The Irish English Resource Centre is a website developed and maintained by Raymond Hickey, Professor in Linguistics at the University of Duisburg and Essen, a renowned expert on the variety of English spoken in Ireland. The website aims to ‘make material on the historical and regional diversity of Irish English, in the north and south of the country, and information on the sociolinguistics of present-day varieties, available to the interested public’. The contents are divided into twelve sections, which can be accessed in different ways: (i) Introduction, (ii) Levels, (iii) Urban varieties, (iv) Ulster, (v) Surveys and data, (vi) Transportation, (vii) Wider context, (viii) Search, (ix) Links, (x) Research, (xi) References, and (xii) Maps.
The introductory section provides general information on the Irish English variety, including a list of linguistic and geographical terms, dialect divisions in present-day Ireland, a concise historical overview of Irish English, a discussion of common misconceptions about Irish English, and a section on features of Irish English which might be of interest to linguists working on other Englishes.
In ‘Levels’, Hickey provides background information about Ireland alongside a concise discussion of historical periods in Irish English. What follows is a succinct overview of some of the phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical features of present-day Irish English.
The section on ‘Urban varieties’ reports on some of the work on the variety of English in Belfast, Derry and Dublin English. The discussion of Belfast English draws primarily on the work by the Milroys in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Milroy, Reference Milroy1976; Milroy, Reference Milroy1981), and the account of Derry English relies heavily on the research by e.g. McCafferty (Reference McCafferty2000). The more detailed section on Dublin English provides a summary of Hickey's (Reference Hickey2005) book on this variety.
Next, ‘Ulster’ concentrates on the English spoken in Ulster, for which four different types are distinguished: (i) Ulster Scots, (ii) Mid-Ulster English, (iii) South Ulster English, and (iv) Contact English. The section consists largely of an extensive reference list of previous work on language and culture in this province, complemented with a brief discussion of Ulster Scots.
In ‘Surveys and data’, Hickey offers an overview of data compiled to date on Irish English. The majority of collections were compiled and published by Hickey, such as his monograph on Irish English (Hickey, Reference Hickey2007), A Sound Atlas of Irish English (Hickey, Reference Hickey2004), and A Corpus of Irish English (Hickey, Reference Hickey and Hickey2003). Here he also discusses the Tape Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech, a project co-ordinated by Michael Barry at Queen's University Belfast, of which the data are also included in Hickey (Reference Hickey2004). This section also provides a concise overview of other corpora and data sources accessible to the academic community and a list of online sources for other varieties of English.
The section on ‘Transportation’ deals, as the name indicates, with the transportation of Irish English to other parts of Britain, North America, the Caribbean and the Southern Hemisphere. Hickey critically discusses the hypothesis that Irish English has had an influence on overseas varieties of English and claims that there are three possible sources of features which might have been transported from Ireland in these varieties: (i) Irish English input only, (ii) Irish English input/other input (dialects of English or substrate language at overseas location), and (iii) independent developments.
In the section ‘Wider context’, the author evaluates Irish English in relation to Celtic and Irish. The section starts with a list of key dates in Irish history, followed by an historical overview of the different periods of the Irish language. There is also a subsection that pays attention to a possible substratum influence of Celtic on Old English, followed by a discussion of dialect divisions of Modern Irish and a collection of sound files for Modern Irish.
The next section, ‘Research’, offers a detailed overview of previous research on Irish English. The section is divided into research background, recent trends in research, Ireland as a linguistic area and biographical notes about some of the main scholars in the field of Irish English.
The final sections gather together the references and maps from the previous discussions.
Evaluation
The contents of this website are an invaluable resource for those wishing to acquaint themselves with the study of Irish English. The website showcases the excellent research carried out by the author and, in addition, Hickey also offers a very comprehensive overview of previous research on this variety of English. The most beneficial tools in my view are the reference lists at the end of each section, which direct the user to further research, and the links to PDF files of some of the author's own work, both published and unpublished.
The website includes numerous maps, with details that help visualise the history of Ireland, and the development and status of Irish English as discussed on the website. In addition, the author has generously made available a large collection of sound files which illustrate the different varieties of English and Irish found in Ireland.
From a critical point of view, it feels as if the features that online sites offer have not been fully exploited. One of the main characteristics which differentiates websites from print media is the use of anchors and hyperlinks. Although there is an excellent reference list at the end of each section, it would have been useful to have anchors and hyperlinks to indicate to users which of the many references deals with a particular item of interest. Similarly, the large collection of sound files are not always referred to in the text, and when they are it would be useful if a hyperlink to the relevant file were provided. A third point concerns the maps: some of the maps were created by the author for this website, but for those which were not, it would be useful to have references available – for example, the early map titled Ireland about 1500 can be found in Bagwell (Reference Bagwell1885), but no mention of this work is made on the website.
As the website clearly aims to provide an introductory reading to the study of Irish English, it is to be expected that many of the discussions are conflated and simplified. However, this is not always clear in the text, and as a result there are a couple of confused accounts. For example, features such as second person plural pronouns, negative concord, lack of negative attraction, the Northern Subject rule, copula deletion, positive anymore and double modals are all discussed under the heading Input to overseas varieties, which suggests that these features were transported from Irish English to other varieties of English. However, as the author acknowledges in his section on ‘Transportation’, there are very few features which can be ascribed to Irish English influence with certainty, and the only example from the above list that Hickey mentions here is positive anymore, suggesting that the other features cannot be irrefutably attributed to Irish English. Another area that could be improved is the account of historical varieties of Irish English – in particular, Medieval Irish English could have been expanded to include a brief discussion of the levels of language.
To sum up, the Irish English Resource Centre is an excellent resource, with an extensive summary of scholarly work on the English language in Ireland. In my opinion, it is a highly recommended starting point for any scholarly investigation into present-day Irish English.
MARIJE VAN HATTUM lectures in the history and development of English, sociohistorical linguistics and corpus linguistics at Liverpool Hope University. She completed her PhD on the historical development of modal verbs in Irish English in 2012 at the University of Manchester. Her main research interests are extraterritorial varieties of English (especially Irish English), language variation and change in (the history of) English, and corpus linguistics. Email: vanhatm@hope.ac.uk
