Kevin McCafferty

The Northern Subject Rule in Ulster: How Scots, how English?

In diffusionist accounts of the Northern Subject Rule (NSR), this subject–verb concord system spread from Scotland via Ulster to North America and elsewhere. Thus, the NSR in Mid-Ulster English dialects of districts originally settled from England is attributed to diffusion from Ulster-Scots. But the NSR was also a feature of dialects of the North and North Midlands, the regions that contributed most of the English settlers to the Ulster Plantation. Since English and Scottish settlement patterns established in the seventeenth century have been reflected in Ulster dialect boundaries since then, the founder principle provides an alternative account of the persistence of the NSR in Northern Irish English. Usage in nineteenth-century emigrant letters indicates that the NSR was as strong in English-influenced dialects of Mid-Ulster as in Ulster-Scots and suggests that the NSR in Ulster may be a direct import from England as well as Scotland. The author thanks Anniken Telnes Iversen, Toril Swan, and Hilde Sollid for reading and commenting on various drafts of this article; Herbert Schendl, Graham Shorrocks, and Dieter Stein for providing references, questions, and answers; and Laura Wright and Lukas Pietsch for offering both kinds of help as well as furnishing copies of forthcoming work that proved interesting and useful. Thanks also to Jack Chambers for copies of his papers. I am also grateful to the anonymous referees for LVC. Their comments, objections, and suggestions have been accommodated as far as possible and the responses to them have, I hope, improved the result. In the usual way, responsibility for any remaining errors lies with me.

William Carleton between Irish and English: using literary dialect to study language contact and change

This study examines two features of the Irish English literary dialect of William Carleton, a bilingual writer of the period when Ireland shifted to English. It addresses the issue of the validity of literary dialect via empirical comparison of the use of plural verbal -s in Carleton and in personal letters written by a close contemporary from a similar background. The result suggests considerable accuracy in Carleton’s dialect representation: he uses plural verbal -snot only in agreement with the complex constraints of the Northern Subject Rule but also in line with usage in the letters. Then the study examines Carleton’s use of the be after V-ing construction, which is typically a perfect in present-day Irish English. The future uses found in older texts are sometimes cited as examples of inauthentic literary dialect. However, like others of his generation, Carleton uses be after V-ingin both future and perfect senses. Given his social and linguistic background, his place in relation to the language shift, and the apparent accuracy with which he portrays dialect features, Carleton provides crucial support for the view that future uses arose in a language contact situation in which speakers of British English interpreted be after V-ingas a future, while speakers of Irish acquiring English intended it as a calque on an Irish perfect. As more Irish shifted to English, perfect meanings came to dominate. Carleton and his contemporaries bear witness to the middle phase of this process.

‘[The Irish] find much difficulty in these auxiliaries . . .putting will for shall with the first person’: the decline of first-person shall in Ireland, 1760–1890

Among prescriptivists, the Irish have long had a reputation for not following the rule requiring a distinction between shall with first-person and will with other grammatical subjects. Recent shift towards will with all persons in North American English – now also affecting British English – has been attributed to the influence of Irish immigrants. The present study of data from the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) finds that Irish English has not always preferred will . Rather, the present-day situation emerged in Irish English between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. This important period covers the main language shift from Irish to English, and simplification in the acquisition process may account for the Irish English use of will . In eighteenth-century Irish English, shall predominated. Comparison with other colonial Englishes of the period – US English (Kyto 1991) and Canadian English (Dollinger 2008) – and with north-west British English (Dollinger 2008) shows broadly similar cross-varietal distributions of first-person shall and will . Irish English shifted rapidly towards will by the 1880s, but was not unusual in this respect; a similar development took place at the same time in Canadian English, which may indicate a more general trend, at least in colonial Englishes. It is thus doubtful that Irish English influence drove the change towards first-person will . We suggest the change might be associated with increasing literacy and accompanying colloquialisation (Mair 1997; Biber 2003; Leech et al. 2009: 239ff.). As Rissanen (1999: 212) observes, and Dollinger corroborates for north-west British English, will persisted in regional Englishes after the rise of first-person shall in the standard language. Increased use of will might have been an outcome of wider literacy leading to more written texts, like letters, being produced by members of lower social strata, whose more nonstandard/vernacular usage was thus recorded in writing. There are currently few regional letter corpora for testing this hypothesis more widely. However, we suggest that, in nineteenth-century Ireland, increasing literacy may have helped spread first-person will as a change from below. The shift to first-person will that is apparent in CORIECOR would then result from greater lower-class literacy, and this might be a key to understanding this change in other Englishes too.

Shared Accents, Divided Speech Community? Change in Northern Ireland English.

This article interrogates the line taken in studies of Northern Ireland English that Catholic/Protestant ethnicity is sociolinguistically irrelevant. Using data from Derry/Londonderry English, gathered with the objective of answering the question of whether ethnicity matters in sociolinguistic terms, it examines the relative importance of a set of social factors for language variation. The strength of these factors (ethnicity, class, sex, and age) varies, but where change is occurring, ethnicity has an effect on the adoption of innovations. In particular, changes originating in the (predominantly Protestant) east of Northern Ireland tend to be adopted primarily by Protestants, whereas Catholics tend to be more conservative. This fits well with a general pattern of diffusion of change suggested by a reading of the sociolinguistic literature from the region.

Victories fastened in grammar: historical documentation of Irish English

In ‘Murdering the language’ Moya Cannon imagines Ireland as a shore washed over by human tides. Each invasion added fresh layers to landscape, community and language, until: […] we spoke our book of invasions – an unruly wash of Victorian pedantry, Cromwellian English, Scots, the jetsam and the beached bones of Irish – a grammarians nightmare. (Cannon, 2007: 88)

Migration Databases as Impact Tools in the Education and Heritage Sectors

There has been considerable recent investment in the digitization of databases, like the Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration (DIPPAM) project, that relate in various ways to the history and Diaspora of Ireland, which has been an area of intensive scholarship since the later twentieth century (see, for example, Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; O’Sullivan, The Irish World Wide: History, Heritage, Identity, Vols. 1–6. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992; Fitzgerald and Lambkin, Migration in Irish History, 1607–2007. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Miller, Ireland and Irish America. Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration. Dublin: Field Day Files, 2008). As such resources were largely designed for academics in historical studies and allied disciplines, their applicability as tools to engage public audiences (particularly in the education and heritage sectors) remains to be tested. In this chapter, we discuss how databases like these can be created and subsequently exploited for a much wider variety of academic and non-academic uses by focusing on two related digital initiatives, namely, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) project currently being undertaken at the University of Bergen and Coventry University’s Digitising Experiences of Migration: The Development of Interconnected Letter Collections (DEM) project.

Emigrant Letters: Exploring the ‘Grammar of the Conquered’

A few lines from Moya Cannon’s poem Our Words distil some of the essence of the evolution of new varieties of English in Ireland: (1) as the language of conquest grows cold in statute books, elsewhere, its words are subsumed into the grammars of the conquered I be, you be, he bees. (Cannon 2007: 16) As new Englishes developed over the last five centuries — an important outcome of English, later British, conquest and colonisation — their speakers took the English language and made it their own, creating new grammars in the process. One new grammatical feature that emerged in Irish English (IrE) is the habitual aspect of the declension rattled off by the poet. The interaction in speakers’ minds of English/Scots verb forms and an Irish grammatical category resulted in an IrE distinction between indicative and habitual be: She bees early means something different from She’s early. This habitual reflects a category that was (and is) present in the Irish language but not in most of the English and Scots varieties that contributed to the feature pool from which IrE emerged. The exception in British English (BrE) is the south-western dialects of England, which did contribute to the mix in colonial Ireland, though the habitual in south-west England is invariant be, rather than the conjugated form found in parts of Ireland (see the overview in Hickey 2007: 226–8).