In: Tristram, Hildegard L. C. (ed.) Celtic Englishes III. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003,357-73.

What´s cool in Irish English?Linguistic change in contemporary Ireland

Raymond Hickey(Essen University)

Abstract The subject of the present paper is the set of changes in the sound system ofDublin English which have been in evidence in the past ten years or so and which arespreading quickly throughout the entire Republic of Ireland. What one is dealing withhere are shifts in the phonological space of vowels which have already led to a majorre-alignment of the vowel system of fashionable Dublin English with a retraction of lowvowels and a raising of back vowels. These changes are, however, part of a largerscheme in which the phonological profile of Dublin English is being radically altered ona broad front. The changes are of general linguistic interest because they represent a caseof dissociation as a type of change, that is, the motivation for the shifts would appear tobe a distancing on the part of fashionable Dublin English speakers from those who speakthe traditional form of English in the capital. Given the social dominance of Dublin overthe rest of the country, the changes in English there are being adopted in the rest of theRepublic of Ireland and a new form of supraregional English is establishing itselfrapidly.

1. Introduction

Authors working on Irish English can be grouped according to the materialwhich they devote their attention to. Firstly, they can deal with phenomenaalready present in Irish English and which are the result of change whichhas long since taken place, mainly during the language shift of the past fewcenturies. Secondly, authors can treat ongoing change in Irish English. Thelatter group is considerably smaller than the first and in essence consists ofscholars working on English in the large urban centres of the island,Dublin, Derry and Belfast. Investigation into English in Belfast has ebbedaway since the seminal work of the Milroys in the late 1970’s and 1980’s.However, the language of the remaining two cities, Dublin and Derry, hasbeen the subject of investigations in recent years by Hickey and McCaffertyrespectively. The works which their investigations have engendered aresociolinguistic studies of linguistic variation in an urban setting and so

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essentially different from the work of other scholars in the field such asCorrigan, Filppula or Kallen to mention only three of the prominent authorsworking currently on Irish English. The latter authors have been looking ateither rural forms of Irish English or at the grammar of more generalvarieties found throughout the island of Ireland, in either the north or thesouth and in some cases in both. The concern of the current article on the other hand is to view thephonological changes currently evident in Dublin, the capital of theRepublic of Ireland, to examine the sociolinguistic motivation for suchchanges and to see how these changes are spreading outside the capital toother parts of the country and to what sections of the community. Thewider implications of these changes for theories of linguistic variation andchange will also be considered. The article is based on data collected over anumber of years and the analysis offered is along the lines of that found inother recent publications by the author (see bibliography). The descriptionand interpretation of Dublin English stem from the tradition of analysingsociolinguistic variation and change established in the late 1960’s and1970’s with urban varieties of English in the Anglophone world by suchscholars as William Labov, Peter Trudgill or James and Lesley Milroy. Theapproach here is quite different from that employed in the very few otherstudies of Dublin English available, namely Bertz (1975, 1987) and theremarks contained in Wells (1982) who are largely taxonomic in theirapproach and who do not see change taking place, hence there is nodynamic element in their descriptions. Additional data has been providedby the recordings made so far for A Sound Atlas of Irish English1 whichthe author is currently compiling and for which approximately one third ofthe projected sound material is already available. In particular over 100recordings of young people of both sexes under 25 were made in 2000 and2001 and these have provided the data for the analysis of the NewPronunciation of southern Irish English offered below, see section 5. Therecordings consisted of anonymous informants reading a set of 54 shortsentences which contain all the lexical sets of English and additional testsentences which were devised to capture realisations of sounds which areof special interest in the context of Irish English. Many of the informantsalso read a small stretch of continuous text of some 280 words which againcontained instances of sounds relevant to the pronunciation of IrishEnglish.

2. English in Dublin

The English language has been spoken in Dublin since the late 12th centurywhen the first English and Anglo-Norman settlers came up from thesouth-east where they had landed around 1169. The next few centuries

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form the first period which lasted up to around 1600 and which in itsclosing phase was characterised by considerable Gaelicisation outside thecapital and within. Despite this resurgence of native culture and language,English never died out in the capital and there are some features ofcolloquial Dublin English which can be traced to the first period (Hickey2002). The 17th century in Ireland marks the beginning of the second periodand is characterised chiefly by the re-introduction of English on alarge-scale. This happened in the north of the country with a steady influxof immigrants from the Scottish Lowlands who came to form the base ofthe Ulster Protestant community. In the south, the new English settlers cameas a result of plantations and land confiscations under Oliver Cromwell inthe mid 17th century; the input here was largely from the west midlands andnorth-west of England.

2.1. Documentation

The records of Dublin English are slight and consist before 1600 mainly ofmunicipal records which here and there betray the kind of English whichmust have been spoken in the city (Henry 1958). For an historicalbackground to present-day speech one must look to the elocutionistThomas Sheridan (the father of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan)who in 1781 published A Rhetorical Grammar of the English Languagewith an appendix in which he commented on the English used by middleclass Dubliners, the ‘gentlemen of Ireland’ in his words, which he regardedas worthy of censure on his part. Sheridan’s remarks are a valuable sourceof information on what Dublin English was like two centuries ago. Amongthe features he listed are the following (the phonetic values have beenascertained with reasonable certainty by interpreting his own system oftranscription which is decipherable and fairly consistent).

1) Middle English /e:/ was not raised to /i:/. The pronunciation [e:] canstill be heard in Dublin in words like tea, sea, please. Of these, thefirst is still found as a caricature of a by-gone Irish pronunciation ofEnglish. Hogan (1927: 65) noted in his day that the non-raised vowelwas rapidly receding. Today it is somewhat artificial; thepronunciation is also found in Northern Ireland, where equally it is aretention of an earlier value.

2) A pronunciation of English /ai/, from Middle English /i:/, as [ei] isfound, though it is uncertain whether Sheridan means this or perhaps[qi] which would tally better with what is known from present-dayDublin English as in wild [wqil(d)].

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When discussing consonants Sheridan remarks on ‘the thickening (of) thesounds of d and t in certain situations’. Here he is probably referring to therealisation of dental fricatives as alveolar plosives as found in colloquialforms of Dublin English today. There is no hint in Sheridan of anythinglike a distinction between dental and alveolar plosive realisations, which isan essential marker of local versus non-local speech today.

(1) Local Dublin Non-local Dublin thank, tank [tænk] thank [tænk] tank [tænk]

Already in Sheridan’s day linguistic behaviour was apparently prevalentwhich aimed at dissociating middle class speech from more local forms asevidenced in the many instances of hypercorrection which he quotes:‘instead of great they [middle class Dubliners - Sheridan’s group ofspeakers, RH] say greet, for occasion, occeesion; days, dees, &c.’ (1781:142) [ee = /i:/ — RH].

2.2. Contemporary Dublin

The city of Dublin lies at the mouth of the river Liffey in the centre of theeast coast, and spreads along the shores of the horseshoe shape of Dublinbay. The suburbs, which have increased dramatically since the 1960’s,reach down to Bray and beyond into Co. Wicklow in the south, to the Westin the direction of Maynooth and to the north at least to Swords, the airportand beyond. The Dublin conurbation now encompasses about a third of thepopulation of the Republic of Ireland. Like any other modern city Dublin shows areas of high and lowsocial prestige. Within Dublin there is a clear divide between the north andthe south side of the city. The latter is regarded as more residentiallydesirable (with the exception of Howth and its surroundings on thepeninsula which forms the north side of Dublin bay). Within the souththere is a cline in prestige with the area from Ballsbridge and Donybrookout to Foxrock enjoying highest status. This is the area of certain keycomplexes like the Royal Dublin Society (an important exhibition and eventcentre in the capital) and the national television studios (RTE) and of thenational university (University College Dublin) in Belfield. This entire areais known by its postal code, Dublin 4. Indeed this number has given thename to a sub-accent within Dublin English which has been known as the‘Dublin 4 Accent’, now referred to simply as ‘D4 English’ or as‘Dartspeak’, ‘Dart English’. The less prestigious parts of the city are known

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by their district names such as Tallaght to the west, the Liberties in thecentre of the city and Ballymun in the north near the airport, the onlysuburb in Ireland with high-rise flats and which is associated with adversesocial conditions.

2.3. Varieties of Dublin English

Any discussion of English in Dublin necessitates a few basic divisions intotypes. For the present contribution a twofold division, with a furthersubdivision, is employed. The first group consists of those who use theinherited popular form of English in the capital. The term ‘local’ is intendedto capture this and to emphasise that these speakers are those who showstrongest identification with traditional conservative Dublin life of whichthe popular accent is very much a part. The reverse of this is ‘non-local’which refers to sections of the metropolitan population who do not wish anarrow, restrictive identification with popular Dublin culture. This groupthen subdivides into a larger, more general section which I label‘mainstream’ and a currently smaller group which vigorously rejects aconfining association with low-prestige Dublin. For want of a better term,this group is labelled ‘fashionable’.

(2) 1) local Dublin English 2) non-local Dublin English — a) mainstream Dublin English b) fashionable Dublin English

A central issue in contemporary Dublin English is the set of vowel shiftswhich represent the most recent phonological innovation in Irish English(see below). This is not suprising as Dublin is a typical location forlanguage change given the following features. 1) The city has expandedgreatly in population in the last three or four decades. The increase inpopulation has been due both to internal growth and migration into the cityfrom the rest of the country. 2) It has undergone an economic boom in thelast 15 years or so, reflected in its position as an important financial centreand a location for many computer firms which run their Europeanoperations from Dublin. The increase in wealth and international positionhas meant that many young people aspire to an urban sophistication whichis divorced from strongly local Dublin life. For this reason thedevelopments in fashionable Dublin English diverge from those in localDublin English, indeed can be interpreted as a reaction to it. This type oflinguistic behaviour can be termed local dissociation as it is motivated bythe desire of speakers to hive themselves off from vernacular forms of avariety spoken in their immediate surroundings (Hickey 1998, 1999b). It isfurthermore a clear instance of speaker-innovation leading to language

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change, much in the sense of James and Lesley Milroy (J. Milroy 1992:169-72; 1999; J. and L. Milroy 1997).

2.4. Features of local Dublin English

2.4.1. Vowels

Breaking Long high vowels are realised as two syllables with a hiatusbetween the two when they occur in closed syllables. The hiatus element is[j] with front vowels and [w] with back vowels.

(3) a clean [klijqn] but: be [bi:] b fool [fuwql] who [hu:]

The disyllabification of long high vowels extends to diphthongs which havea high ending point as can be seen in the following realisations.

(4) a time [tqjqm] but: fly [flqi] b pound [pewqn] how [heu]

If one recognises a cline within local Dublin English then thisdisyllabification is definitely at the lower end. For instance, the front onsetof the vowel in the MOUTH lexical set is quite common in colloquial, butnot necessarily local varieties of Dublin English. However, one does nothave an hiatus [w] or the deletion of the post-sonorant nasal (with orwithout a glottal stop as trace). Further prominent vocalic characteristics of Dublin English are listedin the following.

(5) a Fronting of /au/ down [deun] — [deun] b Historically short vowels before /r/ circle [se:k)] first [fu:s(t)] c Early modern English short /u/ Dublin [dublqn]

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2.4.2. Consonants

Cluster simplification In the area of consonants there are equally clearindications of popular Dublin English. Some are unique to lower registersand others are extensions of features found in more accepted forms ofDublin English. Unique features include the simplification of consonantalsyllable codas, particularly of stops after fricatives or sonorants.Intermediate registers may have a glottal stop as a trace of the stop inquestion.

(6) a pound [peun(?)] b last [læ:s(?)]

Fortition of dental fricatives It is safe to assume that the realisation of thefirst sound in the THOUGHT lexical set in popular Dublin English as analveolar plosive [t] is not a recent phenomenon. Hogan (1927: 71f.) notesthat it is found in the seventeenth century plays (assuming that t, drepresent [t, d]) and furthermore in the Dublin City Records (from the firstperiod, i.e. before the 17th century, see above) where the third personsingular ending -th appears as -t. According to Hogan alveolar realisationsare common in rural varieties in the south and south-west of Ireland. Herethey are probably a contact phenomenon deriving ultimately from therealisation of non-palatal /t, d/ in Irish. Hogan incidentally also remarks onthe dental stops which are found in present-day Irish English (loc. cit.). Theacoustic sensitivity of the Irish to the shift from dental to alveolar derivesnot least from the merger which results in local Dublin English and otherforms of Irish English, see below.

T-lenition The clearest phonetic feature of southern Irish English is therealisation of /t/ as a fricative with identical characteristics of the stop, i.e.an apico-alveolar fricative in weak positions. This cannot be indicated inEnglish orthography of course but vacillation between t and th for /t/ isfound already in the Kildare Poems (probably early 14th century, Hickey1993: 220f.) and would suggest that it was a feature of English in Ireland inthe first period. Extensions include the lenition of /t/ in a weak position beyond theinitial stage of apico-alveolar fricative to /r/ then to /h/ with final deletion asin the following instance.

(7) /t/ [8] F [r] F [h] F ø water [w<:8Q] [w<:rQ] [w<:hQ] [w<:Q]

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Mention should be made of the merger of dental and alveolar stops inlower-class Dublin English. Although it may seem to non-Irish ears thatEnglish dental fricatives are always realised as alveolar stops this is by nomeans the case. There is a clear distinction between the dental stops [t] and[d], which are the equivalents of English [2] and [3] respectively, and thealveolar stops [t] and [d] which correspond to those in non-Irish varieties.Irish ears are tuned to this difference and the retraction of the dental stopsto an alveolar position is immediately noticeable and hence stigmatised astypical of low-prestige speech.

(8) mainstream speech local speech thinker [tinkQ] thinker, tinker [tinkQ] tinker [tinkQ]

breathe [bri:d] breathe, breed [bri:d] breed [bri:d]

3. Dissociation: How to avoid local features

Speakers of both mainstream and fashionable Dublin English (seedistinction in (2) above) generally avoid the local features just outlined.What distinguishes the latter from the former group, however, is that ithas developed strategies for a maximisation of the phonetic differencebetween realisations typical of their own variety and that of local DublinEnglish. This has been achieved by moving away — in phonologicalspace — from the realisations found locally. The following list givessome indication of what is involved here.

a) Local Dublin English has a distinction between historic back andfront short vowels before /r/, in the NURSE and GIRL lexical sets,[nu:(r)s] and [ge:(r)l] respectively. But because the open frontrealisation is so typical of local Dublin English, there is a migration infashionable Dublin English of historically front long vowels to thecentral rhotic type as seen in words from the SQUARE lexical set likecarefully [kQ:fqli] and daring [dq:rin]. This realisation has noprecedent in the history of southern Irish English.

b) Connected with the previous feature is the strict avoidance of schwaretraction before /r/ in NURSE words such as third [tQ:d], purse[pQ:s], not [tu:(r)d] and [pu:(r)s].

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c) The local back rounded vowel /u/ in the STRUT lexical set is replacedby an unrounded front vowel which is almost /i/, as in Sunday[si-nde].

d) A syllable-final retroflex /r/, [5], is used which has the advantage ofmarking the /r/ even more clearly vis à vis the popular forms ofDublin English which, if at all, have only a weak syllable-final /r/.

4. The Dublin Vowel Shift

In present-day Ireland the major instance of language change isundoubtedly the shift in pronunciation of Dublin English. To understandthe workings of this shift one must realise that in the course of the 1980´sand 1990´s the city underwent an unprecedented expansion in populationsize and in relative prosperity with a great increase in internationalconnections to and from the metropolis. The in-migrants to the city, whoarrived there chiefly to avail of the job opportunities resulting from theeconomic boom formed a group of socially mobile, weak-tie speakers andtheir section of the city´s population has been a key locus for languagechange. The change which arose in the last two decades of the 20th centurywas reactive in nature: fashionable speakers began to move away in theirspeech from their perception of popular Dublin English, a classic case ofdissociation in an urban setting (Hickey 2000). This dissociation wasrealised phonetically by a reversal of the unrounding and lowering ofvowels typical of Dublin English hitherto. The reversal was systematic innature, with a raising and rounding of low back vowels and the retractionof the /ai/ diphthong and the raising of the />i/ diphthong, representing themost salient elements of the change (Hickey 1999b). In present-day Dublin the speakers of what is labelled here‘fashionable Dublin English’ (see (2) above) are engaging in a shift of mostlong vowels and diphthongs which constitutes a divergent developmentaway from local Dublin English. This shift centres around the /ai/diphthong and the low back vowels. It has led to a phonetic redistributionof values for these sounds which are discussed in the following sections.

The variable (ai) in Irish English The first point to note when consideringthe vowel shift is that a conservative pronunciation of (ai) in Dublin ismaintained in lower-class speech as [qi]. There is historical documentationof this realisation which is particularly revealing as it shows that it was

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typical of the middle classes in late 18th century Ireland. For instance,Fanny Burney (1752-1840), in her reminiscensces of famous individualsshe knew, imitates the Irish accent of the playwright Richard BrinsleySheridan (1751-1816) by referring to his pronunciation of kind as [kqind],indicated orthographically as koind. This pronunciation seems to havebecome part of the stereotype of an Irish accent and authors such as Kiplingused the oi spelling to indicate this as in woild Oirland. Now the supraregional variety of the south has for (ai) a diphthongwhich has a low mid or low front starting point, i.e., either [ai] or [æi]. Thisrealisation tallies with that in many varieties of Irish, although the positionin Irish is of no relevance to the Dublin Vowel Shift. What is significanthere is that a non-central starting point is the commonest one fornon-regional varieties of Irish English. This pronunciation would seemeither to have developed independently in the capital or to have beenadopted from the large influx of western rural speakers, most of whomwould have had the [æi], [ai] realisation. Recall that in the latter half of the19th century at a time when the population of Ireland sank by severalmillions, that of Dublin actually increased by almost 10%. If one now considers local Dublin English one finds that itsrealisation for (ai) as [qi] is quite stigmatised in Dublin. One can maintainthat the greater the phonetic separation of middle class Dublin English frommore local forms in the capital grew, the more the corresponding forms ofthe lower social classes became stigmatized. However, the matter does not end there. For fashionable Dublinersthe [ai, æi] pronunciations sufficiently delimit them from local DublinEnglish. But increasingly a back starting-point is being used with thisdiphthong, i.e. for a word like style the pronunciation is not [stail] butrather [st<il]. This retracted starting-point is particularly noticeable before/r/ so that the name of the country is realised as [<irlqnd] rather than[airlqnd]. The social group which most clearly shows this pronunciation is thatreferred to above and their variety is that which I choose to term‘fashionable Dublin English’ as this term best captures the element of voguewhich is associated with pronunciations within Dublin which are maximallydistinct from the conservative and strongly local forms.

Distribution of the (ai) shift The most noticeable aspect of the shift is that itdoes not apply to all possible inputs as can be seen from the followingwords with (ai).

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(9) a rice [rais] : rise [r<iz] b tight [tai8] : tide [t<i9] c life [laif] : lives [l<ivz]

The generalisation here is that retraction to [<i] only occurs before voicedsegments. This makes phonetic sense: the retracted onset of the diphthongassumes a laxer muscular setting and the tongue travels a longer distancedown and back for [<i] than it does for the unshifted realisation [ai]. It is difficult to predict whether this distribution will remain typicalfor the Dublin Vowel Shift. It may very well be that it is only characteristicof an initial phase and that the shift will spread to all instances of (ai),masking the present distribution. Or it may freeze at this stage, as has beenthe case with the similar phenomenon of Canadian Raising (Chambers1973) which maintains a differential realisation of the vowels in the PRICEand MOUTH lexical sets before voiceless and voiced segments respectively.

General shift of low vowels The vowel shift in Dublin English is not justconfined to the realisation of (ai). Other vowels in the area of thisdiphthong are affected, particularly the diphthong in the CHOICE lexical setand the low and mid vowels in the LOT and THOUGHT sets which usuallyhave a lower realisation than in Britain (or unrounded in the case of theLOT vowel).

(10) a boy /oi/ F [b>i] b pot />/ F [p>8] — [p<8] c law /o:/ F [l>:]

These realisations show that the change has the characteristics of a chainshift, that is, it affects several segments by a process of retraction andraising in phonological vowel space. This can be seen from the followingtables which summarise the various vowel developments.

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(11) Summary of the present-day Dublin Vowel Shift

a) retraction of diphthongs with a low or back starting point time [taim] à [t<im] toy [t>i] à [toi], [toi]

b) raising of low back vowels cot [k>8] à [ko8] caught [k>:8] à [ko:8], [ko:8]

oi o: á á Raising oi o o: á á á >i > >: Retraction ai à <i

4.1. The spread of the shift

It should be noted that these changes are progressing by a slow and gradualprocess which affects all the elements which are potential candidates for thechange. In this respect the change is progressing by means ofNeogrammarian advance (Labov 1981), i.e. every possible input is affectedby the change. But because of the status of Dublin English as the variety ofthe country’s capital the change is also being picked up elsewhere in thecountry. In these cases, the spread is frequently by lexical diffusion (Wang1969, Chen & Wang 1975) because speakers outside of Dublin adopt thechange through particularly frequent words they hear with the new Dublinpronunciation and not because of any motivation to dissociate themselvesfrom any group of low-prestige speakers in their surroundings, the internalmotivation in Dublin (Hickey 1999b). Because of the status of Dublin, non-vernacular speech of the capitalacts as a de facto standard or at least guideline for the rest of the countrywhen others, outside of Dublin, are seeking a non-local, generallyacceptable form of Irish English. This has also meant, for instance, that theretroflex [5] used by fashionable speakers in Dublin is spreading out of thecapital, especially with younger urbanites from different parts of thecountry (see below).

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5. The New Pronunciation

The remainder of this contribution is devoted to describing those featuresof fashionable Dublin English which are fast becoming typical ofsupraregional forms of southern Irish English as a whole. The spread offeatures of fashionable Dublin English has accelerated considerably in thepast few years. Whereas for studies by the present author in the early andmid 1990’s a pattern of lexical diffusion of new pronunciations — that is,for certain key words — was much more common (Hickey 1998), in thepast year or two during systematic collection for A Sound Atlas of IrishEnglish this sporadic distribution has become recessive and a generaladoption of fashionable Dublin English features is presently widespreadamong certain sections of the younger population as will now be explained. Apparent time study of Irish English shows that female speakers over30 do not always, and those over 40 rarely, have the features which are soindicative of the New Pronunciation of Dublin English (see outline below).In the recordings for A Sound Atlas of Irish English nearly all femalesunder 25, whose self-image, as this could be judged by the present authorduring data collection, was one of modernity and sophistication, had theNew Pronunciation. This has become so widespread over the entire southof Ireland that for the author, when he was collecting the data for the soundatlas, it became a purely academic exercise to ask a young female urbaniteto read the sample sentences used as a basis for collecting the data. Thepronunciation used was that outlined below. Because the key features ofthis accent of English can be easily classified and, more importantly,because these tend to occur as a group of innovative features, they will bereferred to collectively as the New Pronunciation of southern IrishEnglish.2 The use of capital letters is intended to stress the fact that we aredealing here with a fairly unified, structural re-alignment of the entireaccent of southern Irish English and not just one or two minor changes inpronunciation.

5.1. Six features of modern Southern Irish English pronunciation

The New Pronunciation of southern Irish English involves above all therealisation of vowels and of the liquids /l/ and /r/. Other segments do notseem to be affected by the shift in pronunciation. Specifically, the complexarea of coronal segments (Hickey 1984a) has not been altered to anysignificant extent. However, two points should be emphasised in thiscontext: 1) the dental stop realisations of the THOUGHT and THIS lexicalsets, which has been part of the supraregional variety of English in thesouth of Ireland since at least the beginning of the 20th century, aremaintained in the New Pronunciation. 2) among young female speakers,

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especially in Dublin, there is a slight affrication of /t/ and /d/ insyllable-initial position. This may be an age-grading phenomenon whichdisappears with full adulthood and can perhaps be compared to similarphenomena, such as the slight nasalisation of vowels found with youngGerman girls. It is certainly sub-phonemic at the present. However, it isnotoriously difficult to predict the course of such developments. After all,the lenition of alveolar stops in positions of high sonority, which led to theweakening of intervocalic and word-final/pre-pausal /t/ being realised as africative, probably started in a similar sub-phonemic fashion.

5.1.1. /ai/-retraction

In mainstream Irish English, the form of supraregional English used in theRepublic of Ireland up to recently by the younger generation and still foundwith speakers of the middle and older generations, the diphthong /ai/ isrealised as [ai]. But an essential feature of the Dublin Vowel Shift (seeabove) is the retraction of this vowel to a value like [<i]. The exactpronunciation varies here. In the recordings made so far for A Sound Atlasof Irish English the retraction was greatest before /l/ as this tends to besomewhat velarised in the New Pronunciation (see below). Thus words likestyle and Ireland show a clearly retracted vowel.

5.1.2. Back vowel raising

In its original form in the capital, the Dublin Vowel Shift consists of lowvowel retraction and low back vowel raising (see summary under (11)above). The only exception to this general movement in vowel space is thenon-rhotic long low vowel in the BATH and DANCE lexical sets. This vowelis always [a:] in Irish English. A retraction to [<:] would be seen as anadoption of an English accent and has always been regarded asunacceptable for the native Irish, indeed speakers with this retraction, areridiculed as having a ‘grand [gr<:nd] accent’. Probably, for this reason ithas not been participating in the general retraction and raising of the DublinVowel Shift. When comparing the New Pronunciation with conservativemainstream Irish English it is remarkable that a merger has occurred, thelack of which has hitherto been a prominent feature of Irish English. This isthe for/four-merger where the formerly distinct vowels />:/ and /o:/ havecollapsed due to the raising of the former to [o:] and then to [o:], itsrealisation in fashionable Dublin English today.

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5.1.3. /au/-fronting

In Dublin English, and indeed in traditional east-coast varieties of IrishEnglish in general (Hickey 2001), the vowel in the MOUTH lexical set has afront starting point, either [æ] or [e]. A realisation as [au] is moreconservative in Dublin and in rural areas it is traditionally typical of thesouth-west and west of Ireland. The fronted onset of the /au/ diphthong hasnot been the subject of sociolinguistic censure in Dublin and so hasmigrated into the New Pronunciation via fashionable Dublin English whereit is regular for words of the MOUTH lexical set. Indeed a fronted andsomewhat raised starting point as [e] is common among fashionableurbanites and is one of the features which is criticised in the Dart accent orDartspeak, a somewhat vague reference to the speech of those who live insouthern parts of the city which are served by the suburban railway knownas the Dart (an acronym deriving from Dublin Area Rapid Transport).

5.1.4. SOFT-lengthening

Here one is again dealing with a traditional feature of Dublin English. Thevowel of the LOT lexical set, when it occurs before a voiceless fricative, islengthened. This in its turn is in keeping with the general Early ModernEnglish lengthening of /a:/ before such fricatives and is seen in words likestaff, pass, path in southern British English (Wells 1982: 203-6). Inconservative mainstream Irish English soft-lengthening (to use a cover termwith a typical word involving this lengthening) is not found, but againbecause it is present in fashionable Dublin English, it is spreading to the restof the country.

5.1.5. /r/-retroflexion

Traditionally, the realisation of /r/ in southern Irish English is as a velarisedalveolar continuant, a pronunciation found in western and south-westernvarieties of Irish to this day and so it can be assumed that this type of /r/resulted in Irish English from transfer of the Irish realisation of the samephoneme (Hickey 1986). In Northern Ireland, a retroflex /r/ is to be found,a parallel with Scotland, which may well have been the source for thisrealisation, coming into the north with the large-scale settlement ofLowland Scots at the beginning of the 17th century. In current fashionable Dublin English a retroflex /r/ is also to befound, though definitely independently of the occurrence in NorthernIreland as varieties of English there have played no role in the shaping ofthe speech of fashionable urbanites in Dublin. Dissociation from the

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traditional velarised realisation is most likely the reason for the retroflex [5]which has become so widespread throughout Ireland among youngerfemale speakers. A slightly raised /a:/ ([æ:], [e:]) co-occurs with theretroflexion of the /r/ so that one has pronunciations like card [kæ:5d] forcard.

5.1.6. /l/-velarisation

One of the sample sentences used for the recordings of A Sound Atlas ofIrish English was There's a gap in the field. The reason for this was tocheck the pronunciation of syllable-final /l/. Traditionally, Irish English hasan alveolar [l] in all syllable positions. A velarised [1] is really only a featureof contact Irish English, i.e. of the English of native speakers of Irish, andthis was confirmed by recordings in two Irish-speaking regions made forthe current sound atlas. However, the recordings for young female speakerswith the New Pronunciation show a definite velarisation of /l/ in thisposition: [fi:q1d]. This was not due breaking of the long high vowel /i:/. It istrue that this occurs in local Dublin English, e.g. [fijqld] for field, but thisbreaking is not a feature of fashionable Dublin English. Quite the oppositeis the case: it is avoided as too strong an indicator of local speech in thecapital, i.e. a word like school would not be pronounced as [skuwql] byfashionable urbanites. The development of [1], or its adoption from otheraccents of English, should be seen as a reaction to the traditional alveolar [l]so long a prominent feature of Irish accents.

Apart from the above six features there are others which play a minor rolein the sound profile of the New Pronunciation. One obvious feature oflocal Dublin English which has avoided stigma and hence is found infashionable speech in the city is the loss of /hw/ [w] in words like whale,while and which leads to mergers of pairs like which and witch.Traditionally, the occurrence of [w] in all words beginning with wh is aprominent feature of Irish English (Hickey 1984b), but if the NewPronunciation establishes itself in the next generation as the newsupraregional form of English then this will no longer be the case.

5.2. Irish, British and American English

When discussing the rise of the New Pronunciation of Irish English onemight be tempted to see it as something which is due to an increasinginfluence of either British or American English, or a combination of both,on emerging forms of Irish English among fashionable speakers in Dublin.

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However, this is definitely not the case in any systematic way. Indeed Iwould doubt that either form of English has had or has any significantinfluence on Irish English, north or south. There may well be parallels witheither American or British English (see discussion below). However, thesewould appear to be coincidental and for each parallel which may be found,there are internal reasons within the existing varieties of Irish English whichcan account adequately for their occurrence, as outlined above in thediscussion of dissociation in Dublin English. Nonetheless, the parallels arelisted and remarked upon below.

5.2.1. Parallels with American English

1) Use of retroflex /r/ Among major varieties of English, American Englishis known for its use of a retroflex [5] in its standard form. Locations inBritain which also show this realisation are the south-west of England(traditionally) and large parts of Scotland.

2) Use of intervocalic alveolar flap Among the allophones of /t/ inintervocalic position in the New Pronunciation is a flap as in many forms ofAmerican English. This was produced by many young female speakers inthe test sentence They've a new water supply. In conservative mainstreamIrish English the realisation here would be as a fricative, [w>:8Q]. In localDublin English a glottal stop would be found: [w<:?Q].

3) For/four-merger For those speakers with the New Pronunciation, eitherdirectly from the Dublin Vowel Shift or by dissemination from the capital,the vowels in the words for and four have merged. This is true of manyforms of English, not just American English (which is of course rhotic), butfor all non-rhotic varieties, as in the Southern Hemisphere as well.

Despite the above parallels, there can be no question of young Irishspeakers adopting anything like an American pronunciation of English.There are many obvious differences, such as the lack of unrounding withthe vowel in the LOT lexical set or the realisations of alveolar/dentalconsonants which are so different in Irish English when compared toAmerican English.

5.2.2. Parallels with British English

When one considers British English within the context of Irish English, thefirst point to note is that the former is not something which is regarded asworthy of emulation by the Irish, and certainly not in the form of Received

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Pronunciation. Quite the opposite is the case: for any Irish person to imitatean English accent is to make themselves ridiculous in front of his/her Irishcompatriots.

1) Velarisation of syllable-final /l/ The velarised [1] which has begun toappear in the New Pronunciation has a clear parallel in southern BritishEnglish though it is not anything like as old. The vocalisation of [1] whichis so often found in colloquial forms of English in the south-east of Britainhas no counterpart in Irish English.

2) /ai/-retraction The realisation of /ai/ as [<i] is paralleled by the samepronunciation in many forms of southern British English. However, herethe comparison must end. For in fashionable Dublin English there was, andto a large extent still is, a phonetically determined distribution whereby /ai/is only retracted before voiced consonants, i.e. in the PRIDE but not in thePRICE lexical set.

3) Back vowel raising The raised articulation of low back vowels which hasbegun recently in Ireland is an established feature of southern BritishEnglish and is part of a very long-term shift in long vowel values whichcommenced in late Middle English. However, the raising of back vowels inIrish English is not an historical continuation of an older process but areaction to existing open vowel values in popular Dublin English.

4) /au/-fronting The /au/-fronting, which is so much a part of the NewPronunciation, is not so much a parallel with Received Pronunciation aswith vernacular forms of English, especially in London and the HomeCounties and beyond. In Ireland this is a feature of Dublin English whichfashionable speakers did not dissociate themselves from and hence it hasbecome a feature of the New Pronunciation (see above).

6. The spread of fashionable Dublin English

If the observations of the present author in his studies of Dublin and IrishEnglish in general during the 1990’s are correct, the New Pronunciationmanaged to establish itself among the young female generation in less thana decade. The rapidity of this development gives rises to a number ofquestions. The adoption of a new pronunciation implies fairly extensiveexposure to this accent. Traditional accounts of the spread of change wouldsee the New Pronunciation emanating out of Dublin in wave-like form togradually encompass the entire Republic of Ireland. But there are twoserious objections to this view of the change. The first is that traditional

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accents of Irish English in the counties surrounding Dublin, namelyWicklow, Kildare and Meath, as used by the male and older female sectionof the population there do not show the shifts typical of the NewPronunciation, a fact confirmed by recordings for A Sound Atlas of IrishEnglish. The second objection to the wave model has to do with thetime-scale. A gradual diffusion would take decades before reaching theedges of Ireland. But for instance in the recordings for Kerry, aconsiderable distance from Dublin, the same New Pronunciation was foundamong younger females as, say in counties Carlow or Offaly which are lessthan 100 kilometres from Dublin. If one dismisses gradual diffusion through speaker contact withoutspeaker movement (the wave-model), then there are two remaining options.The first is that there was considerable speaker movement with largenumbers of young fashionable Dubliners carrying their pronunciation toremote parts in the south-west and west of Ireland. But that is entirelyimprobable and there is no evidence of such demographic movement. Thesecond option is that the mass-media have played the decisive role. Ingeneral sociolinguists do not attribute media, such as television or radio, amajor role in the spread of change. However, the situation in contemporaryIreland is different. One should remember that the changes in DublinEnglish are clearly in evidence in the speech of newscasters and programmepresenters in the national television network, RTE (< Radio Telefís Éireann‘Radio and Television of Ireland’). This network is located in the part ofDublin which first began to show the shift in the 1980’s. And, of course,the employees of such an institution would be just the sector of thepopulation which one would expect to find dissociating themselves fromthe putatively narrow confines of local Dublin speech. With regard to thedissemination of the New Pronunciation, one should note that exposure tothe national television network is universal in the Republic of Ireland. Asthe presenting staff of the three English-speaking channels which existnearly all exhibit the New Pronunciation, this accent reaches audiences inparts of the country distant from Dublin which would otherwise have onlylimited opportunities to realise what fashionable Dublin English is like.

7. Conclusion

It is premature to say what will happen to the New Pronunciation of IrishEnglish. For its continuation the behaviour of fashionable Dublin Englishspeakers is most important. Assuming that the unarticulated goal of thesespeakers is to evolve a form of speech phonetically distinct from that oflocal Dublin English, then that goal has been all but reached. The shift has

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created new allophones, [<i] for former [ai], [oi] and [oi] for former [>i]but there are no threatening mergers so that there is no system-internalpressure to continue on a shift cycle and to re-align phonemic oppositionswhich are under threat at the moment. The other developments such as therise of a retroflex /r/, of velarised /l/ and the adoption of /au/-fronting haveequally not affected the sound system and so there is no internal pressure tocontinue to different realisations again. The present situation is one in which the New Pronunciation is muchin vogue with younger speakers. To pick up the reference in the title of thischapter, it is ‘cool’ nowadays in Ireland to retract one’s vowels, retroflexone’s r’s, velarise one’s l’s and front one’s /au/’s. This fact will guaranteethat, at least for female speakers and probably for males with a certain timelag as well, this pronunciation will be retained and carried through to thenext generation. As it is already preferred to local traditional dialects, thechances are tipped in favour of the New Pronunciation becoming thesupraregional standard of the Republic of Ireland in the not-too-distantfuture.

Notes

1 Further information about this project can be obtained from the websiteaccessible at http://www.uni-due.de/IERC (= Irish English ResourceCentre).

2 The New Pronunciation applies to the Republic of Ireland and does not seem toaffect English as pronounced in Northern Ireland. Although the section of A SoundAtlas of Irish English for the north of Ireland has not been completed, thespeakers from this part of the country who have already been recorded do notshow the New Pronunciation. Donegal, in the extreme north-west, would seem tobe in a somewhat different position. As part of the Republic of Ireland it hasmuch greater exposure to the New Pronunciation than do adjacent counties inNorthern Ireland such as Derry, Tyrone or Fermanagh. Certainly, the few youngfemale Donegal speakers who were recorded in random sampling in Dublin aspart of A Sound Atlas of Irish English showed the New Pronunciation to almostthe same extent as their counterparts from other regions of the Republic of Irelandwho had come to live in Dublin.

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