The Grammar of Irish English

Abstract

Abstract This chapter provides a description of the main distinctive features of Irish English grammar and a discussion on the background of these features. Besides ‘educated’ IrE, attention is paid to rural regional dialects and urban working-class varieties. They display many features which distinguish IrE varieties from other regional or social dialects spoken in the British Isles with respect to their syntactic properties or frequency of use. The main factors behind these differences include, first, conservatism: IrE retains features that have disappeared from other varieties of English. Another factor is contact with other dialects, especially Scottish varieties. A third important factor is contact influences from Irish, the indigenous language of Ireland, which has for centuries exercised ‘substratal’ influence on IrE. The fourth factor is universal features associated with the kind of intense and fairly rapid language shift which took place in Ireland in the course of the nineteenth century.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.