The Celtic Languages in Contact

On the ‘Celticity’ of Irish Newspapers – A Research Report Hildegard L.C. Tristram (University of Freiburg i.Brsg.) 1 1. Introduction Of all the print-media newspapers are the most commonly used. They are not literature in the sense of belles letters, but they should not be underestimated in their political, social and personal importance. No other printed product is as closely linked with everyday life as the newspapers. The day begins under their influence, and their contents mirror the events of the day with varying accuracy. Newspapers are strongly reader-oriented. They want to inform, but they also want to instil opinions. Specific choices of information shape the content level. Specific choices of language are resorted to in order to spread opinions and view- points. Language creates solidarity between the producers and the consumers of newspapers and thereby supports ideologies by specifically targeted linguistic means. Other strategies are employed for the same purpose, too. Visual aspects are of great importance, such as the typographical layout, the use of pictures, drawings, colours, fonts, etc. According to traditional views, Ireland is the place where people read more newspapers than anywhere else in the world, except perhaps for Iceland. Ac- cording to more recent sources, however, Ireland only comes twenty third out of 1 I am very grateful to the student researchers (Gm. ‘Hilfskräfte’) at the University of Pots- dam who have been involved in the analysis of the newspaper data at different stages since 1997, notably to Meinolf Bunsman, Irene Forsthoffer, Dr. Susanne Kries, Christina Bis- mark and Susanne Hübner. I also wish to thank the many students at Potsdam University between 1997 and 2006 who assisted in the data collection by reading and analysing Irish newspapers in their undergraduate courses on the languages of Ireland (Gm. ‘Proseminare’). Without their help and enthusiasm the project could not have advanced as much as it did. My special thanks go to Meinolf Bunsmann (1997) and Sandra Kaufhold (2004) for their unpublished research papers on the use of language in Irish newspapers. The present paper owes much to their perceptive insights. I also wish to thank Prof. Gearóid Mac Eoin (Gal- way) and Dr. Patricia Ronan (Uppsala) for their proposals of significant amendments of this paper. The responsibility for any mistakes and infelicities is of course entirely my own. 300 Hildegard L.C. Tristram 40 developed countries (Brady 1990: 70). The history of newspapers in Ireland began in 1649 with Oliver Cromwell and The Irish Monthy Mercury (Oram 1983: 21). He used the medium to spread the news about the defeat of the native forces and the victorious deeds of his army. The continuous history of newspapers in Ireland then started at the end of the 17th century with the Dublin Newsletter (1685, O’Toole 1992: xi). Cork was the first city outside the capital to publish a newspaper (1715). Soon Limerick followed (1716), then Waterford (1729) and Belfast (1737) which has one of the oldest continuously published newspapers in the world. By the end of the 19th century, newspapers had been established in all larger provincial towns. The language of the newspapers published in Ireland, however, was English, not Irish, due to the fact that the native Irish aristocracy had been replaced under English colonial rule. English was the language of power. When newspaper pro- duction became cheaper and the papers were readily affordable to the people, the use of English was reinforced and eventually added to the decline of the Irish language. Nevertheless, the newspapers proved to be a useful tool in the promotion of Catholic Emancipation and Home Rule. The growing popularity of TV and the Internet has led to a decline in the newspaper readership all around the world and did not stop at the Irish borders. But it is not only the general decline in readership that weakened the Irish newspaper market. It also had to compete against massive imports from neighbouring Great Britain and overseas. The imports usually belong to the ‘yellow’ press and they offer short and catchy news with a colourful layout. Due to the fact that they include pages full of commercials which are an im- portant source of revenue to the owner of the newspaper, they are cheaper than the more serious products of the upper market and more attractive to the uncriti- cal consumer. As the yellow press lacks journalistic seriousness, this brought about demands for a state-controlled regulation of the Irish newspaper market, because the representatives of Irish newspapers feared that they would lose com- mercially (Kiberd 1997, Kiberd 1999, Horgan 2001). To compete with the imports, they would have to change their principles of journalistic work. They would no longer be able to “reflect the wide diversity of opinion existing in so- ciety and, of course, [to] promote and encourage the formation of opinion by providing a channel for debate, analysis, and discussion” (Rapple 1997: 69). Ireland is a country where today the large majority of the population speaks English, albeit in an acculturated form (‘Irish English,’ ‘Hiberno-English,’ ‘An- glo-Irish’),2 while their ‘native’ language, Irish (Gaelic), is only spoken as an autochthonous community language by a very small minority of the Irish people in the Gaeltacht areas and by urban middle-class language activists. Both varieties of Irish show obvious signs as a semi-language with heavy influence from English on all linguistic levels, the urban variety being more strongly influenced 2 The different terms imply different attitudes toward the varieties of English spoken in Ire- land (Tristram 1997: 17-21). On the ‘Celticity’ of Irish Newspapers 301 than that of the Gaeltacht (cf. Ó Béarra 2007, Ó Curnáin 2007). In spite of this, most of the people in the Republic of Ireland and also to a large degree the population of Northern Ireland identify themselves with their Irish heritage, lin- guistically and culturally, and place emphasis on their being different from the people on the neighbouring island, i.e. the Island of Great Britain. The political tension of this area of contact between the English language and the people’s perceived Celtic heritage can be readily observed on the linguistic level in the use of language in the Irish newspapers. The use of three languages could actually form the object of linguistic research in Irish newspaper usage, i.e. Standard International (newspaper) English, Irish English, the language of shift and long-term linguistic accommodation in Ireland,3 and Irish (Gaelic), the heritage language of Ireland. While both con- temporary Irish English and Irish (Gaelic) have been reasonably well researched in their spoken realisations,4 their written realisations have been neglected outside of studies of the literary language. I am not aware of any study of their use in Irish newspapers. But the readers of this paper may perhaps teach me other- wise and I would be very grateful for possible references. From the angle of the sociology of language, I think it would be particularly interesting to discover how far the Irish language was and still is instrumental- ised in Irish newspapers, that is, to what extent it was and still is intentionally utilised as a tool to construct and maintain a specifically Irish identity. How con- sciously do Irish journalists make use of this tool? And how conscious are the journalists of the ‘Celticity’ of Irish (Gaelic) words, terms and entire articles in the context of the English of an Irish newspaper? Moreover, newspaper language is tied to the different types of texts it consists of. This means that the articles within one and the same issue of a newspaper differ in their use of style and linguistic register depending on the specific com- municative needs they satisfy. These purposes may be geared towards providing information (‘facts’). They may be of a persuasive nature serving the promotion of opinion. They may be instructive or they may serve entertainment and contact inducing purposes.5 Beside the political and ideological orientation of a paper and the specific re- quirements of the various types of articles, research into the use of the Irish lan- 3 Spoken Irish English differs considerably from Standard English, especially on the segmen- tal and suprasegmental levels of phonology and in its morpho-syntax. In the age of English as an international language and through school-teaching, it lost most of its specifically Irish English lexis of former centuries, much of which was historically due to bottom-up transfer from Irish, but also retained some of the Early Modern English lexis of the English and Scottish settlers during the plantation periods (16c. and 17c.). Cf. Bliss (1979), Joyce (1991), Hickey (2002, 2005). 4 See for instance Filppula (1999), Hickey (2002); O’Rahilly (1976 [1932]), Wagner (1958- 1969), MacCongáil & Wagner (1983), Ó Dochartaigh (1987), Wigger (2004), etc. 5 One is, of course, reminded here of the old rhetorical triad of speaker intensions of the docēre, delectare and movēre, as well as of the traditional rhetorical genres of expositio, descriptio, narratio and persuasio. 302 Hildegard L.C. Tristram guage in the newspaper context also needs to take into consideration which au- dience is targeted. National papers compete with regional and professional ones and are likely to differ in their use of the language. A further aspect which makes the study of Irish newspapers particularly interesting is the political divi- sion of the Island of Ireland. Northern Ireland, or more specifically the six coun- ties of the historical Province of Ulster, belongs to the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland). Since languages and their use are invariably moulded by the political circumstances they are subjected to, it would be a re- warding task to investigate how far the use of Irish differs in Northern and Southern Irish newspapers.

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