The language of irish writing in english

Abstract

The concept of ‘perceptual dialectology’ is defined by Preston (1999: xxv) as a sub-branch of folk linguistics that represents the interest in language use by dialectologists, sociolinguists and variationists. This area of investigation is particularly concerned with what non-specialists have to say about variation: ‘Where do they believe it comes from? Where do they believe it exists? What do they believe is its function?’ One of the principal techniques developed for perceptual dialectology in the 1980s included, for example, drawing boundaries on a blank map around areas where the respondents thought regional speech zones existed (Preston and Howe 1987), a method also employed by Hickey (2005: 99-105) in the context of Irish English, in order to test what conceptions of dialect areas non-specialist speakers had for Ireland. In Hickey’s survey, the majority of the Dublin respondents distinguished between two forms of Dublin English: a northern, more vernacular form, and a southern form, which they referred to in the map returns as Dublin 4 (or D4). Such a division was also recognised by 39 per cent of the non-Dublin respondents. This distinction, together with prescriptive comments such as ‘strong’ or ‘hard’ to describe the north Dublin accent, or ‘posh’, ‘snobbish’, ‘phoney’ to refer to the Southside/Dublin 4 accent, is a good barometer with which to measure non-specialists’ beliefs and attitudes towards the English spoken in Dublin.