Irish English: A Legacy of English Colonization

Simposio; X Simposio de Estudios Irlandeses de América del Sur.; 2015

One of the most striking results of the English colonization was the emergence of varieties of English that are widely spoken today in countries where English was not the native tongue. This work focuses on Irish English; the main language spoken in Ireland in spite of the fact that Gaelic is the native tongue of the Irish territory. The aim of this study is to establish relationships between the linguistic characteristics of the Irish English variety and the socio-cultural, historical, and religious context of Ireland, following the tenets of Historical linguistics. With this purpose in mind, we identify lexical, grammatical and phonological features of Irish English and analyse the circumstances in which they entered the English language. Our findings attest to the complex language contact situation experienced by the English and the Gaelic people in Ireland. As members of the History of the English Language chair in the School of Languages of the National University of Cordoba, we consider that our results could increase our students? awareness of the importance of the particular features of each variety of English as tokens of the history and development of the life of its speakers.