A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 299
1975–1986).
Your Neebour’s fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill, [well-going]
Supply’d wi’ store o’ water,
The heapet happer’s ebbing still, [heaped hopper]
And still the clap plays clatter.
Here we see some of the characteristic differences of pronunciation, wha, whase, sae,
weel, neebour, guid, etc. These could easily be extended from others of his songs and
poems, which all the world knows, and the list would include not only words differently
pronounced but many an old word no longer in use south of the Tweed. Familiar
examples are ain (own), auld (old), lang (long), bairn (child), bonnie (beautiful), braw
(handsome), dinna (do not), fash (trouble oneself), icker (ear of grain), maist (almost),
muckle (much, great), syne (since), unco (very).
Irish English, or Hiberno-English, has also left its mark on the literary tradition,
although in different ways at different periods. In the eighteenth century, “stage Irish”
was a familiar convention for representing and often ridiculing Irish characters in plays
written by English authors whose use of stereotypical linguistic features was not always
accurate. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish authors, especially Douglas
Hyde (1860–1940), J.M.Synge (1871–1909), and W.B.Yeats (1865–1939), used selected
features to give an Irish flavor to their works. In the twentieth century there has been a
more realistic tradition, including the work of Sean O’Casey (1880–1964) and Brendan
Behan (1923–1964) and the use by James Joyce (1882–1941) of carefully collected
dialect phrases in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. 13 The distinctiveness of Irish English
derives from a mixture of three sources: the influence of the Irish language; the influence
of Scots, especially in the Northeast; and the nature of the original English that was
brought to Ireland from western England in the seventeenth century and that has
remained quite conservative compared with both RP and American English. For example,
Irish English is firmly rhotic in contrast with RP. Except in the Scots-Irish district of
Ulster, the English language in Ireland has not preserved so many old words as have
survived in Scotland. But the language of the southern part of the island has an
exuberance of vocabulary that recalls the lexical inventiveness of Elizabethan times, the
period during which English began to spread rapidly in Ireland. The vocabulary has been
influenced also by Irish (blarney, galore, smithereens, and many other examples of the
13
See Alan Bliss, Spoken English in Ireland 1600–1740 (Dublin, 1979), pp. 312–26, and Michael
V.Barry, “The English Language in Ireland,” in English as a World Language, ed. R.W.Bailey and
M.Görlach (Ann Arbor, MI, 1982), pp. 92–93.