The Grammar of Irish English

Language in Hibernian Style

Markku Filppula

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134759958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Irish English, also termed 'Anglo-Irish' or 'Hiberno-English', as in this book, is not usually perceived as having a grammatical system of its own. Markku Filppula here challenges this misconception and offers a descriptive and contact-linguistic account of the grammar of Hiberno-English.
Drawing on a wide range of authentic materials documenting Hiberno-English dialects past and present Filppula examines:
* the most distinctive grammatical features of these dialects
* relationships with earlier and other regional varieties of English
* the continuing influence of the Irish language on Hiberno-English
* similarities between Hiberno-English and other Celtic-influenced varieties of English spoken in Scotland and Wales
The Grammar of Irish English is a comprehensive empirical study which will be an essential reference for scholars of Hiberno-English and of value to all those working in the field of Germanic linguistics.

1
INTRODUCTION

Dialect grammar, here understood in a wide sense as referring to the syntactic, morphosyntactic and also discourse-structural properties of any given dialect, has until quite recently been among the least favoured subjects in dialectological and sociolinguistic studies. In trying to explain ‘why dialectologists have fought shy of syntax’, the late Professor Ossi Ihalainen, one of the pioneers of the study of dialectal English grammar, points out two main reasons for this state of affairs: first, many dialectologists believe that syntactic differences between English dialects are not significant enough to warrant much syntactic analysis; second, research in this area has been held up by the lack of sufficiently large databases (Ihalainen 1988:569). Ihalainen’s article, and indeed, his work on dialectal syntax as a whole, constituted an apt reply to the view expressed some years earlier by another great dialectologist, the late Martyn F.Wakelin, who on one occasion had described dialectal syntax as an ‘unwieldy’ object of study (Wakelin 1977:125). Fortunately, the last few years have witnessed a clear change of attitudes among dialectologists, and this has resulted in a rapid growth of literature on the grammar of regional dialects (see, e.g. Trudgill and Chambers 1991; Milroy and Milroy 1993). This in itself is proof that there are differences between the grammatical systems of English dialects which need to be described and explained. Although there is still a shortage of generally available databases, the development of computer-assisted research techniques has made it possible to build machine-readable corpora, which enable a systematic study of, and comparisons between, considerably larger databases than before.

Among the regional varieties which have become the object of fresh interest are the dialects of English spoken in the Celtic lands, including what will in this study be termed ‘Hiberno-English’, i.e. Irish English (see the discussion on terminology in section 3.5). What makes the study of Hiberno-English (henceforth abbreviated as HE) dialects particularly intriguing is their historical background: they are a product of a unique linguistic situation involving long-standing contact between two languages which, though both members of the Indo-European language family, display typological and structural differences in some central areas of their grammars, including the systems of word order, the article system, the tense and aspect systems, the role of prepositions, and the information structure of the clause. On the other hand, there are significant similarities and structural overlaps even in the mentioned areas. Many of the dissimilarities and similarities are reflected in various ways in the linguistic outcome of the contact, namely HE dialects, which have preserved their distinctive nature up to the present day. First described in any detail at the beginning of this century by scholars such as Mary Hayden and Marcus Hartog (1909), P.W.Joyce (1910/1988), A.van Hamel (1912), and Jeremiah J. Hogan (1927/1970), the grammar of HE passed into near-oblivion as an academic object of study until P.L.Henry’s thorough account of the spoken dialect of North Roscommon (Henry 1957). Another couple of decades passed in silence before a new wave of interest arose from the 1970s onwards along with descriptions of HE grammar by Alan J.Bliss (see e.g. Bliss no date, 1972, 1979, 1984a), Michael V.Barry (e.g. Barry 1981, 1982), and Lesley and James Milroy (e.g. L.Milroy 1980; J.Milroy 1981), who were soon followed by others.

The 1980 seminar on The English Language in Ireland, organised by the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics (IRAAL) in Blackrock, Co. Dublin, marked another important step forward in the study of HE (see TEANGA 2 1981 and Ó Baoill 1985, which contain selections of the papers read at this Seminar). Five years later, it was followed by The First Symposium on Hiberno-English, which was held at Trinity College, Dublin. This Symposium attracted a large number of scholars from various parts of the world, with one of the sections being devoted to syntactic theory and language contact (see Harris, Little, and Singleton 1986 for the papers read at this Symposium). Since then the number of scholars engaging in active research in this field has grown quickly, seminars and symposia have been arranged around the subject, and a constantly growing body of literature exists on various aspects of the grammar of HE approaching it from different theoretical points of view.

However, despite the general rise of interest in HE studies there has been a noticeable lack of descriptive and historical accounts of the grammar of HE dialects and, more specifically, of studies which would be based on authentic materials and would cover a wide range of the distinctive features of HE grammar. It is this gap which the present study seeks to start filling and thus continues the kind of enterprise represented by the grammatical section of Henry (1957). As in that work, the object of study here is the grammar of what can be called traditional HE vernacular, as it is spoken today, but in this study equal weight is given to the historical background of the features investigated. The focus will be on southern as opposed to northern HE dialects, though most of the features at issue are shared by all varieties spoken in Ireland and, indeed, in many cases even by dialects spoken outside Ireland.

The principal database of this study consists of recordings of speech collected from four broadly defined southern HE dialects: the rural (south)western dialects of Counties Clare and Kerry, the eastern dialect of rural Co. Wicklow, and the urban dialect spoken in Dublin City. By comparing dialects which differ especially with regard to their recentness of direct contact with the Irish language I hope to be able to shed light on the often controversial problem of the origins of their distinctive features. The possible influence of Irish has also been a central factor in the choice of the features investigated: this study concentrates on those features which on the basis of the data and also of previous works can be said to be distinctive of, though not necessarily unique to, HE dialects and which, furthermore, have a potential source in the Irish language. Thus, besides being descriptive, this study aims to provide an explanatory account of the distinctive nature of HE grammar in a historical and contactlinguistic perspective. In order to achieve these objectives, various kinds of data representing earlier forms of HE and other varieties of English, including its earlier stages, will be used as points of comparison.

The order of discussion is as follows. Chapter 2 gives an outline of the ‘external’ history of English in Ireland and also provides a brief account of the language contact setting and of the decline of the Irish language. Chapter 3 provides an introduction to some of the most widely debated issues in the study of HE: the distinctiveness of HE vis-à-vis other dialects of English; the kinds of explanation offered in previous works for facts of HE grammar; the dating of the formative period of HE grammar; the degree of homogeneity of HE dialects; and finally, terminological issues. All of these themes will be followed up and discussed in the chapters dealing with particular features of HE grammar. Chapter 4 describes the nature and composition of the databases and explains the methods used in this study. Chapters 5 to 10 are devoted to a detailed discussion of selected features of HE grammar. The order adopted here follows the rather traditional pattern of starting with features associated with the category ‘noun phrase’ (Chapter 5), proceeding thence to various features of the ‘verb phrase’ (Chapter 6), here understood in a very broad sense. Selected aspects of questions, responses, and negation will be discussed in Chapter 7, while Chapters 8, 9, and 10 concentrate on some features of the complex sentence, prepositional usage, and focusing devices, respectively. Finally, Chapter 11 aims to pull the various strands of discussion together and present my conclusions with respect to the general issues raised in the course of this study.

2
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN IRELAND

2.1 The position of English in medieval Ireland

It has become customary to distinguish between two principal stages in the external history of the English language in Ireland: medieval and modern (see, e.g. Hogan 1927/1970; Bliss 1977a, 1979; Kallen 1994). This distinction is a convenient starting-point for our discussion, too, although it does not do full justice to the importance of the nineteenth century as a period which marked a drastic change in the dominance relationships between Irish and English (see the discussion in sections 2.2 and 3.3.3).

The introduction of English into Ireland started with the Norman invasion in 1169. As Bliss (1979:11) points out, this led to the establishment of English and Norman French as vernacular languages spoken in Ireland alongside Irish. Despite the fact that within the next hundred years or so the Normans managed to take over nearly all of the province of Leinster and parts of Munster and Ulster, Norman French began to decline rapidly, and the Norman population soon became gaelicised in their language and customs (Bliss 1979:12). English, which was the language of the tenants of the Norman lords, was at first more fortunate than Norman French, gaining some ground during the thirteenth century, but gradually the pressure of Irish pushed it into a steady decline in the following centuries. According to Hogan’s vivid description of the developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

Irish came down again into the plains and up to the walls of the towns. With the exception of those who carried on the Dublin government, or lived in or near the Pale, the great Norman families, never having been English, now became thoroughly Irish. The English yeomen and small freeholders steadily forsook the land, going to England or the Pale.

(Hogan 1927/1970:23)

That the English language was indeed under growing pressure in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is also shown by the various attempts made by the English rulers to halt the process of gaelicisation. Among these, the Statutes of Kilkenny became particularly well known: originally written in Norman French and passed by a Parliament held in Kilkenny in 1366, these statutes sought to turn the tide by imposing heavy penalties on those who were found using Irish. They, as well as other similar measures, turned out to be of no effect, and Irish continued to encroach upon the position of English not only in rural areas but also in towns, including even Dublin (Bliss 1979:13).

The decline of English was further hastened by the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Bliss (1979:17) points out that the Reformation legislation enacted for Ireland in 1536–7 resulted in a union of the ‘Old English’ settlers and the native Irish against the Protestant, ‘New English’, rulers, and the Irish language thus became the symbol of the Catholic religion. Contemporary evidence has often been cited to demonstrate the dominance of Irish by the mid-sixteenth century. Hogan quotes a report contained in Justice Luttrell’s Book dating from 1537, according to which the decline of English was not restricted to counties outside the Pale. In his description of the situation in County Kildare, not far from Dublin, Justice Luttrell laments the fact that English-speaking husbandmen had been driven out of the county to the extent that

nowe the said countye, whiche was more parte Englyshe, as the countye of Dublyn now is, ther is not one husbondman in effect, that spekeith Englyshe, ne useith any English sort ne maner, and ther gentyllmen be after the same sort.

(Hogan 1927/1970:34)

Other sources cited by Hogan include The Dublin Assembly Rolls of 1657, which state that

There is Irish commonlie and usuallie spoken, and the Irish habitt worne not onelie in the streetes, and by such as live in the countrie and come to this cittie on market dayes, but alsoe by and in severall families in this cittie.

(Hogan 1927/1970:36)

On the basis of these and other similar sixteenth-century or later reports on the decline of English, Hogan concludes that ‘there is probably no exaggeration in the accounts of the decay of English in the country districts, including the Pale’ (1927/1970:36).

In a similar vein, Ó Cuív (1951), Henry (1957), Bliss (1979) and Barry (1982) emphasise the tenuous position of English especially in rural areas by the end of the sixteenth century. Thus, Ó Cuív (1951:14) states that ‘with the exception of a small number in parts of Leinster and in certain urban areas, the people of Ireland were Irish-speaking and Irish-speaking only’. Henry (1957: 16), writing on the same period, speaks of the ‘early’ extinction of English in most rural areas. Bliss (1979:14) refers to the contemporary reports on the session of the parliament held in Dublin in 1541, which he interprets as indicating that, of all the ‘Old English’ lords attending the session, the Earl of Ormond was the only one who had sufficient knowledge of English to understand the Bill proclaiming Henry VIII as King of Ireland. Another testimony cited by Bliss is that given by Lord Chancellor Gerrarde in 1578, according to which ‘all English, and the most part with delight, even in Dublin, speak Irish, and greatly are spotted in manners, habit and conditions with Irish stains’ (Bliss 1979:14).

Bliss’s general conclusion is that ‘[b]y about 1600 the older English [MedHE] survived only in the towns, and in two widely-separated rural areas’ (Bliss 1977a:8). The latter comprised the dialects of ‘Old English’ holding out in the baronies of Forth and Bargy in Co. Wexford, and in the district of Fingal, north of Dublin. In the former area, the old dialect continued to be spoken well into the eighteenth century, and in the barony of Forth, even up until 1850 (for further discussion of these dialects, see Ó Muirithe 1977; Dolan and Ó Muirithe 1978).

Despite the kind of evidence discussed above, there is some disagreement on the general position of English towards the end of the sixteenth century. Kallen (1994:155) notes the tendency of earlier research to place emphasis on those contemporary reports which provide evidence of the near-extinction of ‘Old English’ by the end of the sixteenth century. In contrast to the views underlining the discontinuity between ‘Old English’ and the ‘New English’ introduced by the seventeenth-century plantations, Kallen finds it more plausible to assume that some English continued to be spoken throughout the sixteenth century, hence providing a living link between the medieval and modern strands of HE. According to him, the contemporary reports on the linguistic situation provide enough evidence to show that ‘English was spoken within the Anglo-Irish population, though it may not have been the only language used and may not have corresponded to the contemporary English of England’ (Kallen 1994:155– 6). In further support of his view Kallen cites the studies by Irwin (1935) and Canny (1980), who also argue for a certain degree of continuity between the medieval and early modern phases.

2.2 The rise of modern Hiberno-English dialects and the decline of Irish

Although there are differing views on the question of continuity, it is generally acknowledged that the plantations of the seventeenth century marked an important turning-point in the linguistic history of Ireland (see, e.g. Kallen 1997:14). The latter half of the sixteenth century had already witnessed the plantations of Leix and Offaly under Queen Mary and of Munster under Elizabeth. These were to be followed in 1601 by the defeat of the Irish rebels and their Spanish allies at the battle of Kinsale. Subsequently, the failure of various rebellions in Ulster and the so-called Flight of the Earls in 1607 led to an influx of English and Scottish settlers into the northern parts of Ireland. However, the most influential changes were brought about by the Cromwellian Settlement in the 1650s. In Hogan’s (1927/1970:52) words, this settlement ‘gave the final blow to the old Irish society, reduced the native race to helotry, and established as the Irish nation an alien upper class’. It also gave a strong impulse to the diffusion of the English language. In all provinces except Connacht, the landowners were English-speaking Protestants, and as Bliss (1979: 19) points out, ‘the great houses formed centres where the English language was spoken: tenants and servants alike had to learn some English in order to communicate with their masters’.

It is remarkable that, although the Cromwellian Settlement gave a decisive impetus to ‘New English’, it did not proceed with any notable speed among the mass of the Irish-speaking population until much later. Thus, Ó Cuív (1951: 18) notes that Irish continued to be spoken even in Dublin throughout the seventeenth century and also during the eighteenth century. As one piece of evidence indicating the tenacity of Irish Ó Cuív (1951:18–19) mentions the repeated measures suggested by the authorities for the use of Irish as the most suitable medium of Protestant religious instruction. Hindley (1990:8) writes that the position of Irish stayed so strong throughout the seventeenth century that, apart from the planted parts of Ulster, the descendants of Cromwellian settlers ‘were commonly monoglot Irish by 1700’. As regards the eighteenth century, Ó Cuív refers to some contemporary estimates of the numbers of Irish-speakers, which indicate that in 1731, for example, some two-thirds of the population still used Irish as their everyday means of communication, while as late as 1791 about half of the population were either monoglot Irish or had Irish as their preferred language (Ó Cuív 1951:19). De Fréine (1977:73) gives an essentially similar account of the developments in this period. He writes that the language situation at the end of the eighteenth century was not significantly different from that in the year 1700, while Hindley (1990:8) states that ‘it is unlikely that Irish began to fall into disuse in native homes before about 1750, except in a handful of towns’. On the other hand, there was a clear social division here: as Hindley (1990:8) points out, the gentry were anglicised by 1800 throughout the country, and in most eastern and central areas had no knowledge of Irish.

The above accounts are also supported by the meticulous statistical analyses carried out by Fitzgerald (1984) on the basis of nineteenth-century censuses and especially the 1881 census. Fitzgerald’s study covers the period from c. 1770 to 1870, and by using the data from the age-group tables it seeks to establish the minimum levels of Irish-speaking in successive new generations in different parts of Ireland. His results show that, of those born in the first decade investigated, 1771–81, more than 90 per cent were Irish-speaking in the (south-)western counties of Kerry, Clare, Galway, and Mayo. In Cork, Waterford, and Sligo the percentage of Irish-speakers was over 80, and the 50 per cent mark was also exceeded by varying degrees in the following counties: Kilkenny (57), Louth (57), Limerick (76), Tipperary (51), Leitrim (52), Roscommon (74), and Donegal (56) (Fitzgerald 1984:127). The corresponding figures for the four provinces were of course slightly lower: Leinster 17, Munster 80, Connacht 84, and Ulster 19 per cent, the percentage for all Ireland being 45 (Fitzgerald 1984:127). As Fitzgerald (1984:125) notes, the results provide plenty of evidence for the survival of Irish amongst young people ‘in much the greater part of Ireland’. Where Irish turned out to be weakest was the area between Dublin and Wexford, including also parts of the Midlands. Not surprisingly, the level of Irish-speaking was very low in various parts of the north and north-east, and in mid- and south Antrim, Down and north Armagh there was no sign of the survival of Irish (ibid.).

Despite the continued dominance of Irish in the eighteenth century, it is evident that bilingualism spread steadily throughout this period. As Hindley (1990:11) points out, the ‘general setting’ of eighteenth-century Ireland favoured the adoption of English, but at first only as a second language; it was not until the following century that this policy of bilingualism was abandoned and a large-scale language shift got under way. The numbers of bilinguals in different periods cannot be estimated very exactly, but Hindley (1990), relying on the account given by Dr Whitley Stokes in 1799, arrives at the figure of 1,600,000 bilinguals at that date out of an estimated population of 5.4 million, i.e. some 30 per cent (Hindley 1990:15; see also Ó Cuív 1951:19, who uses the same source but estimates the total population to have been only 4.75 million at this period). According to Stokes’s account, the number of monoglot Irishspeakers in 1799 was some 800,000, which was about 15 per cent of the total population (Hindley 1990:15). De Fréine (1977:80) places the number of the monoglot Irish around 1800 at a considerably higher level, namely at some 2 million, while his estimate of the number of bilinguals is 1.5 million.

Leaving the possible inaccuracies in the statistics aside, it is no exaggeration to say that the first half of the nineteenth century turned the scales in favour of English. This becomes clear, for instance, from the returns of the first official census of 1851. The number of Irish-speakers was now estimated at about 1.5 million or 23 per cent of the total population, which by this date had increased by more than a million and amounted to just over 6.5 million (Hindley 1990: 15). A significant change had also taken place in the number of monoglot Irish-speakers, which by 1851 had dropped to slightly over 300,000 (or some 5 per cent) from the 800,000 (or two million, as de Fréine writes) in 1799. The 1851 census has been criticised for under-representing the numbers of Irish-speakers (see, e.g. de Fréine 1977:80–1; Kallen 1994:162), but as de Fréine (1977:81) aptly remarks, ‘[t]hey [the census data] may not show how far the people had travelled on the road to anglicisation, but they pointed unmistakeably in the direction they were going’. The overall trend is perhaps most reliably demonstrated by Fitzgerald’s (1984) statistics on the developments from 1771 to 1871. According to them, the Irish-speaking proportion of four decennial cohorts first declined only slightly, dropping ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The English language in Ireland
• 3 Major issues inthe study of Hiberno-English
• 4 Databases and methods
• 5 The noun phrase
• 6 The verb phrase
• 7 Questions, responses, and negation
• 8 The complex sentence
• 9 Prepositional usage
• 10 Focusing devices
• 11 Discussion and conclusions
• Appendix 1 A description of the Hiberno-English informants
• Appendix 2 Specimen texts
• Appendix 3 Details of the manuscript sources
• Notes
• Bibliography