Vocabulary. · There are several Welsh loan-words, such as eisteddfod (a type of arts festival), Duw (God, as in exclamations)

· There are several Welsh loan-words, such as eisteddfod (a type of arts festival), Duw (God, as in exclamations), def (dear, as a term of endearment) and nain and taid (grandma, grandpa).

Case study 7: Hiberno-English

T here is as yet little sign of a regionally distinctive educated standard in Ireland; but there are many cases of words, idioms, and grammatical patterns in informal non-standard speech, which are characteristic of the dialects of the area, and which are reflected in a strong regional literature. From a linguistic point of view, Irish English in all its variation is widely referred to as Hiberno-English. As with other English-speaking varieties, Hiberno-English is by no means homogeneous. A major boundary can be drawn, first of all, between the dialects spoken in the southern two-thirds of the island and those spoken further north, in the former province of Ulster (where among other dialects there is Ulster Scots or Scotch-Irish in the north-east and Mid-Ulster or Ulster Anglo-Irish in other parts of Ulster). Rural dialects, especially those in the west, display a highly conservative character, much influenced by the speech forms of Gaelic. Urban dialects, especially those of Dublin and Belfast, are more heavily influenced by English, and display many of the nonstandard forms found in the urban dialects of Great Britain. And throughout the country there is an educated variety of Hiberno-English, containing relatively few regional forms – though enough to make such speech ‘sound Irish’ to outsiders (e.g. taoiseach ['ti:ʃəx] ‘prime minister’).

Pronunciation

· Words such as tea and key tend to be pronounced with [e:] instead of RP [i:] as reflected in such literary spellings as tay, Paycock.

· RP [ɔi] is often prohounced [ai], especially in the south: as suggested by the literary spelling jine for join.

· Thereare several differences from RP in open vowels: in particular, words like path and calm often have a long front [a:], with a long back [ɑ:] used in saw and talk.

· [r] after vowels is kept in such words as car and purse.

· [t] and [d] are usually dental (alveolar in RP) and the RP th fricatives [ð,ɵ] appear as plosives (thanks [ṱaŋks] and this [ḓis]); some pairs of words (e.g. thin and tin) may therefore sound the same.

· [l] is always clear in such words as full and field

· Some consonant clusters have been influenced by the Gaelic sound system: for example, [s] may become [ʃ] before [t,n,l] as in stop [ʃtop].

· A noticeable feature of many Hiberno-English accents is the way the chief stress in a polysyllabic word is often different from its location in RP. Stress patterns seem to be more flexible than in RP, especially in the south, and there is considerable variation, but a few general tendencies have been noted. In polysyllabic nouns, a syllable followed by a consonant cluster tends to attract the stress: al geb ra, archi tec ture, cha rac ter, orc hes tra, dis cip line.