If you celebrate St. Patrick's Day with plastic pitchers of green beer and rousing choruses of "Danny Boy" (composed by an English lawyer) and "The Unicorn" (by Shel Silverstein), you may be roaring just about anywhere in the world this week--except in Ireland. And if your friends insist on hollering "top o' the mornin'" and "begosh and begorrah," you can be pretty sure they're not Irish.
The English language as spoken in Ireland (a variety known as Hiberno-English or Irish English) has many distinctive features--none of which should be confused with your friends' Celtic clichés or the Hollywood brogues of Tom Cruise (in Far and Away) and Brad Pitt (in The Devil's Own).
As examined by Markku Filppula in The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style (Routledge, 1999), Irish-English grammar "represents a unique combination of elements drawn from the two principal partners in the contact situation, Irish and English." This grammar is characterized as "conservative" because it has held on to certain traits of the Elizabethan English that helped shape it four centuries ago.
Here are just a few of the characteristics of Irish-English grammar:
- Like Scottish English, Irish English has unmarked plurality in nouns indicating time and measure--"two mile," for instance, and "five year."
- Irish English makes an explicit distinction between singular you/ye and plural youse (also found in other varieties): "So I said to our Jill and Mary: 'Youse wash the dishes.'"
- Another characteristic of Irish English is nominalization, giving a word or phrase a noun-like status that it doesn't generally have, as in "If I had the doing of it again, I'd do it different."
- A direct borrowing from the traditional Irish language (also known as Irish Gaelic or Gaeilge) is the use of after in noun phrases such as "I'm only after my dinner."
- Like Scottish English, Irish English often uses progressive forms of stative verbs ("I was knowing your face").
- Another salient feature is the use of sentence tags initiated by so, as in "It's raining, so it is."
That's just a small sample of the many distinctive features of Irish-English grammar. Discussion of its rich vocabulary (or lexicon) and patterns of pronunciation (phonology) will have to wait until next year's St. Patrick's Day.
Until then, if you're interested in learning about Gaeilge (the historical language of the Irish people, now spoken by only a small minority of the population), visit Michelle Gallen's website, Talk Irish. Marking its first anniversary this week, the award-winning site provides a social network for teachers, speakers and learners of traditional Irish.
Slán go fóill. Goodbye for now.
More Varieties of English:
- Australian English
- Canadian English
- Chicano English
- Chinese English
- Dublin English
- Hinglish
- Philippine English
- Singapore English
Image: The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style, by Markku Filppula (Routledge, 1999)
Comments
Your comments on Hiberno-English vs the Hollywood version are very apposite, and the examples you give eg “after my dinner” (or more likely “I’m only after having my dinner”) are accurate. However, if there are any would-be novelists or scriptwriters out there ready to put such language into the mouth of their characters, beware! Educated Irish people (of whom there are a great many) don’t really speak like that. We do betray our origins in more or less subtle ways, including of course accent, and the occasional “Amn’t I?” as opposed to “Aren’t I?” or “Am I not?” The only way to tune in accurately to Hiberno-English is to come and live here for a while, and not to expect leprechauns under every bush.
BTW, I’m new to this site, and really like it. Well done, and thanks for all the effort. As a country newspaper editor, I appreciate the re-sharpening of my criticial faculties. David Burke
Thanks for your writing, now I, little by little, understand English as a world discourse.
Best regards
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Very Interesting. I never realized there were so many differences with the English language.
I know that people in W. PA have many unusual phrases
and speech patterns. I didn’t realize that most of them
may be Irish. I hear or say 4 out of the 6 examples all the
time. I was brought up short by the two mile phrase. I do that and never thought of it as incorrect! So it is can drive me nuts and as a child I was not allowed to say youse like my friends. Thank you for this interesting post.
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