Abstract
Sociolinguistics in Ireland is edited by Irish-English scholar Raymond Hickey, and is a timely collection of contributions from a steadily growing area of research across the island. The volume foregrounds Irish-English and Irish language scholarship from variationist, sociocultural, socio-historical, and corpus perspectives.
The volume is divided into three main sections. Part 1, “Language and Society in Contemporary Ireland,” comprises five chapters which provide an overview of the sociolinguistic context of Ireland in terms of the two official languages: Irish, the lesser spoken but first official language of the country; English, or Irish-English (henceforth IrEng), the second official language and first language of the majority; and the relationship between the two. Chapter 1 by editor R. Hickey provides an overview of the languages found in present-day Ireland, and a review of the developments of varieties of English in Ireland. He traces the shift of the language of the majority from Irish to English, as well as some of the contemporary patterns of IrEng variation and change, such as the supraregionalization of “fashionable” varieties of Dublin English that emanate from the capital. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the status of the Irish language in Irish history. In chapter 2, Brian Ó Catháin delivers an insightful overview of the history of the Irish language in Ireland—here divided into five periods of language shift, from Irish monolingualism to a potential future of societal English monolingualism. Following this overview, Iarfhlaith Watson presents a socio-historical investigation into the language-ideological phases of broadcast media from pre-independence Ireland to the present-day in chapter 3.
Chapter 4, “Irish-English Code-switching: A Sociolinguistic Perspective,” by Siobhán Ní Laoire, reads as a natural progression from the first three single-code oriented chapters. Analyzing naturally occurring speech data as well as transcripts from an Irish language radio soap opera, Ní Laoire investigates the sociolinguistic and socio-stylistic functions of Irish-English code-switching (CS). She finds that avoidance of CS is associated with L2 rather than L1 users of Irish. Following Gardner-Chloros (2009), she argues that rather than CS marking a deficient or corrupted form of Irish, Irish-English CS is “the plurilingual embodiment of techniques that have equivalents in the monolingual sphere” (103). The findings of this study may have significant implications for Irish language education, policy, and maintenance in a country where most Irish speakers learn the language as a compulsory L2 throughout primary and secondary education.
The final chapter in the section is by Anne Barron and Irina Pandarova, who take a variationist-pragmatic approach to IrEng use. Drawing upon the ICE-Ireland corpus (Kallen & Kirk 2008), the authors quantitatively investigate the use of tag questions according to patterns of usage in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and speaker sex. Demonstrating variation according to both social variables, this chapter strongly points to the need for a further investigation into regional and gendered IrEng variation. Although research on a range of features of IrEng has increased in recent years (e.g., Migge & Ní Chiosáin’s 2012 volume), further investigation into gender and IrEng, and indeed language and gender in Ireland more broadly, is essential, given the dearth of research in this area (see, however, Murphy’s 2010 corpus study) and the current dominance of the discursive approach to language and gender, where gender is viewed as negotiated and (re)produced in language and other practices (e.g., Pavlenko & Piller 2001).
Part 2, “Language and Society in Irish History,” comprises chapters 6-11, many of which do not fall within the bounds of traditional sociolinguistic methodologies. However, with the definition of sociolinguistics itself becoming less bounded by disciplinarity (see also Lawson & Sayers 2016), this is to be welcomed, particularly given both historical and present-day Irish language planning efforts. In chapter 6, Patricia Ronan traces the sociocultural status of speakers of Irish and English during the medieval period, and investigates the linguistic outcomes of language contact between the two groups. Using Schneider’s (2003, 2007) dynamic model of language contact, she presents the linguistic outcomes of contact between Gaelic and English settlers in the early Middle Ages—when the English adopted the Gaelic language and customs—and the subsequent reversal of the direction of linguistic accommodation by the English settler elites in the seventeenth century, when the nativization and stabilization of English occurred. Chapters 7 to 9 investigate the history of Irish and Irish-English use and societal attitudes. Liam Mac Mathúna draws upon historical documents to assess the sociolinguistic situation of Ireland between the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, at which point a nascent nationalism facilitated the revival of interest in the promotion and preservation of the Irish language. Regina Uí Chollatáin examines how the Irish language revival process was approached by scholars in the nineteenth century, and how this affected the outcomes of the revival. Although the creation of an “Irish reading public” via Irish-language periodicals was essential to the revivalist movement, she describes how the concerns of first language speakers of Irish were often far removed from the Dublin-centric debates on language policy and language revival. This echoes Ní Laoire’s earlier chapter, where the sociolinguistic reality of L1 Irish users is contrasted with that of L2 users and what is prescribed by Dublin-based institutions.
Similarly, in chapter 9, Tony Crowley argues that the Irish language has been reduced to a cipher for the nationalist cause, “forced to fit the prescriptive mode of identity” (215). He argues this reduction may have, ironically, undermined the use of Irish, as the identity for which it stood did not reflect the realities of daily life in a changing Ireland. The positions adopted by Uí Chollatáin and Crowley reflect the broader scholarly approach to Irish-language policy and planning today, and highlight a disparity between policy and actual language use. Such a disparity, as Tina Hickey and Nancy Stenson later demonstrate in chapter 12, may ultimately give rise to an inability among L2 users to apply Irish-language competencies in reading and writing outside of the assessment environment.
Chapters 10 and 11 mark a shift in the focus of this section from the Irish language to IrEng. Kevin McCafferty presents two variationist studies of IrEng in the historical letters (1750-1940) included in the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence. He traces historical variation and change in IrEng through these letters, most notably will/shall variation, with shall all but unused today. R. Hickey’s second chapter in the volume, “Society, Language and Irish Emigration” presents a survey of the influence of Irish and IrEng on other varieties of English across the world, in regions such as the Caribbean, the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand.
Part 3 of the volume, “Sociolinguistic Interfaces,” presents five chapters based on interview data, media, literature, and linguistic corpora. In chapter 12, T. Hickey and Stenson examine the beliefs of Irish language teachers and teacher educators surrounding the development of literacy in Irish in primary education. As the communicative approach to language teaching became commonplace in the latter half of the twentieth century, the authors argue that a renewed focus on both literacy and teacher education in literacy could help students find enjoyable outlets for using Irish.
Chapters 13 and 14 investigate mediatized and popular representations of IrEng in print and film. Carolina Amador-Moreno investigates IrEng use in the parodic and bestselling Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series of books, written by Paul Howard. She finds that among the features for which enregistered South Dublin English is known, the quotatives go and be + like display gendered as well as first- versus third-person patterns of use. Although she notes that literary representations of dialect can contribute significantly to enregisterment, the response to Howard’s series indicates that the reader already recognizes many aspects of contemporary South Dublin English in the books. In chapter 14, Shane Walshe investigates the use of features of IrEng morphology, syntax, lexis and discourse markers in films from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Comparing his findings to studies of actual language use, he argues that the films reflect and represent language use in Irish society, rather than influencing it.
In chapter 15, Kathleen Shields presents a cultural and linguistic history of translation in Ireland, identifying four major periods in the history of the field, and demonstrating the influence of Catholic ideology and related legislation in post-independence Ireland on translation and availability of translatable texts. The concluding chapter by Elaine Vaughan and Brian Clancy presents a guide to using a corpus approach to sociolinguistics, describing the type of sociolinguistic analyses possible from existing IrEng corpora. Succinctly defining and describing the value of corpora for sociolinguistic research, the authors provide a valuable table charting the corpora available to researchers of IrEng, and sample studies to illustrate the way in which said corpora may be used. This chapter will be particularly beneficial to linguists looking to adopt a corpus-based approach to sociolinguistics and/or IrEng, due to its explanatory outline of theory and method.
Sociolinguistics in Ireland would have benefited from the inclusion of studies that transcend Irish-English and Irish language-focused scholarship, such as those that foreground the island’s linguistic diversity, including the languages of the Irish travelling community (e.g., Reider 2016), the migrant experience (Singleton, Regan & Debaene 2013), as well as studies that centralize gender (Murphy 2010). The organization of the volume into sections according to linguistic sub-field or more precise themes would have also been useful given the range of topics and approaches to language. However, the chapters presented in this volume will be of considerable interest to a range of audiences, including both established and early career researchers of Irish-English and the Irish language, language educators, language policymakers, and graduate students. The IrEng scholarship presented in the volume demonstrates its ever-increasing scope, through both historical and contemporary mediatized language. This volume also points to the need for Irish language users’ perspectives on language use and Irish teaching and learning to ensure its survival.