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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 725

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

Authority and authenticity in contemporary spoken Irish: An urban-rural divide?

Authors: Ó Murchadha, Noel Pádraig
Submitted by: O Murchadha, Noel Padraig (University of Limerick, Ireland)

Traditionally, the local vernacular Irish spoken in the Gaeltacht, those small dispersed rural communities in Ireland where Irish is one of the community languages, have been perceived as the most prestigious and correct forms of spoken Irish. Although not a uniform variety, the Gaeltacht vernacular has been valorised and recognised as a quasi-official model for spoken Irish and it has been central in language planning initiatives and in all discussions on the standardisation of written Irish. Meanwhile, varieties not conforming to this model have been overtly stigmatised and criticised. For instance, ‘post-Gaeltacht speech’, the Irish spoken by portions of the more urban revivalist speech community outside the Gaeltacht is often labelled an artificial inauthentic variety.

This perception is in stark contrast with patterns of language use in the Gaeltacht as the local variety, particularly among speakers born since the 1960s, moves rapidly from the local model towards a type of speech that appears to be influenced by English, by the Irish practiced at school, in the peer group, in the broadcast media, in non-local Gaeltacht areas and in the post-Gaeltacht (Ó hIfearnáin & Ó Murchadha 2011).

Data are presented from fieldwork in the Munster Gaeltacht in which teenagers’ perceptions of variation in contemporary Irish are investigated using focus groups and speaker evaluation experiments where a distinction is made between data gathered when participants were aware and unaware of the nature of the study. Particular attention is paid to participants’ responses to the oft stigmatised post-Gaeltacht speech which is perceived to be a more urban variety.

In the responses to post-Gaeltacht speech offered when participants are aware of the nature of the study a familiar, predictable mismatch emerges between the apparant direction of language change and the participants’ responses. However, in the speaker evaluation experiment where participants are unaware of the nature of the study post-Gaeltacht speech is significantly upgraded in relation to its position vis à vis Gaeltacht speech and its position in evaluations made when participants are aware of the nature of the study. This is consistent with research elsewhere that suggests that speakers perceptions of variation are intricately linked with the direction of language change (Blommaert 2009; Coupland & Kristiansen 2011).

References

Blommaert, J. (2009) ‘A Sociolinguistics of globalization’, in Coupland, N. & Jaworski, A., eagí, The New Sociolinguistics Reader, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 560-574.

Coupland, N. & Kristiansen, T. (2011) ‘Critical perspectives on language (de)standardisation’, in Kristiansen, T. & Coupland, T., eagí, Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe, Osló: Novus, 11-38.

Ó hIfearnáin, T. & Ó Murchadha, N.P. (2011) ‘The perception of Standard Irish as a prestige target variety’, in Kristiansen, T. & Coupland, N., eagí, Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe, Osló: Novus Forlag, 97-104.