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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1112

Part of Session 181: Folk linguistics and society (Other abstracts in this session)

Irish English: the perspective of migrants to Ireland

Authors: Migge, Bettina M.
Submitted by: Migge, Bettina M. (University College Dublin, Ireland)

Much of the research in Folklinguistics focuses on the so-called emic view: It looks at how people conceptualize their own linguistic resources (e.g. Preston 2003). Much less attention is given to the ‘non-native’ perspective and specifically how people conceptualize the languages that they come in contact with and how this affects their integration process. In this presentation I want to explore the views about the English spoken in Ireland among immigrants to Ireland and explore the factors that condition language ideologies in the context of migration. The paper draws on data collected from 72 people of diverse national and social backgrounds (EU-15, EU-10, non-EU, including both L1 and L2 speakers of English) between 2006-2007 and 2008-2010. People’s views were obtained through informal interviews on a variety of issues related to their life in Ireland. Interviews were carried out by the author and her collaborators.

Migrants tended to perceive differences between Irish Englishes in similar ways to local Irish people. However, instead of using socially evaluative terms to differentiate them (e.g. posh vs rough), they rated varieties based on their mutual comprehensibility (or in fact divergence from international norms), using terms like ‘difficult/impossible to understand’ versus ‘clear’.  Positioning towards Irish varieties of English was variable across national groups. Continental Europeans described Irish ways of speaking English as ‘warm’ and ‘down-to-earth’ and sometime positively contrasted them to English spoken in the UK. They were also happy to embrace Irish norms and felt that his was a prerequisite for integration. Interviewees from the UK, by contrast, often did not recognize Irish English as a separate entity in its own right and felt very uneasy at the prospect of adopting aspects of it as this was perceived as a threat to their national identity. English speakers from the USA, Australia and New Zealand, tended to find features of Irish English quaint but interpreted their own use of them positively as it conferred them with internationality. While learning of Irish English or lack thereof was presented as being subject to individual and sociocultural factors in the case of most people, this was experienced differently by African migrants. They consistently argued that their own use of Irish English was generally met with criticism on the part of their Irish interlocutors. This suggests that language ideologies are not uniform (Kroskrity 2006), but are intricately tied up with and contribute to people’s sense of self and their aspirations, but also is subject to external factors.