#irishenglish — Public Fediverse posts

Reconstructed 17th century English sounds a lot like Irish English. So why is Irish English so phonetically conservative? When English was brought to Ireland, Irish already distinguished vowels before /r/ and palatal /k/ and /g/ before front vowels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRZiUQv4F0E

#EarlyModernEnglish #LanguageEvolution #IrishEnglish #phonology #linguistics

Fun to see the Irish idiom "make a hames of" in a national news headline: https://www.rte.ie/news/2026/0417/1568809-odonovan-protests/

I wrote about the expression in 2012: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/making-a-hames-of-it/

#language #IrishEnglish #dialect #idioms #phrases #words #blogpost

"Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy."

—Eavan Boland, on using the word "amn't" in a London school at the age of 6 or 7

#language #IrishEnglish #dialect #poetry

Eavan Boland and the emergence of a poetic self

I picked up Object Lessons (1995) by Eavan Boland (1944–2020) thinking it was a memoir, but it’s more focused than that: a meditation on the emergence of her identity as a poet, specifically a woman poet and an Irish poet.

This identity is further complicated by her emigration from Ireland as a five-year-old girl when her father, a diplomat, took up work in London in the mid-20th century:

Hardly anything else that happened to me as a child was as important as this: that I left one country and came to another. That an ordinary displacement made an extraordinary distance between the word place and the word mine.

In England, everyday words reinforced her sense of difference and lack: ‘They [the other children at school] could say “orchard” instead of “garden” with the offhand grace imparted by nine-tenths of the law. I could not.’ But it would be an Irish English word that crystallized her alienation:

The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom at school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”

Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.

This account elaborates on Boland’s description of the incident in her poem ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’, which I excerpted in a 2014 post about the Irish use of amn’t.

In her mid-teens Boland returned to live in Ireland and began to explore the inchoate sense of Irishness from which she felt semi-estranged:

Language. At first this was what I lacked. Not just the historic speech of my country. I lacked that too, but so did others. This was a deeper loss; I returned to find that my vocabulary of belonging was missing. The street names, the meeting places—it was not just that I did not know them. It was something more. I had never known them. I had lost not only a place but the past that goes with it and, with it, the clues from which to construct a present self.

I had to learn a new sensory idiom. A fog in the mouth, for example, which was different from the London one: less gritty, with more of an ocean aftertaste. An unkempt greenness on the streets. A drizzle which was interseasonal, constant. Different trees. Different birds.

Nurturing this idiom, she found, years later, that ‘language can reclaim location’, a beautifully concise expression of this insight.

It was not just Irish English with which Boland familiarized herself. In her final year in school she was struggling with Latin, resentful of its difficulty. Then came a turning point:

It was something about the economy of it all: the way the ablative absolute gathered and compressed time. One day, again figuratively, it was a burdensome piece of grammar. The next, with hardly any warning, it was a messenger with quick heels and a bright face. I hardly knew what had happened. I began to respect, however grudgingly, the systems of a language which could make such constructs that, although I had no such words for it, they stood against the disorders of love or history. They had left the mouth of the centurion and entered the mind of a Sicilian farm worker. They had forged alliances and named stars. And at that point of my adolescence, where the words I wrote on a page were nothing but inexact, the precision and force of these constructs began to seem both moving and healing.

As Boland developed her poetic ability and her confidence in its effect, she found herself entering a heavily male tradition. There were pivotal encounters with avatars of that tradition: with Padraic Colum at an elevator; with Patrick Kavanagh in a café in Dublin (his style of speech ‘shy and apocalyptic’).

But the constraints of history and structural intransigence pressed tight:

Gradually the anomaly of my poetic existence was clear to me. By luck, or its absence, I had been born in a country where and at a time when the word woman and the word poet inhabited two separate kingdoms of experience and expression. I could not, it seemed, live in both. As the author of poems I was an equal partner in Irish poetry. As a woman—about to set out on the life which was the passive object of many of those poems—I had no voice. It had been silenced, ironically enough, by the very powers of language I aspired to and honored.

Object Lessons abounds in eloquent, carefully honed ideas about womanhood and nationhood and the complications of a poetic self at their intersections. For this post I’ve selected just a few language-themed passages; if they appeal to you, you’ll enjoy Boland’s book.

Saw this sentence with both the Irish English "give out" and a standardized-English "give out":

"The banks often give out¹ that the rules are too tight and they can’t give out² the money people need."

¹ complain
² issue, distribute

Source and commentary: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/giving-out-irish-style/

#language #dialect #idioms #IrishEnglish #EnglishUsage #phrases

Saw some excited reaction videos lately to a clip of an Irish politician sounding Caribbean. This is a good analysis of what's going on, by Nadine White:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/04/viral-speech-ireland-thomas-gould-colonial-history-caribbean-english

Paywall workaround:
https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/04/viral-speech-ireland-thomas-gould-colonial-history-caribbean-english

#language #linguistics #colonialism #IrishEnglish #accents #Caribbean #HistoricalLinguistics #Mastodaoine

On the peculiarly Irish use of "grand", from Garrett's Carr's novel The Boy from the Sea

More on that usage here: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/a-grand-irish-usage/

#books #IrishBooks #reading #GarrettCarr #words #grand #EnglishUsage #Ireland #IrishEnglish

"Agin" = "against" is a feature of colloquial Irish English. Hence the joke "He who is not for us is a Guinness" ["agin us"], and the dialect word "aginner": one who opposes or begrudges something

#dialect #words #IrishEnglish #HibernoEnglish #language #puns

Tickled by a comment on this post about two dialect words that shows Julie Andrews, in Mary Poppins, mispronouncing "stravaging" the same way I did:
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2020/01/29/are-you-codding-me-with-all-this-stravaging/

#language #dialect #etymology #slang #words #IrishEnglish

I asked the writer, who said the quote was accurate and that my instincts were right: the child's parents were from Donegal! So with her assent I added a phrase to indicate dialect, for readers' benefit, and avoided "[sic]".

Further reading, for the curious, on "be's" and related idioms in Irish English https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/do-be-doing-bes-habitual-aspect-in-irish-english/

and on what Jessica Mitford called the "pedantic, censorious quality" of "[sic]" https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/the-pedantic-censorious-quality-of-sic/ [2/2]

#copyediting #dialect #IrishEnglish #sic #acwri #editing

"Scone": rhymes with bone, or with gone? I left a couple of comments. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=65494

I once used the pronunciation of "scone" to illustrate a linguistic isogloss in my essay on Irish English dialect: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/wasn-t-it-herself-told-me-which-bit-of-ireland-would-that-phrase-be-from-1.4434174

#language #dialect #phonetics #linguistics #Ireland #IrishEnglish #geography #accents #scone

Always wondered if the Irish phrase "make a hames of" (="make a mess of") came directly from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Found support for that origin in Tom Phelan's memoir, and updated this old post:

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/making-a-hames-of-it/

#language #etymology #idioms #words #IrishEnglish #HibernoEnglish

I'm copy-editing a nonfiction book by an Irish writer and added a note of explanation after its use of "minerals" to mean "soft drinks, esp. soda pop"

So I'm curious: Are you familiar with the usage "mineral" = "soft drink, soda pop"?

#language #words #Mastodaoine #Ireland #dialect #IrishEnglish #editing #copyediting

The latest @grammargirl podcast discusses the origins of language, and at the 8-minute mark has a bit on calques in Irish English, citing my post on the "after perfect":

https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/bow-wow-theory-yOpLYBZi
#language #dialect #grammar #linguistics #IrishEnglish #podcast

Banjaxed and bockety – a new post on two much-loved Irish words:

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2024/03/15/banjaxed-and-bockety-words-in-ireland/

#words #language #etymology #slang #Irish #IrishEnglish #dialect

Saw a nice example of habitual "be's" in Irish English, in Pat McCabe's novel The Stray Sod Country:

"Och sure you know Balla, she had replied, there never be's much stir round there, about anything."

#dialect #language #IrishEnglish #grammar

Expressing habitual aspect in Irish English with 'do be', 'be's', etc.:

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/do-be-doing-bes-habitual-aspect-in-irish-english/

h/t @Gina

#dialect #language #IrishEnglish #grammar #linguistics #Mastodaoine

Well, this is no fun 💁🏼‍♂️🙄 #Craic #Ireland #IrishEnglish

A note on time in Irish English, from my essay on the dialect:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/wasn-t-it-herself-told-me-which-bit-of-ireland-would-that-phrase-be-from-1.4434174

#language #dialect #IrishEnglish #Ireland #time #linguistics #Mastodaoine

Week 45, 2023: What @[email protected] album languages grew the most this week?

The craic approaches ninety as the Irish rise to the top yet again. 🥇🇮🇪🎉

📊 #Wikidata 🎶🎵 #ExMusica @[email protected] #HibernoEnglish #IrishEnglish #Hibs

what do ye think about this? https://youtu.be/u9Gp3beVDvU?si=4bpIOai7pfIRuUN3 #Ireland #IrishEnglish

Talking with someone from Poland today, I was delighted to hear them use the extremely Irish word "amn't"

My old post on it: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/amnt-i-glad-we-use-amnt-in-ireland/

#language #dialect #etymology #words #Ireland #grammar #IrishEnglish

Edited an article with the text "a HR meeting" and left the "a" intact. In Irish English the name of the letter H is aspirated: "haitch" rather than "aitch".

This is deeply controversial in some quarters, as I reported here: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/an-aitch-or-a-haitch-lets-ear-it/

#language #linguistics #phonetics #speech #sociolinguistics #IrishEnglish #dialect #editing #haitch

Interesting piece on developing Irish Alexa via 'voice disentanglement', though some details seem off: I've seldom if ever heard anyone say 'bath' like 'bat' or 'bad', and the 'r' sound in Irish English is not 'overpronounced' – it's just pronounced, unlike in non-rhotic accents

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/technology/amazon-alexa-irish.html/ #language #linguistics #accent #Alexa #IrishEnglish #dialect #speech #generativeAI #Amazon

A few thoughts on Americanisms in Irish English, and the tricky case of 'mom':
https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2023/05/21/mom-vs-mam-and-americanisms-in-irish-english/

#language #dialect #linguistics #IrishEnglish #Mastodaoine #Americanisms

Article on the rise of 'mom' and other Americanisms in Irish English (with a few quotes from me): https://archive.ph/sa55d

#language #dialect #linguistics #IrishEnglish #Ireland #Mastodaoine #Americanisms

Two related posts of mine: on folk etymology as a linguistic phenomenon: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/folk-etymology-from-hiccup-to-hiccough/

and on the Irish word "plámás", roughly equivalent to "curry favour": https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/plamas/
#language #etymology #IrishEnglish #words