Language relations in early Ireland

Abstract

Since the Middle Ages, the linguistic landscapes of Ireland have clearly undergone massive changes, of which the most obvious one is the rise of English and the concomitant decline of Irish. Generally, in situations where different population groups, who are speakers of different linguistic varieties, come into contact, it is the language of the socio-economically more powerful group that will influence the language of the less powerful population group (e.g. Crystal 2002, Thomason 2001: 66, 77, Hickey 2010: 8). As far as the linguistic situation in Ireland is concerned, Crowley (2000: 1) observes that the relations between the two main languages of Ireland, English and Irish, are as complicated as the political relations between these two communities. In order to trace the linguistic influences of relative socio-economic differences, the lexicon of a language constitutes a good source. The language of the less powerful linguistic variety will typically incorporate a large number of loanwords from the more powerful variety, as the vocabulary is ‘an open class with a high degree of awareness by speakers’ (Hickey 2010: 8). In the following we will consider statements about population groups as well as semantic fields of loanwords taken from the languages in contact.