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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 764

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

‘It’s all a bit sporkly…’: ‘New Pronunciation’ of southern Irish English in radio advertising

Authors: O'Sullivan, Joan
Submitted by: O'Sullivan, Joan (University of Limerick, Ireland)

The second half of the 1990s saw the beginning of a period of economic growth in Ireland,   particularly in the capital, Dublin.  As a result of this economic ‘boom’, in-migration to Dublin city increased, creating what Hickey (1999, 2005) describes as a classic setting for language change.  In Dublin city, the desire for ‘urban sophistication’,  linked to Ireland’s increased prosperity and elevated international position, created a  need among ‘socially mobile’ and ‘weak-tie’ speakers (Hickey 2004, p. 46) for a non-local but socially acceptable form of Dublin English. In what Hickey refers to as ‘a classic case of dissociation in an urban setting’, a new form of pronunciation developed which differentiated and distanced itself from local speech forms. (Hickey 2004, p.46) The ensuing new form has spread at a rapid pace, not only in Dublin, but throughout southern Ireland, and the fact that its salient features are readily classifiable and occur as a set of features which are appropriated by a younger group of speakers, has prompted Hickey (2004, p. 48) to use the term New Pronunciation to describe this set of features.  Hickey (2005, p. 208) speculates that this New Pronunciation is the variety which   ‘will probably become the new supraregional variety’ given its influence on southern Irish English speech.

The discursive practices of particular societies are, according to Lee, reflected in their advertising, which, he tells us, is ‘the meeting place’ of many different ways of speaking (Lee 1992, p.171). Since New Pronunciation is seen by Hickey (2005) as indisputably the most important case of language change in contemporary Ireland, the extent to which this innovative development in Ireland’s linguistic environment is reflected in the Irish advertising context demands attention.

The paper will outline my research into the extent and functions of New Pronunciation of southern Irish English in advertising through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of 160 radio advertisements from RTE Radio1, (the principal radio channel of Irish public-service broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann) comprising 4 subcorpora of ads from the years 1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007.  Following Lee (1992), the ads were examined in terms of the presence of New Pronunciation in the ‘Action’ (associated with dialogic interaction of actors) and ‘Comment’ (associated with slogan or authoritative voice) components of the ads. (Sussex 1989 cited in Lee 1992) This analysis according to component is designed to shed more light on how this new form of pronunciation operates in the Irish advertising environment and to identify its role in this context.

References:

Hickey R. (1999) ‘Dublin English: current changes and their motivation’ in Foulkes, P. and  Docherty, G., eds., Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles, London: Arnold, 265-281

Hickey, R.(2004) A Sound Atlas of Irish English,  Berlin:Mouton.de Gruyter

Hickey, R. (2005) Dublin English - Evolution and Change,  Amsterdam: Benjamins

Lee, D. (1992) Competing Discourses: Perspective and Ideology in Language, London: Longman