after the Medieval period23 (although traces of it survive in IE and HE) and many of the Norman

settlers – the so-called Hiberno-Normans - were assimilated into Irish society and had little to do with the

Anglo-Normans in the Pale or back in Britain. Similarly, English also suffered decline; the Statutes of

19 In a language with few inflections, the grammatical function of a word is usually shown by its position in the sentence (cf. “She stores paints” and “She paints stores”). 20 Indeed the word ‘Scot’ comes from Latin, Scotia, which originally referred to Ireland. One of the most famous Irish philosophers and theologians of the early middle ages was thus known as John the Scot or Johannes Scotus Erigena – both Scotus and Erigena meaning ‘born in Ireland’. 21 Most historians today believe that the Celts were displaced from England and did not coexist in a state of subservience to the Anglo-Saxons, as the latter were later to do with the Normans. The evidence for this is firstly the fact that so few Celtic words were incorporated into Old English, indicating that there was little contact between the communities, and secondly the archaeological and historical evidence of mass migrations towards Celtic areas of Britain and the Armorican peninsula in France (now called revealingly Bretagne or Brittany). 22 Full title: World Englishes: The Journal of English as an International and Intranational Language. It is this publication that has popularised, so to speak, the term Englishes, but T McArthur (1998: 61-65) shows how it has a considerably longer pedigree. 23 See Curtis 1919, cited by Doolan (p. XIII) in his introduction to Joyce (1988).

Kilkenny were issued in 1366 (in Anglo-Norman, as was customary) to halt the revival of Irish, instructing

settlers to desist from adopting indigenous customs and to continue speaking English.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the period of most rigorous campaigning by the British (The

Stuart Kings, Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange), Irish had come to be associated not with a separate

and ancient culture with its own institutions and traditions, but more with a subject indigenous people: an

increasingly disadvantaged underclass in shrinking speech communities in isolated geographical areas.

Indeed, the mass colonisation of Ireland that started in this period came at the same time as the first British

colonies (in truth at that time still classed as either English or Scottish – the latter being far fewer in

number) were being established across the Atlantic; Oliver Cromwell even sent several hundred Irish and

Scottish prisoners to the Caribbean, in particular Barbados and Bermuda, where they were held with

Africans as slaves (see section 4)24. The colonisation of Ireland was thus an integral part of a wider

worldwide (or specifically pan-Atlantic) process.

There was also a religious dimension to the marginalisation of the Irish speaking community which

was largely absent from the treatment of Celtic-speaking communities in Great Britain. In the latter, almost

universal conversion to Protestantism was achieved, albeit not always peacefully or voluntarily but

nonetheless with relatively less turmoil than in Ireland25. As a result of this, while speaking Celtic in Great

Britain was eventually perceived merely as a mark of backwardness, in Ireland it was always to be a sign of

belonging to a group that refused to be subjugated or conform and indeed which owed allegiance to a

foreign and sometimes hostile potentate: the Pope 26.

Over time, use of Irish in Ireland decreased and was gradually displaced by English in all but those

areas which, on independence, were to make up the Gaeltachtaí (regions where Irish is officially

recognised as the main community language). This was through official policies which led inexorably to

monolingualism, such as the Education Act in the 1820s which introduced compulsory primary education

but only in English. Other indirect – but equally important - factors were rural poverty and various laws

that were designed to keep Ireland subservient in economic and commercial matters, as well as political, to

the so-called “mainland” (e.g. the restrictions put on Irish ports participating in international trade). Such

deliberate measures, as well as plain incompetence and mismanagement, led to repeated catastrophe in

rural areas culminating in the Great Famine / Hunger of 1845-49 (even in Ireland itself, scholars are still

divided on how to classify this tragedy: natural or manmade disaster). However these events are defined, it

24 A similar fate was later to meet a similar number of (mostly non-conformist) Protestant English rebels in Somerset involved in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 against James II. 25 Strange as it may seem, while there were significant numbers of committed Catholics among certain clans in the Highlands and Western Isles until the failure and discrediting of the Jacobite cause (and it is relevant that it was these Gaelic speaking groups who bore the brunt of British reprisals, despite the fact that the Stuarts had found more support among Lowlanders), the most notable concentrations of Catholics in Britain after the reformation were in England itself, in the county of Lancashire. 26 Illustrative of the strategic importance of Ireland as “the backdoor to England” is the saying: “Qui Angliam vincere vellet ab Ybernia incipere debet,” (“He who would England win, with Ireland he must begin” – the Latin version given by T. Kunesh http://www.darkfiber.com/blackirish) which dates from the Anglo-Spanish conflicts of the sixteenth century.

is estimated27 that, in the years from 1846 to 1849, between 500,000 and over 1 million died, while there

were two million refugees (the same number that emigrated in the same period to Britain, the USA28,

Canada or Australia).

Emigration from Ireland had started long before the 1840s and it is only relatively recently that the

phenomenon has declined29. Throughout the long history of Irish emigration, a disproportionately high

number of those departing came from small Irish-speaking communities and, as with other minority

languages in similar situations, their dispersal around the world will have contributed to discontinued use.

One of the first acts of the Government of the Free State was to institute policies aimed at reviving

the Irish language and restoring it to its prior position of dominance. To this end, it designated Irish as

Official National Language and English only as Second Official. Part of the reason for this radical and

controversial policy had been the change on the part of the nationalists in their attitude to English. Initially

and with no sense of contradiction, they, like most of the Catholic Church, had adopted English as their

working language. This move reflected their class and social origins – as it undoubtedly did the hierarchy

of the church: urban intellectuals and professionals, many of whom, in the case of the nationalists, were

part of the so-called Protestant Ascendancy (the Anglican ruling classes). At the turn of the century,

Douglas Hyde, Eoin MacNeill and other promoters of the Irish Revival were arguing that independence by

itself was not enough without a cultural rebirth. Though Anglo-Irish and not L1 Irish speakers themselves,

they maintained that a unique Irish national identity could only be expressed in a truly Irish idiom. Similar

views at the same time were being expressed by other nationalists elsewhere, notably the so-called

Zionists, among whom Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who set about reconstructing and reintroducing Hebrew.

Modern Irish, like Modern Hebrew or Modern Welsh30, as found in its official written standard

(Caighdeán Oifigiúil), is partly a construct made from the often very different dialects still in existence31

combined with certain features of older recorded varieties that have fallen into disuse, together with some

invention where deemed necessary. Some of the scholars actively involved in the creation of modern Irish

were from the unlikeliest sources. Take, for example, the Cambridge graduate, George Derwent

Thomson32, later to be professor of Greek at University College Galway and later still at Birmingham, who

in his youth had taken the unusual step, above all for someone from England, of not only learning Irish but

27 Records are incomplete: these figures from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Potato_Famine_) 28 Some measure of the scale of Irish emigration in the 19th century is given by the fact that, according to records, as early as 1860, New York was the city with the largest population of Irish in the world: approximately one quarter of its 800,000 inhabitants. 29 The Republic of Ireland only became a net in-migrant country in 1973 when it joined the European Economic Communities (as the EU was then called), and then many of the immigrants were in fact returnees or of Irish extraction. 30 Incidentally, with about 611,000 speakers in Great Britain (UK census 2001), by far the most widely spoken of the Celtic languages today despite the fact that it is Wales that has, for the longest period of time, been subject to domination by England. 31 The main three groupings correspond approximately to the three provinces of Munster, Connacht and Ulster. 32 For a full appraisal of George Thomson, see the eponymous article by Seán O Lúing in Classics Ireland, 1996 vol 3, http://www.ucd.ie/classics/classicsinfo/96/oluing96.html

of doing so among the small isolated community of the Blasket Islands33 (in particular from the local poet

Maurice Sullivan, whose publication of Fiche Blian ag Fás – “Twenty Years A-growing” he actively

promoted). In the 1930s, under the pseudonym Seoirse Mac Laghmainn, Thomson was one of the pioneers

of academic writing in Irish, producing translations of ancient Greek classics for use as textbooks in

schools. It was initiatives such as these that were to be instrumental in reviving the use of Irish as a national

standard by adopting it for purposes of a modern European education rather than seeing it merely as the

vehicle for traditional local culture.

While Irish is no longer a language under immediate threat, its revival has done little to effectively

dent the dominant position of English in Ireland, even if this were an achievable or desirable aim (and few,

even among the most ardent supporters of Irish, would agree that it were). Indeed, the Republic of Ireland

was until 2005 the only member of the European Union not to insist that its official language (Irish) was

used as an official working language of that body34 (a policy that has saved Europe a great deal of money

in translating and interpreting fees). In the 1991 census, L1 (native) speakers of Irish numbered 83,268,

equal to 2 % of the population of the Republic of Ireland, these mainly concentrated in the various

Gaeltachtaí. As an L2 (second language), Irish is healthy. In the 2002 census, 1.57 million of the total

population of 4 million had “an ability” to speak Irish35 and the Official Languages Act of 2003 was

designed to strengthen the position of Irish by ensuring its continued use by public officials36, not least in

the Gaeltachtaí. Most recently, in late 2006, the Irish government outlined plans for a new twenty-year

Irish language strategy to promote “functional bilingualism” whereby the number of people able to speak

both Irish and English will be greatly increased.

Such objectives are not always seen as worthwhile or realistic by critics (although a similar official

promotion of bilingualism has been a success in nearby Wales). Much will depend on public reaction and

how many resources, public, private and individual can be allocated to such efforts, and how effective any

measures prove to be. Furthermore, the arrival of immigrants adds more uncertainty to the future of Irish

and of the delicate balance currently holding between it and English. For the first time, the Department of

Education and Science has had to make provision for a coordinated programme for the teaching of English

as an additional language for speakers of other languages (Integrate Ireland Language and Training -

33 As McArthur (2002: 115) notes, at the time of its creation (1893), the Gaelic League (comprised of acquired Irish speakers, most of whom Dublin intellectuals like Hyde and MacNeill) showed little empathy towards the impoverished, conservative and isolated Gaeltachtaí. 34 A change that came into effect on 1 January 2007. The Republic of Ireland changed this policy partly in frustration at the lack of agreement within Europe to adopt fewer working languages especially in view of the affording of official recognition to some major sub-national languages, such as Catalan, and at the entrance of newer member states most with their own national language to promote. 35 What exactly the term ‘ability’ corresponds to was recently put to the test in the RTÉ documentary series “No Béarla” where Manchán Magan attempts to travel round Ireland using only Irish. Not only does he frequently find it difficult to make himself understood but his insistence is often met with impatience and sometimes even open hostility (and not only in Loyalist areas of the North) see http://www.manchan.com/pb/wp_f4b21f7c/wp_f4b21f7c.html. 36 Since 1974, it has no longer been a requirement for all employees in the public service to know Irish.

IILT37). How many of these immigrants or their children can be encouraged to adopt both Irish and English

– often in addition to their L1 or their ethnic community’s language – may prove decisive, as they will no

doubt make up a considerable proportion of Ireland’s future population38.

4) The importance of English as spoken in Ireland

There are three main reasons why English as spoken in Ireland is important to scholars in general.

However, before giving them, it should be underlined that for a linguist any language or variety is worthy

of study: no matter how many or how few speakers it has. This argument also dismisses the notions of

standards and sub-standards: of seeing one variety as superior to another. Like any other scientist, a linguist

should examine his or her data without prejudice or making any irrelevant value judgements.

For most non-linguists, the first and most obvious reason to study the English of Ireland may be

purely cultural, not essentially linguistic. The island of Ireland has since even Celtic times, produced a

disproportionate number of people proficient in the artistic use of language: poets, bards, balladeers, and

more recently writers novelists and playwrights – too many indeed to even attempt a short exemplary list -

as if such a thing was even necessary. It is worthy of note that the Irish have seemed to excel in whichever

language they have used or adopted, be it Irish, Latin, Norse39, English, or French, in the case of Beckett.

This means that, as regards the arts and culture, English as spoken in Ireland is of importance purely as a

vehicle for such great works.

The second reason for studying the English of Ireland is historical seniority so-to-speak. It is one of

the oldest varieties of English together with the British varieties (here including not just standard BE or

Scots but also regional varieties of English English such as Western, Eastern Counties, Kent and Surrey or

South Yorkshire: see Trudgill 1990). As we saw in section 2.0, like predominantly rural varieties

elsewhere, HE retains many archaic features and is also of interest to historical linguists. In particular, it

has been widely noted how some Elizabethan forms familiar to Shakespeare survive only in HE. It was

once believed that Elizabethan English also formed the basis of some varieties of Midland US English:

notably that of “Hillbillies” from the Appalachians. This view is no longer widely held (see McArthur:

2003), but it is accepted that this variety was heavily influenced by the influx of Ulster Scots (or Scots

Irish) in the 17th century. Examples of Elizabethan words still in use in HE are: ‘mitch’ to play truant,

37 In recent years, an English language exam for speakers of other languages has been produced in Ireland: the Test of

Interactive English (TIE), devised by the state-recognised Advisory Council for English Language Schools (ACELS), and which is also recognised by some countries abroad, including Italy. IILT has also recently developed English language proficiency tests. 38 According to a report by the Dublin-based stockbrokers NCB by (2020 “Vision: Ireland’s Demographic Dividend”, 2006), by 2020 Ireland’s population will have grown from 4.1 million to 5.3 million and the number of immigrants will have risen from 400,000 now to 1 million, that is 19% of the country's expected population. 39 It is believed that, at the time of the Vikings, the Irish had the highest literacy rate in northern Europe (see Cahill 1996). There is indeed genetic evidence that Iceland (that part of the Viking world that developed its own literature recording its history in written “sagas”), was colonized principally by Irish, not Scandinavian settlers. Some anthropologists, however, are cautious, pointing out that the six small pox epidemics between 577 and 1061 (to which people with Viking blood types were more susceptible) may have eliminated many Viking genes from contemporary pools (see MacKenzie 1996).

‘blowing / bilowen’ – to tell tall tales (also found in Piers Plowman). The presence of words, elsewhere

only found in works of canonical literature, has tempted some scholars to conclude from this that HE is

purer than other varieties and thus superior (see Greig cited in section 2.0). This is an opinion a linguist

cannot share, as any such observations are purely subjective; it would have to be established on what

precise objective basis one could say that the code that happened to be used as a vehicle by an important

literary figure was intrinsically “better” than any other.

A third reason for looking in depth at the English language in Ireland is that both directly through

the Irish Diaspora and indirectly as one of the longer established varieties of World English, it has been

highly influential on varieties of English around the world, in most concentrated form in Newfoundland

and the Ottawa valley, but also notably in urban centres in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada etc. There is

also a case for a direct link between Irish and Caribbean varieties of English-based Creoles40 and HE has

no doubt been one of the many influences for Caribbean English Creole. However, reports of the existence

of pockets of HE-speaking communities in the Caribbean (Montserrat has been referred to as the

“Caribbean’s Emerald Isle”) are exaggerated (see Wells, 1980), and may be partly due to confusion with

the ill-defined term ‘black Irish’41.

The influence on African American Vernacular English of HE and more latterly of Irish American

Vernacular English (the variety of HE that has evolved in the USA) is often the subject of debate. There are

similarities and it is possible that some words associated originally with black culture may have HE or Irish

origins: for example, ‘jazz’, a word, whose source most dictionaries give as unknown, which, according to

some scholars, comes from Irish ‘teas’ (heat: excitement)42. Such claims can be contentious, especially

when they are perceived as an attempt to appropriate aspects of other groups’ cultures. Furthermore,

etymology is a notoriously complicated field and rival explanations can be given for even well-documented

words (see for example ‘OK’/‘okay’). Generally, analysing relationships between varieties is difficult,

especially when they are just two existing among the many in a cosmopolitan society like the USA; one

would expect to see clear evidence of a distinctive and numerous set of significant linguistic features that

seem shared, not just isolated grammatical features or individual lexical items that bare some vague

40 The grounds for this contention are both linguistic and historical – it is known that among the early slave community in the Caribbean were Celtic-speakers from Ireland and Scotland (Scottish Gaelic being a variety of Irish). The linguistic evidence is that these Caribbean English-based Creoles, show more “Celtic-like features” (e.g. use of ‘do be’ construction for durative aspect) than African American Vernacular English, (see Rickford 1986 and Elena Perekhvalskaya Milkova “Irish Gaelic in the Caribbean” at http://www.joensuu.fi/fld/ecc/colloquium/milkova.html). 41 A term, thought to originate in the USA, whose origins and meaning is obscure. Variously, it has been said to apply to: Irish with black hair; Irish of mixed ethnicity, especially those rather fancifully descended from shipwrecked Armada survivors; survivors from the potato famine (which turned potatoes black); descendants of black slaves who took the names of the indentured Irish servants that they had replaced in the Caribbean, in particular Montserrat. (See Wikipedia: http:\\en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-Irish). Others among them, Ignatiev (1996), sees a racist, racial categorisation of those of Irish and African origin as belonging to the same broad group of subhumans in 19th century so-called White Anglo-Saxon Protestant USA – a situation which, according to Ignatiev, the Irish Americans freed themselves from partly by embracing racism. T. Kunesh (http://www.darkfiber.com/blackirish) links the term more positively to a folk memory of historical bonds between Ireland and Spain. 42 A claim made by Prof Daniel Cassidy on the website Educational Cyber Playground (http://www.edu-cyberpg.com). It is based on the recent discovery of the earliest use of the word in print (the San Francisco Bulletin of 1913), in a sporting article, where it co-occurs with other apparently Irish terms such as ‘giniker’: the latter, according to Cassidy, a phonetic transcription of Irish ‘tine (teine) caor” (to ignite).

similarity43. Having said this however, it should be no surprise that there is some reciprocal influence

between the speech varieties of the two communities in American society that are not only two of the

longest established, most numerous and widely dispersed (also within specific sections like the armed

forces), but also two of the most productive in terms of literature, theatre, music and oralature (verbal but

unwritten forms of artistic expression).

5) Conclusion

While it is true that by far the majority of people in Ireland have a variety of English as their L1, Irish,

different as it is to English, has had a profound effect on the evolution of HE and IE even in metropolitan

areas like Dublin where L1 Irish speakers are in a minority. Indeed, even if Irish were not an L2 in the

linguistic repertoire of over a quarter of the citizens of the Republic of Ireland, it still enjoys an afterlife as

a subliminal element in the varieties of English spoken in Ireland.

In this, it is like the many indigenous languages around the world in similar situations, existing not

separately but rather through the usurping language, reasserting itself from within. Such a thing is

happening, in a more extreme form, with some aboriginal groups in Australia: they have lost use of their

traditional idioms but now use so-called Aboriginal English Creole which, though an unwelcome

development in many respects (its adoption by younger aborigines has undoubtedly sped up the process by

which some languages have become extinct), is in effect the only form in which certain aspects and

elements of the (otherwise) extinct languages continue to exist. That such transplanting of elements from

one language to another is possible is confirmation – if any further were needed - that all languages share

common underlying structures and are governed by the same limited sets of principles or rules44. It also

shows the highly complex and multifarious nature of language contact and evolution especially in the case

of English: ultimately, except in extreme cases involving complete dispossession or genocide (and at times

the Irish have been threatened with both), domination involves not total eradication but degrees of

assimilation and of the dominant language, at least in specific locations, becoming itself the vehicle or host

for some of the structural and lexical features of the languages that it has usurped.

On one level, one could view such hybrid varieties of languages, like many of the World Englishes

that are asserting themselves around the world, as mere linguistic counterparts of Humboldt’s parrot45, that

is basically as versions of standard English which, for a brief period, survive as a repository of only

selected items of some lost idiom.

43 Indeed it is in the nature of language and of universal grammar (the fact that languages all display the same underlying linguistic characteristics drawn from a common set of possible features – see Chomsky 1965) that similarity even between the most diverse languages, both structurally and historically, can be expected to occur. For example, as regards intonation, Swedish can be classed alongside Japanese (see, for example Crystal 1987: 172, though Cruttenden in his study of intonation (1986) is more hesitant), a totally unrelated language, by dint of the fact that in it there are about five hundred minimal pairs that can be distinguished by tone alone (e.g. / tanken, the tank, \ tanken, the thought). 44 See Chomsky 1965. 45 A bird that the German Scientist found on his travels in South America which, by amazing coincidence, could apparently recite phrases of the language of a recently extinct tribe whose remains he had just previously been collecting.

However as historical linguistics shows, not least that of English itself, assimilating elements of

another language can be an unpredictable process with radical consequences for the host language. Those

elements that one language may import from another are not preserved in fossilized unalterable form

without affecting their surroundings. Rather, they insert themselves into the delicate balance of existing

features of the language and, like the proverbial beat of butterfly wings in chaos theory, can have

unpredictable results that may change the nature of the whole structure of the language, or significant parts

of it.

Such effects may be observed when one considers the general evolution of English. In its relatively

short history (about 1000 years), it has undergone numerous changes from its roots in the ethnic and

cultural mosaic of 6th century Britain to the worldwide position that it holds today. Many of these,

especially in the transition from Old to Middle English (i.e. by the mid 14th century), would appear to have

been relatively rapid46. One major feature was the loss of most verb inflections and of noun inflections for

gender and case, resulting in English being transformed from a largely inflectional language with flexible

word order to a largely isolating one with fixed word order. The causes of many of these far reaching

changes are still the subject of much conjecture47 but it has been argued that even relatively minor

alterations, namely the fixing of word stress and the subsequent evolution of the unstressed vowel (the so-

called schwa) may have been the catalysts48.

In the debate about the future of English, there is much conjecture about what the effects of being

a/the world language will have upon it49, whether it will continue to be the supposed monolithic whole,

dear to the prescriptivists, or whether it will split up into different varieties which eventually cease to be

mutually intelligible and will thus become separate languages (see McArthur 1998). It is fair to assume

that, at some levels at least, an international standard will continue to exist – and if it does, it is likely that

in a short time, as more and more of the people who use it are no longer L1 speakers50, this international or

global standard English (whatever term gains currency) will come to reflect the verbal repertoires of the

majority of those who speak it. One could certainly expect to see a greater influence of languages like

Hindi, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. In predicting and describing these changes, the history of English in

46 There are, for example, major differences between Middle and Modern, or contemporary, English; so many in fact that the works of Chaucer (writing in the second half of the 14th century in the midst of the changes) are largely incomprehensible to the typical modern reader. Such a thing is not true of all languages however: In Italian, Dante (who was writing about fifty years earlier than Chaucer) is still readily comprehensible to a reader today. 47 It has even been argued that Middle English is not a natural development of Old English but rather a Creole created out of the mixing of Old French with Old English and Norse dialects found in England at the time (see Bailey and Maroldt 1977, and other proponents of the so-called Middle English Creole Hypothesis). 48 See for example, Baugh and Cable 1993:154-155. 49 For a summary see McArthur 1998, 2002, Crystal 2003a & b. 50 This historic threshold has, it seems, already been crossed: figures are approximate, but it is estimated that there are between 330-450 million L1 speakers (possibly more depending on whether individual creoles and pidgins are included and on more accurate surveys of the still unclear situation in India, which is however now officially home to the largest L1 English-speaking community), while various estimates put the figure of second-language speakers somewhere in the region of 430 million speakers (again, further research in India might change this figure). If one adds to the figure of second language speakers, that of foreign language speakers (an even more difficult figure to arrive at), it is obvious that L2 speakers outnumber L1 speakers (for a discussion of the figures and various estimates see Crystal 2003a 67-71).

places like Ireland will be highly instructive, as such a process of code merging has already been underway

for over 500 years.

For many people, however, the important question arising from the globalisation of English is not

so much how this will affect the English language but what effect wider adoption of English will have on

local languages and cultures (see Crystal 2000). Many of the world’s languages face a bleak future (but not

just because of the spread of English) and many fear that, as languages die, so will whole ways of life and

of perceiving the world. This view owes much to the so-called mould theory of language whereby the code

used determines the thoughts of the speaker. The alternative view is the cloak theory; according to which,

language has some influence on thought but is itself ultimately reshaped by the speaker’s underlying

mentality51. From the history of the English language in Ireland, it can be seen that, where the indigenous

culture, in the general sense, is allowed to survive - and the history of Ireland can be seen as one long

struggle to ensure the continuance of a distinctly Irish way of life and of looking at the world - then the

language that is chosen for communication is just a veneer through which deeper thought-patterns will

inevitably show. As Brian Maracle, a Mohawk from Canada, says in his book Back on the Rez52(1996)

“Just because we starting speaking English doesn’t mean we also started playing cricket and eating kippers.

No, we still play lacrosse and eat corn soup and we still have an attitude regarding the future that is hard to

pin down.”53 Of course, language and culture cannot be treated as separate entities, as language is a

fundamental part of society and culture: as Claude Lévi-Strauss famously says in Tristes Tropiques (1955):

“Qui dit homme dit langage, et qui dit langage dit société”. In many cases, the same forces that lead to the

extinction of a language lead to the extinction of its related culture54.

However, as most notably Ireland or the African Diaspora clearly show55, if a group’s sense of

identity is strong enough, then its culture can withstand even the loss of its language(s). A culture may

survive, flourish even, in different linguistic codes. Whether that which evolves is still the same culture is

open to question, and there can be no definitive answers - culture is, in any case, a fluid concept, constantly

changing and open to myriad interpretations. One thing is clear: what has evolved in the shape of

contemporary Irish culture, though no doubt very different from that which would have emerged had the

English language never been introduced into Ireland, is still recognisably Irish and consists of a uniquely

Irish way of life and of looking at the world.

The story of English in Ireland is not then a story of the language and culture of a dominant group

displacing and suffocating the language and culture of a weaker group (as Maracle and many others fear is

51 See Bruner et al. (1962: 11). 52 Quoted in Mark Abley (2003: 178) 53 As any sport fan will know, this quote is particularly apt in the context of Ireland because, partly through the efforts of the Gaelic Athletic Association (set up in the late 19th century), it is one of the few ex-British possessions that continued and developed its own sports: hurling and Gaelic football, even exporting them – Australian rules football being a variant not of soccer or of rugby (as is American Football even) but of Gaelic football. 54 As Brian Maracle (in Abley 2003: 178-9) says in another passage: “Without the language, our ceremonies, songs and dances will cease … the [Mohawk] Confederacy will cease to function … The names themselves will lose their meaning. Without the language, we will lose our traditional way of thinking and our distinctive view of the world.” 55 Why this should be so is certainly an interesting question; being part of a relatively large group that has a strong identity, borne out of centuries of adversity and repression, must certainly be a factor.

happening to Aboriginal languages in North America and Australia). It is rather the story of how an

indigenous language, Irish, withstood a rival and eventually insinuated itself inside that same language

creating a hybrid code that manages to be both recognisably of the English family of languages and still be

a successful vehicle for Irish language and culture56. Unfortunately, it is not a common story, but others

may draw inspiration from it. If there is to be linguistic triumphalism, it is as much on the side of Irish as of

English, ultimately to the benefit of the whole English-speaking world.

Acknowledgement:

I would like to thank my friend and ex-colleague Paul Caffrey of the Department of Education and

Science in Dublin for acting as both native and expert informant for this article, advising on Irish

and Hiberno-English and making many valuable suggestions.

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