English in Ireland and Irish in
English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar
of World English1
Thomas Christiansen
1. 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 lan-
1
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.
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.
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Thomas Christiansen
guage 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).
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 AngloNormans, 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
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.
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.
English in Ireland and Irish in English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar of World English
63
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 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:
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”.
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Thomas Christiansen
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.
In section 2 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, 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
10
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiberno-English.
English in Ireland and Irish in English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar of World English
65
the shifting power relations between the various speech communities have been
reflected in the verbal repertoires11 of people in Ireland.
In section 4 we discuss some of the reasons why the varieties of English spoken in Ireland are significant on an international level.
Finally in 5, 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. 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 /D/ and /d/, making thin and tin and then and den nearhomophones; 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),
11
This term from Fishman (1997).
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Thomas Christiansen
the ‘Dáil’ and ‘Seanad’ (the lower house and Senate, respectively), or Gardaí12
(the national 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,
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 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.
English in Ireland and Irish in English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar of World English
67
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 Englishspeakers 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). Among
the more cosmopolitan sections of Irish society – and it should also be remembered that Ireland has the largest 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
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.
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%.
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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).
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
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’”.
English in Ireland and Irish in English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar of World English
69
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. For example, in cleft sentences, the word order reflects that in Irish: “It is after money you are?”
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).
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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. 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 AngloNorman-speaking community in the ‘Pale’ centred on Dublin, the rest of Ireland
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.
English in Ireland and Irish in English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar of World English
71
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 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 Celticspeaking 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
23
See Curtis 1919, cited by Doolan (p. XIII) in his introduction to Joyce (1988).
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.
24
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Thomas Christiansen
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 Pope26.
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 socalled “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 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, the 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
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.
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.
English in Ireland and Irish in English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar of World English
73
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 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
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.
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.
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Thomas Christiansen
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 was). 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
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.
English in Ireland and Irish in English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar of World English
75
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 – 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.
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).
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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, 2002), 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, ‘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). 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
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).
English in Ireland and Irish in English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar of World English
77
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 similarity43. Having said this however, it should be no surprise that there is some recip-
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).
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).
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rocal 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 stan44
45
See Chomsky, 1965.
A bird that the German Scientist found on his travels in South America which, by amazing coin-
English in Ireland and Irish in English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar of World English
79
dard English which, for a brief period, survive as a repository of only selected
items of some lost idiom.
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 mutu-
cidence, could apparently recite phrases of the language of a recently extinct tribe whose remains
he had just previously been collecting.
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 and b.
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Thomas Christiansen
ally 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
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
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).
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, part-
English in Ireland and Irish in English – Hiberno-English as Exemplar of World English
81
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 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.
ly 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: 178-179) 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.
56 In English and Celtic in Contact, Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Paulasto
(Routledge, forthcoming), look in more detail at the influence of the Celtic languages on English.
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