To the rapidly growing series Dialects of English Footnote ¹ there has now been added the first of two volumes on Irish English – Northern Ireland, by Professor Karen Corrigan of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.Footnote ² Following the pattern of the other volumes, Irish English – Northern Ireland provides a description of this area's phonology, morphosyntax, lexis and also certain discourse features, an account of the geography, demography and culture which have shaped the local speech forms, a narrative of its external history, a thematic bibliography and a few sample texts. In brief, this new book offers the fullest description of Northern Ireland English to date, in a very handy format, by page-size and layout.

In chapter 1, the account of geography, demography and cultural factors, although inevitably non-linguistic and dependent upon work in other disciplines, is extraordinarily interesting, not just for its rarity but also for its insights into the shaping and conditioning of language by climate, topography and environment in this part of the world. Co. Down, for instance, is the county of hills – not just the legendary Mountains of Mourne, but its many short, rounded hills called drumlins.Footnote ³ The UNESCO-protected Giant's Causeway comprises red basaltic prisms, some of which are referred to by Scots dialect words such as the granny (in the sense of ‘chimney cowl’). From rivers and canals flowing in and out of Lough Neagh – more than the present figure 1.4 (p. 6) charts (see Muhr & McKay (Reference Muhr and McKay2007: xi) for a fuller picture) – the lough forms not only a veritable roundabout of waterways but has many inlets and recesses with their own names, such as Ellis's Gut and Kinnegoe Gut (gut from Scots gate ‘a navigable channel’, as in Gawley's Gate, illustrated in Muhr and McKay Reference Muhr and McKay2007: 41 and 56), showing the infusion of Scots elements in an otherwise predominantly Irish onomasticon.Footnote ⁴ In this rather original chapter, Corrigan thus provides a fresh and vigorous demonstration of how geological and environmental evolution has shaped present-day speech patterns.

One of the features of this series of dialect studies is that it should be based on the author's own research. Although, in her previous work, Corrigan has concentrated on southern Co. Armagh, using recordings made by the fieldworker Michael J. Murphy for the Irish Folklore Commission between 1942 and 1974, for the present purpose, she has assembled a team of consultants from throughout Northern Ireland, of both sexes, Catholics and Protestants, of all ages (from a schoolboy in Co. Armagh aged 12 to a woman in Co. Antrim aged 90), the bio-details of whom are listed in the final part of this first chapter. This team proves invaluable, providing fresh confirmation for numerous points throughout the book.

In its approach to phonetics and phonology, chapter 2 deals head-on with the single central question of Northern Ireland English phonology: vowel length. As is well known, the Scottish Vowel-Length Rule operates throughout Northern Ireland, except in the southernmost part – its absence being criterial for Harris's (Reference Harris1985) identification of Southern Ulster English.Footnote ⁵ The rule also expands to further environments, so that there are far more lengthened vowels in Northern Ireland than in Scotland. Corrigan deals with vowel length in terms of vowel quality and the groups of closely related consonants which are responsible for its operation. Given the overwhelmingly Scottish basis of the phonological system, although she structures her treatment using Wells's lexical sets, no doubt because of the latter's familiarity, despite – or because of – its basis on RP, there would have been a case (not discussed) for using Aitken's vowel system (Aitken & Macafee Reference Aitken and Macafee2002), which has been shown (Macafee Reference Macafee, Kirk and Ó Baoill2002, Reference Macafee, Smyth, Michael and Robinson2006) to be much more suitable for Scottish (and by extension Northern Irish) patterns than Wells. Nevertheless, her treatment of quantity on the basis of the consonants following the lengthened vowel usefully extends Wells's treatment with considerable fine-meshed detail. Prosody, especially high-rising and high-plateau tones, for many the marker of a Northern Ireland accent, is also treated, although all too briefly.

Many of the morphosyntactic topics which are dealt with in chapter 3 are well known to scholars, thanks to Filppula (Reference Filppula1999) and Hickey (Reference Hickey2007). A further account is Robinson (Reference Robinson1997, Reference Robinson2007). To her credit, Corrigan goes out of her way succinctly to synthesise and integrate every known contribution to each topic – all now valuably extended by the fieldwork conducted with her focus group. She deals with the definite article (but no other determiners, although the demonstratives and the consecutive/inclusive distinction e.g. each vs. both would merit discussion, too); pronouns (with Corrigan supporting the substratal interpretation of a singular/plural distinction in the second person); prepositions (although much is devoted only to ‘unusual senses associated with’ on and with (p. 58), she doesn't get as far as contrasting uses of in with the much-used within); verbal agreement (especially the operation of the Northern Subject Rule, which operates much more strictly in Northern Ireland than in Scotland, and which is here shown to operate in at least one place almost categorically as if, as far as the verb to be is concerned, a vernacular universal); perfective aspect and habitual aspect (both features of all varieties of English and Scots throughout Ireland); modality (largely based on her work on substrate-derived, positive, invariant, be to, expressing weak obligation as in you be to do without yourself, or what she regards as the innovatory certainty-inferring epistemic be to, as in he be to be an old-fashioned one, without substrate or superstrate parallels); double modals (which, she claims, have not been maintained through insufficient conservatism); uninflected intensifiers as in I have a wild keen interest in it); and finally the items yet, whenever and all, each of which in some respect functions differently from the standard.

There then follows a long section on syntactic structures: imperatives (with the retention of the subject pronoun, as in Go you away!); embedded interrogatives (with inversion retained after a greater range of control verbs, as in . . . some time to see could you beat this fellow? or The police found out had the goods been stolen); relativisation (where putative substratal influence (as in elided relatives such as I've a cousin a nurse . . . she lives in Edinburgh) is reanalysed as ‘convergence under language shift’ (p. 73)); complementation (particularly the for-to/tae/til complementiser, with its substratal reinforcement, shown to be on the increase and shedding its sense of purpose to become more generalised); and focusing through clefting and topicalisation. Corrigan is as much at pains to stress the lack of unusualness about morphosyntactic features and syntactic structures as she is to stress their uniqueness and divergence from standard usage or usage in other vernaculars. Her account is rich, research-based and wide-ranging, valuably judicious in its reworking of the scholarly literature to date, beneficially extending Filppula (Reference Filppula1999) and Hickey (Reference Hickey2007) with regard to the North, and with ever an eye on future research possibilities, particularly the social marking of variable constructions and conservative or substrate-influenced usages.

Whereas phonology and morphosyntax have received the most attention by linguists, chapter 4, on lexis and discourse, redresses the imbalance through its provision of a full and wide-ranging lexicological and lexical-semantic description. Upon the foundations now laid by dictionaries such as the Concise Ulster Dictionary (Macafee 1996) and The Hamely Tongue (Fenton Reference Fenton1995, 2000, 2006), and using such work as is already available (e.g. Kirk 1999; Zwickl Reference Zwickl2005) as well as fresh research with the focus group, chapter 4 describes the local vocabulary in terms of its lexical fields (including flora, fauna and the landscape; drinks and foodstuffs; religious practices, pastimes and entertainment; building, land and settlement; work implements and tools; and terms of abuse; all inevitably reflective of a peasant folk culture), its sources (principally Scots, dialectal – and specifically northern – English, and Irish Gaelic) and its semantic relationships. Nevertheless, probably because the vocabulary has been tackled so seldom, I find this the most interesting chapter. As Kirk & Kallen (Reference Kirk, Kallen and Hickey2011) show, it is largely through the lexicon that the two very different cultures of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and related issues of identity are created and expressed.

Only in chapter 5 does there follow a historical account. Whereas, traditionally, history precedes description, the reversed order – seemingly standard in the series – works well. Once readers are fully au fait with the outcome, they can discover how it all came about. As in the first chapter, language history is difficult to write about, as one is dependent upon evidence and other scholars’ work. Corrigan finds her voice and guides us with certainty and confidence.

Inevitably, each volume in the series will have its own socio-historical account to make. A major challenge for Corrigan was the relationship between Scots and English elements in the confluence of present-day Northern Ireland speech. Although the Scots elements are distinctive, as are those usually referred to as ‘Hiberno-English’, Corrigan rightly describes the Scots and Hiberno-English elements as dialectal elements of realisation and exponence within an overall English system.

With this detailed and integrated presentation, Corrigan's book provides the much-needed scientific corrective to the view that Scots in Ulster is somehow a separate language – even separate from Scots in Scotland.

For all its merits, the volume is unfortunately marred by several irritating features.

It may be editorial policy to refer as much as possible to companion volumes in the series, but many of the references to McColl Millar – surely just Millar? – (2007) are misleading, as if that were the source of, or central reference to, much major research scholarship on Scots.

Secondly, as the series is concerned with the scholarship on each dialect (the dialect-logos) as well as the dialect itself, a further design feature of the series is the inclusion of a chapter on bibliography. Whereas most volumes usefully provide references in one single composite list of references at the end, Corrigan embeds most of her references in the numbered thematic paragraphs of her discussion, with a final list at the end of the book of only those references (e.g. on history, geology or the environment) which are not so embedded. I'm sorry to have to point this out but, because the retrieval of those deeply embedded references becomes so extremely difficult, the arrangement creates considerable inconvenience and frustration. Moreover, although the paragraph symbol is used with references in the text to indicate the numbered paragraph in which the reference occurs, it is not invariably so, for the symbol is also used occasionally to refer to paragraphs within texts referred to (e.g. p. 30 the paragraph symbols refer to Wells Reference Wells1982), so that there is even more confusion. Could these be rectified in any second edition?

Finally, the abbreviation for Scots is invariably ‘Sc.’ so that ‘O.Sc.’ is Older Scots, ‘M.Sc.’ is Middle Scots, etc. and so one would expect ‘U.Sc.’ to refer to Ulster Scots. However, here the last is abbreviated to ‘US’, misleadingly suggesting the United States.

In conclusion, Corrigan's description of Northern Ireland English overall is, for the most part, excellent, commendably fulsome, up-to-date and authoritatively scholarly, providing so far the best and fullest scientific account of Northern Ireland English, a useful corrective to the treatment of the North in Hickey (Reference Hickey2007), and the treatment of Scots in Ulster in Robinson (Reference Robinson1997, 2007). It sets the bar high – both for the volume on the Republic of Ireland and for other forthcoming volumes in this rapidly expanding series.