This book sets out to provide a comprehensive account of the history and linguistic characteristics of the Irish dialects of English. It is, indeed, by far the most extensive and detailed survey that has been done on these dialects so far. As such, it continues the still rather short line of previous book-length studies, such as Hogan (Reference Hogan1927/1970), P. L. Henry (Reference Henry1957), Kallen (Reference Kallen and Burchfield1994), A. Henry (Reference Henry1995), Moylan (Reference Moylan1996), Filppula (Reference Filppula1999), McCafferty (Reference McCafferty2001) and Corrigan (Reference Corrigan2008). All of these are, however, much narrower in scope than Ray Hickey's (RH) present volume, which approaches its subject from a wide range of both diachronic and synchronic perspectives.

The book is organised into six large chapters. In chapter 1 (‘Introduction’) RH starts off by describing the aims of his book; then he moves on to some problems of terminology, discusses the question of the identity of Irish English (IrE) and, finally, the attitudes of Irish people towards their varieties of English. One of his aims is coverage of several ‘transported’ varieties to a greater extent than in previous research. Similarly, Dublin English gets a special treatment as the ‘lead variety’ setting the linguistic trends amongst varieties of IrE. As regards terminology and especially the terms used for the Irish dialect(s) of English (pp. 3ff.), RH makes his stand very clear: ‘Irish English’ is for him the most neutral, and hence most appropriate term, whereas ‘Anglo-Irish’ or ‘Hiberno-English’ fall short of the target for different reasons. The former suffers from too many other uses besides the linguistic one, whereas the latter is in RH's view ‘too technical’ (p. 5). While I myself consider RH's objections to ‘Anglo-Irish’ to be well-founded, I do not see any particular harm in using ‘Hiberno-English’ as an optional term alongside ‘Irish English’ in the linguistic sense. That said, it is true that the majority of linguists today tend towards using ‘Irish English’, which will most likely establish itself as the primary term at the expense of the others. Before moving on to other matters, one should mention RH's useful discussion of various other terms to refer to the Irish varieties of English, including those commonly labelled as ‘Stage-Irish’. In the section on the identity of IrE, RH brings into the discussion something that he terms the ‘supraregional variety’ (of IrE) (p. 13). However, the nature and status of this variety is not defined or documented in this context; rather, it is posited by the author as something underlining the unity of southern IrE (he does, though, refer to an earlier work by himself on this). A more detailed discussion of supraregional IrE only follows a little later (p. 21), where RH defines it as the form of English used by educated Irish people but at the same time as something which is not generally recognised as such. According to RH, this explains why there is no popularly known name for IrE, such as Cockney, Scouse or Geordie (pp. 22–3). The same topic is resumed in chapter 5, which has a special section (5.3) devoted to supraregional IrE. The introductory chapter then ends with an interesting discussion of possible future developments of IrE. RH rightly points out the important role of the greatly increased immigration into Ireland in the last couple of decades and notes that this will most probably lead to the emergence of new varieties of IrE, e.g. that spoken by the numerically large Polish population in Ireland.

The next two chapters are devoted to the ‘external’ and linguistic history of IrE dialects. Chapter 2 (‘The coming of the English’) takes as its starting point the early twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invasions (as do, indeed, most other writers on this subject) and presents a detailed account of the spread of the English language in Ireland over the next few centuries following the first invasions and up until the period of the most intense language shift in the nineteenth century. All in all, RH manages to give a very informative account of the external and linguistic developments in late medieval Ireland. In many places, however, RH's style of referencing (most of the sources are placed in brackets at the ends of sentences) makes it hard for the reader to identify the exact sources of some of the statements which are presented as historical facts. Sometimes, no sources are mentioned at all or the page numbers are missing even in the case of specific facts or claims which in normal practice would require them.

Chapter 3, then, deals with the settlement of Ulster and the emergence of Scots-influenced varieties in the north of Ireland. The significance of these to the subsequent development of Ireland has been a topic of many debates. RH rightly notes here the influence that the social background of some of the historians writing on the settlements has had on their views (see, especially, p. 89 and the references there). Indeed, in assessments of the positive or negative effects of plantations, a great deal seems to depend on the religious background of the writer. The section on Ulster Scots (U-S) is of particular interest as this term also has other than linguistic underpinnings. RH himself takes a realistic view of the linguistic status of U-S as a variety, evidently endorsing the commonly held view among linguists that U-S is basically a dialect rather than a language in its own right, despite its recognition as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The discussion here could, indeed, be even more critical, e.g. when discussing the numbers of U-S speakers today (p. 99). To anyone familiar with the linguistic scene in present-day Northern Ireland, it should be clear that it would be impossible to find a valid set of criteria for distinguishing putative U-S speakers from those speaking other Ulster English dialects. Against this background, the estimate of some 100,000 U-S speakers offered by Montgomery & Gregg (Reference Montgomery, Gregg and Jones1997), and mentioned by RH as a possible guideline for ‘general orientation’ (p. 99), is unwarranted. By way of contrast, when explaining his own stand on the issue of the ‘languageness’ of U-S (p. 101), RH states that ‘language’ is too strong a term for U-S, while ‘variety’ does not do justice to the distinctive character of the dialect. Somewhat paradoxically, RH also mentions his own observation according to which not a single person interviewed by him identified him/herself as a speaker of U-S (p. 102). On p. 112 again RH writes that ‘[t]he present-day relationship of Ulster Scots to Ulster English is a cline from conservative rural to non-local urban speech’. The same can be said of the relationship between Ulster English and southern IrE dialects: all in all, we are here dealing with a dialect continuum from more Scots to less Scots influence the further south one goes (cf. Harris Reference Harris and Trudgill1984: 115–16).

Chapters 4 and 5, which focus on ‘The emergence of Irish English’ and ‘Present-day Irish English’, respectively, will no doubt be the most interesting to the linguistically minded who wish to find out about the distinctive features of IrE grammar and phonology (in this order), how these features have come about, and how they can be explained. RH's method is in the main empirical and corpus-based but he also uses his native-speaker intuitions and informal observations on IrE usages. The databases used by RH range from historical texts to collections of private letters and other similar texts from previous centuries, corpora representing present-day speech, as well as notes taken by the author while interviewing speakers. On the basis of RH's description of his database it seems that few, if any, of what are here called ‘recordings’ are in fact audio recordings. For example, the set of data labelled by him as ‘Dublin English recordings’ is in the form of handwritten notes. As his reason for not using a tape recorder RH is content to mention that ‘permission to tape record was not sought from the informants’ (p. 165). The same appears to be the case with another set of data, called ‘A collection of contact English’. Here, too, RH writes that ‘no mention of making a tape recording was ever made. Instead, the author took notes of the features of interest which occurred during the sessions’ (p. 162). Anybody with even the slightest experience from linguistic fieldwork knows the sensitivities involved in trying to bring a tape recorder into a supposedly informal interview situation, which is why it is easy to understand and accept RH's choice of method. The downside of handwritten notes is of course possible lack of accuracy and non-repeatability of the potentially interesting features, and hence possible errors of interpretation. To obviate these difficulties and to complement the other sources, RH also carried out a questionnaire survey, named by him as ‘A Survey of Irish English Usage’. The purpose of this was to document Irish people's views on the acceptability of a number of syntactic structures (57 in all), which included some of the features most commonly associated with IrE in the literature. Informants were asked to grade the example sentences along a three-point scale as being either ‘no problem’, ‘a bit strange’, or ‘unacceptable’. As the number of returned and usable questionnaires amounted to about 1,000, the results do indeed shed new light on the geographical distribution of some of the IrE features.

Chapter 4 begins with a description of the language shift situation in Ireland. There is some amount of overlap between this section and chapter 2, e.g. with respect to the causes of language shift (the Great Famine, emigration, etc.). As regards the linguistic outcomes of the shift, RH endorses Thomason's (Reference Thomason2001: 79) view, according to which the numerical strength of Irish-speakers relative to the English is a major factor explaining the considerable amount of transfer features in IrE (p. 123 fn. and again p. 126). He also refers here to Winford (Reference Winford2003), who assigns bilingual children a special role in the regularisation of Irish English grammar. This is, indeed, an important point which has perhaps not been underlined enough in previous research. Generally, RH follows Thomason's model of contact-induced change, e.g. in outlining the types of contact that are relevant to the Irish setting. He also stresses the ‘unguided’ nature of the transmission of English in the Irish context; that is, Irish speakers learning English picked it up not through formal instruction in schools but from their compatriots. Here RH's view concurs with that of Alan Bliss, one of the pioneers of IrE studies. Bliss was, indeed, one of the first to stress this (see e.g. Bliss Reference Bliss and Muirithe1977: 16–17), and since his view has now become standard wisdom in the field and was later documented statistically by Odlin (Reference Odlin1997), one would have liked to see the work of these two scholars acknowledged by RH in this connection. In any case, RH also discusses in this section other useful concepts which can be used to explain the nature of IrE as a contact variety. These include, most notably, ‘search for categorial equivalence’, ‘under-differentiation’ (or ‘neglect of distinctions’), ‘overrepresentation’, and ‘structural match’, all of which are familiar in some form or another from contact-linguistic literature (pp. 134ff.).

RH's description of the grammar of Irish English shows that he is, generally speaking, sympathetic to Irish substratal influence, which, as he demonstrates with examples, is possible even in those cases where an earlier English parallel exists. One complex case discussed by RH is the so-called for to infinitive, which has a semantic equivalent in the Irish chun ‘in order to’ structures (pp. 187f.), which could have provided the model for the IrE structures. In this case, as RH notes, the geographical distribution of acceptance rates indicates that it is actually more favoured in the north and the east, which suggests a superstratal northern dialectal, rather than substratal, origin for this feature. RH does not consider – or rather, his database does not allow it – the possible social distinctions in the use of for to infinitives. My own data from Dublin would seem to indicate that this is a predominantly working-class speech feature. By comparison, the 1-million-word ICE Ireland corpus has only three or four clear instances of for to + infinitives, which suffices to show that this feature is virtually non-existent in educated IrE.

Another interesting geographical division emerges with respect to omission of to before the infinitive with allow, help and come. For the first mentioned verb, RH's Survey reveals a clear south–north demarcation, with the south in the lead (pp. 189–90). By contrast, use of a past participle after need turns out to be a uniquely northern feature (p. 190). This has been noted in previous works as well (see e.g. Harris Reference Harris, Milroy and Milroy1993), but RH's Survey data serve a useful purpose here in giving a rough estimate of its frequency of use in these dialects. Another allegedly northern (and Scottish) feature is ‘double modals’, which however turned out to be completely absent from RH's data, suggesting that this feature is no longer productive in northern IrE (p. 191).

Unsurprisingly, the section on tense and aspect (4.4.1.4) occupies a central place in RH's description of IrE grammar, just as it does in works by other authors. A motley terminology has developed over the years to describe the specific features of IrE grammar in this area, and those used for different types of ‘perfects’ are no exception to this. RH seeks to clarify the issues involved with this category by defining ‘perfect’ as something that refers to tense, whereas ‘perfective’ for him pertains to aspect (p. 194). He hastens to add that even this distinction ‘is often blurred and authors tend to vary in their definitions of these terms’ (p. 194). In what follows, RH combines in an interesting way some of the terms used by previous writers on the subject (including the present writer) and some that he introduces himself, e.g. the term ‘immediate perfective’, denoting what has generally come to be known as the after perfect (as in He's after having a lot of setbacks, cited by RH on p. 198). Perhaps more important than terminology, RH's discussion of the rise and development of the various perfects/perfectives in IrE contains many insightful observations, thus enhancing our knowledge of IrE grammar. In some cases, however, one may want to argue about the strength of the evidence for some of RH's conclusions. For instance, when discussing the so-called ‘indefinite anterior perfect’ (as in Were you ever in Kenmare? ‘Have you ever been to Kenmare?’), RH makes the point contra Filppula (Reference Filppula1999) that during the historical language shift Irish speakers of English did not really have a choice here between the use of the past tense and the ‘standard’ have perfect as the latter was not available to them. Therefore they followed the Irish pattern involving the past tense of the verb ‘be’. As evidence, RH mentions the absence of have in present perfect constructions in his Collection of [present-day] Contact English. To me, this evidence is hardly sufficient, as examples of ‘standard’ have perfects in indefinite anterior contexts can be found in sufficient numbers in texts from both the earlier periods, including nineteenth-century emigrants’ letters, and present-day vernacular varieties (see Filppula Reference Filppula1999, section 6.2.1 for further discussion and examples). They show that this option, though undoubtedly a clear minority one, was available to speakers from early on. To that extent, RH's critique of Filppula's (Reference Filppula1999) treatment (p. 195) is not quite accurate.

Of particular interest to many readers is the author's account of the various stages through which the ‘immediate perfective’ (i.e. the after perfect) acquired its present-day meanings, as well as the dating of the relevant changes. Concurring with some of the earlier views, e.g. by McCafferty (Reference McCafferty2004), RH argues that this construction initially had both future (or ‘dynamic’) and past (or ‘stative’) meanings, and that there was a gradual transition to the latter starting in the latter half of the eighteenth century (see also Filppula Reference Filppula1999, section 6.2.2 for a roughly similar dating). RH's use of what he calls the Old Bailey Texts to document these developments deserves to be specially mentioned here. These texts are (more or less) verbatim transcripts of court proceedings at the Old Bailey dating from the early eighteenth century onwards. In many cases, the defendant was Irish, which opens a valuable window to the form of English spoken by Irish people at that period.

Besides perfects and perfectives, RH discusses at some length so-called habitual aspect and especially the emergence of the various do(es) be and be(es) constructions in IrE (as in He does be buying and selling old cars; He does work in the garden a lot; The men bees at home at the week-ends). He dates the emergence of do(es) be in habitual function to the early part of the nineteenth century, i.e. to the period of the most intense language shift. According to him, it was a result of transfer from Irish, which has a well-established category of habitual aspect though not an exact structural parallel to the IrE construction. Here RH's account departs from some of the earlier studies, especially that by Guilfoyle (Reference Guilfoyle1983) and Kallen (Reference Kallen, Harris, Little and Singleton1986), who derive IrE do(es) be from the earlier English periphrastic uses of do by assuming a process of reanalysis or reinterpretation by Irish speakers of English. What would seem to support RH's account is the relatively late appearance of habitual do(es) be structures in IrE: RH places it in the first half of the nineteenth century. This is, in fact, the conclusion reached in some previous studies, e.g. by Filppula (Reference Filppula1999) as well as Montgomery (Reference Montgomery1995), the latter writing on the northern dialects of IrE and the occurrences of be(es) and do(es) be there. Again, it would have been customary to acknowledge these sources, especially because RH uses some of the same emigrant letter examples and mostly the same literary sources as the first-mentioned.

The rest of this section is organised around other ‘areas’ of grammar, including the ‘nominal and pronominal areas’, the ‘prepositional area’, and the ‘adverbial area’. These are followed by a discussion of various features of ‘sentence structure’, comprising relativisation, subordination, focusing, negation, inversion with embedded questions, and tag questions. All in all, RH manages to cover in some detail a wide range of interesting features of IrE, most of which are familiar from previous studies but are here documented further by using partially new types of data, such as the questionnaire surveys undertaken by the author. The discussion also benefits from RH's good knowledge of the grammar of Irish, which lies behind many of the IrE structures in one way or another.

The title of chapter 5, ‘Present-day Irish English’, somewhat hides the fact that this chapter deals with the pronunciation, lexicon and ‘pragmatics’ of present-day varieties of IrE, as opposed to the previous chapter which focused on its grammar. Once again, the starting point is the early modern period, and the author starts off by describing his stand on the alleged Shakespearean origins of IrE and the much-debated question of so-called ‘Stage Irish’ and ‘Stage Irishman’, i.e. satirical representations of the English spoken by the Irish mainly in the literature written by early modern and even later non-Irish playwrights. From here the discussion moves on to ‘supraregional’ IrE and ‘supraregionalisation’, terms which surface here and there in the previous chapters but are here properly explained and exemplified. RH defines the latter as ‘an historical process whereby varieties of a language lose specifically local features and become less regionally bound’ (p. 309). The principal driving force behind supraregionalisation in the Irish context was according to RH the introduction of general schooling and the concomitant rise of a middle class in the course of the nineteenth century. From the linguistic point of view, supraregionalisation has meant three kinds of outcome which are manifest in what can be called ‘supraregional IrE’: (i) replacement of earlier vernacular forms by new, more standard, forms; (ii) restriction of earlier local forms to certain phonetic environments; and (iii) relegation to colloquial registers. These are exemplified through features such as ‘R-lowering’ in words like door, floor, which was only introduced into IrE in the nineteenth century; ‘S-palatalisation’ from all positions to the end of the syllable only (as in [bɛʃt] for best); and the colloquial pronunciation of a limited set of words like Jesus, decent, tea and queer with unraised /ɛ/ (often spelled Jaysus, etc.), respectively (pp. 312–14).

The actual description of the present-day sounds of IrE is done by means of lexical sets, a technique which appears to be common practice in present-day phonetic and phonological studies, and which illustrates well the distribution of sounds across the lexicon of a variety, thus helping to reveal possible ongoing changes. Using this method, the author goes systematically through the vowels and consonants of IrE. Since my own work has so far focused on the grammar of IrE rather than its pronunciation, I leave it to others with a better knowledge of the sound systems of IrE to judge the merits and possible shortcomings of RH's description. I would, however, like to make a few methodological remarks. In many places RH presents rather broad generalisations without really providing the necessary empirical proof for them, at least not in the volume at hand. For instance, when discussing the alleged spread of retroflex /r/ in IrE, he states that this sound ‘has become ubiquitous with younger female speakers and has spread rapidly outside the Dublin area’ (p. 321). Now, this is a very strong sociolinguistic statement and would, at the very least, require some kind of quantitative documentation of the spread of this feature across time and space in order to capture the aspect of change, as well as across gender and different age groups in order to confirm the gender and age distinctions. It is quite understandable that such evidence is not readily available and cannot be easily amassed even by a large research team or project, let alone by a single researcher working all on his own, as RH has done. The author is no doubt aware of the limitations of his database, but in places like this appears to have succumbed to the temptation of generalising rather freely on the basis of limited data. The same tendency occurs in several other contexts where RH describes certain features as being typical of one variety as against some other or others, or makes statements concerning the nature of a feature as being on the rise or decline. The reader just has to take his word for it, without really having any chance of checking against empirical data. References to the many other existing studies are also rather scant in this chapter, which does not add to the strength of the evidence presented.

This critique is particularly relevant, as I see it, to the way in which linguistic change in Dublin English is presented. RH starts off by dividing Dublin English into two broad varieties, which are: (i) local Dublin English; (ii) non-local Dublin English. The latter is further subdivided into ‘Mainstream Dublin English’ and ‘New Dublin English’. Briefly, ‘new’ here refers to features which have only emerged in the past twenty to twenty-five years. These divisions sound quite plausible as such, but little sociolinguistic evidence is put forward to substantiate them, apart from a description of the general social and economic background and development of Dublin City in recent decades.Footnote ¹ Another problematic point in RH's argumentation is his use of the notion of ‘dissociation’ as the crucial factor explaining the rise of ‘New Dublin English’. Dissociation, as the term suggests, refers here to speakers’ (mostly subconscious) desire to distance themselves from some given linguistic norm and develop a new usage different from it. On RH's account, that norm has until recently been the ‘local’ (or traditional) Dublin one, which has now been challenged and eventually superseded by new forms especially in the speech of young people aspiring towards a more urban and sophisticated way of life and linguistic usage. As RH argues, the new forms are ‘new’ also in the sense that they do not replicate standard or other metropolitan British English usages, as these would not be socially acceptable in the Irish context. This scenario may well correspond to the real situation on the ground but the question is: how do we know that dissociation really is the principal driving force behind the changes observed by RH (assuming that they are accurate), and could there also be some other factors, perhaps interacting with each other? Clearly, a more rigorous sociolinguistic study than is the case here would be needed to control all the possible variables involved and to confirm the role of dissociation as against other possible factors. It is true that the author refers in this context to his 2005 study on change in Dublin English (see Hickey Reference Hickey2005) and cannot obviously rehearse his argument in its entirety here. However, a closer look at the methodology used in that study reveals that, resourceful and commendable as it is in combining Labovian-style fieldwork (or ‘streetwork’, rather) with other kinds of data collection, the evidence gathered remains limited and cannot therefore provide sufficient proof for such broad generalisations as are presented here.

The rest of chapter 5 is devoted to the lexicon and pragmatic aspects of IrE. The discussion of the former follows a pattern familiar from other studies on IrE (see, especially, Dolan Reference Dolan1998) by drawing a major distinction between words which originate in the varieties of English introduced into Ireland in the previous centuries, on the one hand, and those which have been borrowed from Irish, on the other. Further topics in this section include the use of IrE words in international English and in American English, in particular. Finally, chapter 6 (‘Transportation overseas’) opens up a ‘global’ perspective to IrE. A welcome addition to a description of IrE, it provides a brief survey of the emergence of IrE-influenced varieties in a wide variety of settings in Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand, all of which have been the destination of large-scale emigrations from Ireland especially during the last couple of centuries. The book has several appendices containing, e.g. a chronological outline of Irish history, a glossary of terms, and maps. These are followed by an extensive and useful list of references, many of which have hardly been mentioned in the literature before.

All in all, RH's book is an indispensable source of information to anyone interested in Irish English and its distinctive features. As a one-man project, it is a real tour de force on the part of the author and must have demanded an exceptional amount of work and dedication. A book of this size is bound to contain some material or sections which leave room for improvement in some respect or other. My main criticisms have concerned some points of methodology and especially the lack of sociolinguistic evidence for many of the generalisations or explanations presented by the author. I have also remarked critically on the way in which RH relates, or rather, often fails to relate his own findings to those achieved in other studies. Many of his statements or views are presented as if they were completely new and original, when in fact the same views or conclusions have been expressed in previous works and, as pointed out above in the case of the dating of emergence of do(es) be structures, sometimes on the basis of the very same data. But putting that aside, there is no question that RH's work makes a major new contribution to the field of IrE studies and manages to put forward a great many interesting hypotheses worthy of further empirical investigation.