This chapter begins by surveying the linguistic history of Ireland. Although it is situated on the periphery of the British Isles, there is evidence of contact between the island, other regions of Britain and indeed other countries in western Europe for centuries. It explores early and later contacts between the indigenised Celts and more recent colonisers and immigrants, including the Normans, the English, the Scots and twentieth-century settlers from the European Union prior to Brexit. These contacts have created a set of contemporary Irish English varieties that are not only distinctive with respect to other world Englishes but are also differentiated diatopically, ethnically and socially. Two main topics are addressed. The degree to which Irish English from different time frames is structurally similar to other dialects spoken elsewhere is considered alongside evaluating the extent to which contemporary Irish Englishes vary internally and externally with respect to their lexis, phonology, morphosyntax and discourse pragmatics. Some space is also devoted to examining how the study of Irish English has developed and what directions research might take in the twenty-first century in response to new approaches to modelling linguistic contact as well as the availability of larger and more diverse digital datasets.

Geography and linguistic ecology

The subject matter of this book is restricted to varieties of Irish English and Ulster Scots spoken within the territory of Northern Ireland (henceforth, NIE/US). The region is highlighted in Figure 1.1 and was created as a result of the partition of Ireland. This followed the enactment of the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, creating the state of Northern Ireland (NI), which stayed within the territory of Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland (ROI), which eventually became independent (see Dudley Edwards with Hourican 2005: 1–4; www.cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/goi231220.htm). Its geographical extent is confined to six of the historical nine counties of what was once the province of Ulster (Figure 1.2).

The Ulster dialects spoken in the remaining counties, Donegal (in the extreme west), Monaghan (south of Tyrone and Armagh), Cavan (south of both Fermanagh and Monaghan) and Leitrim (south of Fermanagh) are examined in Kallen's companion volume in this series.

Figure 1.1 also demonstrates the proximity between NI and its neighbours on the island of Britain, which is relevant to issues of language contact to be explored in Chapter 5. Of particular interest is the short distance between the north-east coast of NI and the west coast of Scotland. Just 35 km separate the Ards Peninsula from Galloway and the 22 km separating Fair Head from Kintyre mean that permanent and seasonal migration between these places in both directions has always been common (Herity and Eogan 1996: 16–17; Holman 2007: 37–40; Kelly and Young 2004, §6.7;1 Montgomery and Gregg 1997: 569, §6.9; Otway-Ruthven 1968: 224–5; Russell 1995: 9–10).

This volume highlights aspects of language and dialect in Northern Ireland that are in need of further research, especially those that might make suitable projects for student dissertations. It is also intended to be a reference tool for a general readership.

The book evolved from my enduring interest in this topic which started as a childhood game with my sister in which we mimicked different Irish English varieties for the amusement of our parents. Later, I became aware that they used expressions like for to instead of to that our generation did not – though, of course, at the time I had no idea why this might be (see §3.7.4) nor why my uncle from the Republic of Ireland was perceived to have a ‘softer brogue’ than they did (see §1.3). This curiosity was also fuelled by my exposure to other local language attitudes, starting with my mother's enrolling us in elocution lessons where we worked hard to eradicate the distinctive Northern Irish [əᵾ aᵾ, aᵾ] diphthong in MOUTH words (see §2.2.2.5). There was also my grandfather's conviction that my cousins who went to a state school had ‘Protestant accents’ which his Catholic-educated grandchildren did not (see §1.4.3).

This book is designed to provide an accessible overview of research addressing questions like these relating to the distinctive phonological (Chapter 2), morphosyntactic (Chapter 3) and lexical/discourse features (Chapter 4) used in Northern Ireland.

Models of language contact and language shift

Although universal and language-internal processes have operated to create the structural features of NIE/US just described, they were also generated by a combination of external factors unique to this part of the world. Of particular importance is historical contact between populations induced by various migratory processes, including colonisation. Since a language's status is not neutral but is connected with the relative socio-economic and political power of the group that uses it, contact between communities can lead to different results. If two groups have equal status, then bilingualism is generally the outcome, with speak-ers shifting between the two languages effortlessly. Sometimes, a very particular type of bilingualism occurs, originally defined by Ferguson (1959) as ‘diglossia’ in which the languages develop different functions. One of them (termed the H(igh) language) will be favoured in public contexts or ‘domains’ while the other (the L(ow) language) is used privately. This state of affairs can endure and, indeed, more than one H or L variety can be used. Other types of contact can lead to a scenario in which the power differential between the two languages is so great that, pragmatically at least, simply being monolingual in the one which has most status becomes an advantage. This situation generally leads to speakers of the language with the lowest status learning the one with more ‘cultural, economic and social capital’ (Bourdieu 1982).

Introduction

There has been much recent discussion of the extent to which features occurring in English vernaculars are either ‘global’ and thus shared across varieties or ‘local’ and therefore particularised to discrete communities of speakers (Coupland 2003; Filppula et al. 2008). Hence, there have been suggestions that postcolonial varieties of English, like those in the Celtic countries, exhibit so-called ‘Angloversal’ features of morphosyntax on account of the type of L2 acquisition process that created them (Filppula 2006; Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2004). Indeed, there is research which suggests that postcolonial varieties as well as other language contact types like English-based pidgins/creoles also share a set of ‘vernacular universals’ (phonological/morphosyntactic features) with child language and other English dialects that have no recent history of colonisation (Chambers 2003: 242–50). As such, Milroy and Milroy (1993: xiv) remark that ‘a clear distinction cannot always be drawn between localised non-standard constructions and those that have a wide regional distribution’. This global/local dichotomy is addressed here by devoting less space to those features of NIE/US like the levelling of verb forms/default singulars (§3.4) which are vernacular primitives in the sense of Chambers (2003: 242) than to those that appear to be more widespread socially in NIE/US and other Celtic Englishes (and indeed are restricted to them in certain respects). It should be borne in mind, however, as Harris (1984b) first noted in the context of NIE/US, that even global features can be interpreted locally.