IRISH PHONOLOGICAL FEATURES IN IRISH ENGLISH 1 To What Extent Do Irish Fluency and Gender Affect Prevalence of Irish-influenced Phonological Features in Irish English? (original) (raw)
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2019
This thesis presents research into the variety of Irish English spoken in the Múscraí area of County Cork, Republic of Ireland. The focus of the research is to examine phonological features of Irish English which may have been influenced by Irish and how these interact with speakers' levels of Irish fluency and to a lesser extent, to their gender. The use of dental stops [tt dt ] as realisations of /θ/ and /ð/ in THINK/THIS lexical sets are considered, as they are seen as a hallmark feature of West Irish Englishes (Hickey, 2004). In addition to th-stopping, levels of rhoticity and vowel epenthesis (both classed as supraregional features of Irish English by Hickey (2004)) are also examined. All data was collected by means of questionnaires and interviews with participants living or working in the West Cork Gaeltacht (Irish speaking area). Analysis consisted of examination of questionnaire results and transcription of all interviews, followed by comparison of use of the focus variables between interviews and questionnaires. Distinct trends noted in this work were that fluency and gender did not necessarily correlate positively with use of the focus variants as predicted. Fluent Irish speakers were more likely to use [dt ] stops in place of /ð/ than non-fluent speakers in interviews, but this finding was reversed in the reading tasks, with non-fluent participants using [dt ] more frequently. Men generally used dental stops more frequently than women. However, it was female speakers who took the lead in r-dropping. Both male and fluent Irish speakers reported using epenthetic variants more often than non-epenthetic variants during the sound file segment of the study, but only two examples of epenthesis could be found across all interviews and reading tasks. This indicates a more complex sociolinguistic situation in Múscraí English than might be expected.
A phonetic comparison of two Irish English varieties
Proceedings of 11th International Conference of Experimental Linguistics, 2020
This research offers a preliminary survey on vowels and diphthong variation between two Irish English varieties: Galway (GW) and Letterkenny (LK). The results showed only a smaller difference between GW and LK with respect to the monophthongs, whereas a larger difference was found for the MOUTH diphthong. Despite the great amount of literature on English dialects, a phonetic investigation of these specific varieties is still lacking. This study may open the path to further investigations of sociophonetic values and the stereotypes associated with different varieties, in particular those of the northern regions.
Palatalization in Dublin Irish: the extent of phonetic interference
In: Procedia - social and behavioral sciences 236 (2016), p. 213-218. This paper focuses on palatalization in Irish spoken by Dublin-based bilinguals with English as their first language. It has already been pointed out that English phonetics affects Irish speakers even when Irish is their first language, especially in case of palatalization. The extent of English influence on palatalization in Dublin Irish and the possible reasons behind its inconsistent use acquire special prominence not only in terms of phonetics, but also because in Irish palatalization performs phonological functions.
Syllable onsets in Irish English
WORD
This study is intended to present a unified discussion of a number of phenomena which are different in Irish English (hereafter IrE) and Received Pronunciation (hereafter RP) as described in Gimson (1980:89ff.). It is also designed to show that these phenomena are in fact related to each other, not only due to their position in syllable nuclei but also on the level of phonological abstractness. The first phenomenon concerns the sequence which developed from Middle English /iu/ and /eu/. In both of these diphthongs the first element developed into a voiced palatal continuant losing its vocalic character, and yielding finally the sequence /ju:/ (Dobson 1968:705ff., Welna 1978:224). The frequency of this sound in French loan-words and the fact that Middle English /u:/ had been shifted first to /qu/ and later to /au/ as a result of the Great Vowel Shift seems to have led to /ju:/ standing as the pronunciation of the letter u and to be used as the English rendering of any later loan-words containing long /u:/. It also affected the pronunciation of the /u:/ sounds of loans established in Middle English, for example university with initial /u:/ (from Old French université, Onions 1966:961). The dating of the collapse of /eu/ and /iu/ can be given as mid 16th century, interpreting the orthoepic evidence of Bullokar who confirms in a rhyme that they were pronounced the same (Dobson 1968:802) and the merger was complete by the mid 17th century when it probably had developed from /iu/ to /ju:/. The importance of these considerations for the issue at hand is to establish that /ju:/ was the pronunciation of the Middle English diphthongs at the time of the most extensive Anglification of Ireland in the 17th and early 18th century (Bliss 1979: 19ff.). The remarks below refer to present-day IrE and to the variety of it which I term urban middle class. This general designation, while without validity for many areas of IrE phonology such as the realization of stressed vowels, can be permitted here because the peculiarities of IrE described below are found in all varieties of IrE with the sole exception of contact IrE (that of the 'Gaeltacht' or Irish-speaking areas) and of course of Ulster which is radically different from the English of the Republic of Ireland.
Analysing Irish prosody: A dual linguistic/quantitative approach
2004
A project of Irish prosody is described which attempts to provide not only the basis for a linguistic description of the prosody of Irish dialects, but also the prerequisite quantitative characterization that is needed to allow us to use it for future technological applications, particularly text-to-speech development for Irish dialects. As with many other minority languages, there are particular challenges, but also particular opportunities to address. A multi-layered analytic approach is adopted, which will provide coverage of the three phonetic dimensions of prosody: pitch dynamics (intonation); voice quality; and temporal features. It is also envisaged that these analyses will provide the basis for an account that encompasses both the narrowly linguistic functions of prosody and its paralinguistic function of signaling attitude and emotion. In these last respects, this study aims also to contribute to the broader understanding of prosody, and to its modeling for more expressive speech synthesis. Given the relatively threatened status of Irish, we hope that by gearing our linguistic analysis to eventual technology exploitation, we can go beyond the mere documentation and aspire to the provision of tools that can support language teaching/learning and language usage generally.
Nuclear accents in four Irish (Gaelic) dialects
Proceedings of the XVIth International Congress of …, 2007
In this paper the distribution of nuclear accents in declaratives of four major dialects of Irish is described. The findings show considerable variation, particular between northern and southern dialects. Speakers of the northern dialect of Donegal show a propensity for rising ...
Analysis of the vowel system of Wexford English
2019
This paper analyses the vowel system of Wexford English, focussing on qualitative and quantitative differences, as well as the influence of Wexford English in a rhotic environment. To answer this question, we measured vowel formants and durations from two corpora, one containing vowels in a non-rhotic environment, one in a rhotic one, and compared them, using plots and bar charts. Our results confirmed the literature provided, and revealed Wexford English peculiarities, as the absence of /ʌ/ and the diphthongization of /eː/ and /oː/. In a rhotic environment, long vowels present a retraction, while short ones are often reduced to schwa. In future, these results could be confirmed by a similar analysis in a bigger spoken corpus.
Weak Segments in Irish English
Phonological Weakness in English, 2009
The varieties of English spoken in southern Ireland are noted for the reduction in the articulation of alveolar segments, chiefly /t/. This has a long history and is amply attested in the textual record. Vernacular speech in the capital Dublin shows alveolar stop lenition to a more considerable degree than do less regionally bound varieties of Irish English. This lenition is clearly organised as a cline on which lenited segments increase in sonority. The precise manifestation of lenition depends on syllable position, being disfavoured in onsets but also in covered positions such as immediately before stops. There are also manner restrictions on lenition prohibiting it before /s/ because sequences of two fricatives are not legal. On the cline of lenition there are different realisations and the extent to which a variety shows these depends on its degree of vernacularity. The range is from non-lenition (faithful representation of segments from the lexical input) to deletion of segments. There are furthermore lexicalised instances of advanced lenition which occur in the supraregional variety of English in Ireland which normally only shows the first stage of lenition, i.e. frication of stops with the retention of all other articulatory features. In this contribution both a phonetic analysis of lenition and a consideration of the external factors (degree of vernacularity) which determine the range of lenition is offered.
Issues in the vowel phoneme inventory of western Irish1
2010
The vowels of the various dialects of Irish, including that of Cois Fhairrge examined here, are related to each other by a series of morphophonemic processes such as the lengthening of short vowels before certain word-final sonorants, and final palatalization or velarization: these are used to establish relationships between long and short and back and front vowels. The effect of additional factors such as r-lowering and nasal rising is considered and an attempt is made to predict alternations between back and front vowels given an outset position. In conclusion an analysis of four surface diphthongs is offered whereby they all can be shown to be derived synchronically from a single underlying form. In the various studies of Irish dialects which have appeared over the last forty years2 the vowels of the various dialects are presented as simple taxonomies without due consideration of the relationships in which they stand to each other and to a series of morphophonemic and morphologic...