The edited volume Irish identities: Sociolinguistic perspectives comprises thirteen chapters. After the editors’ contextualization of the volume, John Walsh examines how new (i.e. second language) speakers of Irish construct their identities through using the official first language of the state. He shows that connections to Irish-speaking areas, Gaeltachtaí, remain an important factor. Liam Mac Mathúna traces language use in Ireland from the arrival of the Anglo-Normans to the twentieth century and explains how the continued strong identity of historical Ireland encouraged strict English language policies. Next, Raymond Hickey analyses twentieth-century pronunciation shifts in Irish English. Due to (southern) Irish independence from 1922 on, Irish English accents changed rapidly and reoriented from British English standards to new endonormative pronunciation models. In chapter 5, Marion Schulte investigates Dublin English fricated /t/ and attitudes to it. She finds that not only syntactic position and phonetic context but also speakers’ self-positioning and evaluation of the discourse topic determine its use. Next, Stephen Lucek & Victoria Garnett discuss what Irish English speakers associate with varieties of Irish English. They find strong feelings of otherness between Dublin and the rest of the country, though Dublin and Northern Ireland show similarities in some respects. In chapter 7, Göran Wolf discusses Ulster Scots identity. He shows that spelling patterns of Ulster Scots are markers of ethnic, ideological, and political identity.

With a corpus pragmatics approach to studying personal pronouns, Brian Clancy (chapter 8) shows that he and she, particularly used with is and did, are central to indexing shared knowledge in intimate groups. Shane Walshe examines linguistic features that are used to construct Irish identity in jokes. He finds that international jokes are more likely to use spelling to mimic Irish accents, while national jokes show more morphosyntactic, lexical, and pragmatic features. In chapter 10, Elaine Vaughan & Máiréad Moriarty investigate identity construction through local language varieties in YouTube videos. Here, local vernacular speech serves for identity construction in the digitally created performance domains. Next, Joan O'Sullivan studies social identities in Irish radio advertising. She argues that while the ‘other’, the outgroup, used to be presented by Southern British English accents, representation shifted to Advanced Dublin English, which together with other local accents now represents ingroups in Irish radio advertising. In chapter 12, Ana Maria Terrazas-Calero investigates how modern Irish identity is enregistered through pragmatic markers in fictionalized Irish English. She argues that modern Irishness is typically represented in fiction by the language of recession-hit middle classes and their uses of quotative go, clause-medial like, and expressive fucking. Finally, Carolina Amador-Moreno & Nancy Ávila-Ledesma explore identity construction in nineteenth-century emigrant letters. They show that the expressed diasporic identities change according to self-perception and evaluation of past and vision of the future.

Overall, this volume provides an interesting overview of different facets of linguistic identity construction in Ireland. It shows how formerly Irish-speaking Irish linguistic identity has slowly moved towards a—not undisputed—post-independence creation of endonormative Irish English linguistic identities focused on urban Dublin speech.