In: Terttu Nevalainen, Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta and Minna Korhonen (eds) The Dynamics of Linguistic Variation: Corpus Evidence on English Past and Present. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008, 229-243.
Feature loss in 19th century Irish English
Raymond Hickey Essen University
Abstract
The current contribution is concerned with the disappearance of a number of dialect features from the English language in Ireland during the course of the 19th century. At the outset of this century there were many archaic and dialectal features from earlier input varieties of English as well as transfer features from Irish which had been carried over by bilinguals during the language shift to English. In the course of the 19th century a native middle class arose in Ireland due to the emancipation of, and general education for the Catholic population. This in turn led to the emergence of a supraregional variety of English in which many of the earlier features were removed and/or replaced by more mainstream ones, stemming from southern British usage. Developments were not always straightforward and many features were relegated to vernacular varieties or to positions of slighter salience, thus escaping censure by later generations. The consideration of just what paths was taken by what features forms the backbone of this contribution.
List of keywords for index
18th century prescriptivism, ASK-metathesis, CATCH-raising, dialect / archaic features, feature loss, lexical diffusion, SERVE-lowering, SOFT-lengthening, supraregional standard, transfer features from Irish, unraised long E, unshifted vowel values, variant pronunciation
Introduction
Any consideration of the development of English in Ireland in the past two centuries shows quite clearly that many features which were present in the 18th century were lost in the course of the 19th and possibly the early 20th century. This fact in itself is not surprising and similar loss is to be found among traditional dialects throughout Britain. What makes an investigation of such feature loss of general linguistic significance is its manner and course as well as the consideration of precisely what features disappeared. The loss of dialect features has its roots in external developments. As there is no language internal motivation for feature loss, such as analogical levelling or reanalysis of structure by language learners, only changes in social attitudes towards dialect speakers and assessment of their speech can be appealed to as a cause. Assuming this external perspective is helpful in finding the triggers for feature loss. These lie in developments located in the 18th century, chiefly the rise of prescriptivism in language use. Raymond Hickey Feature loss in 19th century Irish English Page 2 of 13
While variant pronunciations had been registered by authors writing in the 17th century, e.g. John Ray (1674) who pointed out many of these, it was not until the 18th century that the additional factor of social censure is to be found with authors writing about the English language (Beal 2004a, 2004b). In Britain the notion of accent as social symbol (Mugglestone 2003, Phillipps 1984) became prominent in the late modern period. The foundation for this was laid by the general dominance of London and its surroundings, a fact which also had a linguistic dimension. This contrasts with other European countries at the time, such as Germany, which lacked a central region which was socially and politically dominant. In such cases the primacy of one accent, and the attendant censure of other accents, is not to be found to anything like the same extent as in Britain. The position of the Celtic regions is interesting in this respect. The two major regions, Ireland and Scotland, were both heavily influenced by attitudes to language use in England. This was due in large part to native authors writing in English. These authors show a typical colonial stance: language use in the centre, in this case south-east England, was the model for the periphery. The fringe regions of Britain had to strive particularly hard for acceptance by those at the centre. In Ireland, Thomas Sheridan is the main author who embodies this attitude. In his attempts at acceptance in England, Sheridan was singularly censorious towards his compatriots in Ireland. Similar behaviour was also found in Scotland, e.g. with James Buchanan who specifically stated in the title of his The British Grammar (Buchanan 1762) that it was intended for use in Great Britain and Ireland. The Celtic periphery was explicitly included as remedial instruction was regarded as necessary there. The framework for this concern with language as a social symbol was undoubtedly determined by the large-scale political situation in the 18th century. Certainly, the relative peace of this period (see Johnston 1994 for a consideration of Ireland) contrasted strongly with the political and military vicissitudes of the 17th century during which more pressing matters than the relative value of accents were uppermost in society. Late 18th century prescriptivism continued into the 19th century and in the Irish context it was, if anything, strengthened by the rise of a native middle class. The roots of this lie in the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the introduction of general primary education for Catholics in the 1830s (Dowling 1971). This furthered the spread of English throughout Ireland and with the possibilities for social advancement which were now open to Catholics in Ireland a native middle class arose during the course of the 19th century. This class also developed notions of correct linguistic usage which ultimately were responsible for the shape of supraregional Irish English usage in the 20th century (Hickey 2003a). Some features were censured, and still are to this day, e.g. the expression of habitual aspect via do(es) be, while others escaped this censure and are part of the supraregional standard of the Republic of Ireland, Examples for the latter are the perfective aspect with after + V-ing, as in She is after breaking the glass ‘She has just broken the glass’, or the resultative aspect expressed via the word order ‘Object + Part Participle’ as in He has the work done ‘He has completed the work’. These changes part of the general process of supraregionalisation (Hickey, forthcoming). Just what is involved here and how the process proceeds depends on the specific conditions in the country or region where it occurs. What is certain is that supraregionalisation is an externally motivated instance of language change and Raymond Hickey Feature loss in 19th century Irish English Page 3 of 13 that it is driven by the desire by more educated speakers embedded in weak-tie social networks to remove obvious local features from their speech. The upper ceiling in supraregionalisation is determined by additional factors such as the presence of an extra-national norm of the same language, as is the case with standard British English vis à vis Irish English. Although vernacular features are lost on supraregionalisation there is never full approximation to the standard of the language in question as this would lead to a loss of linguistic identity for the group undergoing the supraregionalisation. Many features of Irish English pronunciation also disappeared in the course of the 19th century. These had various sources, both transfer from Irish by bilinguals during the long period of language shift and the retention of dialect and/or archaic features of English input to Ireland. The source is not the determining factor, or at least there is no evidence for this. Indeed the factors which were responsible for the censure of features and their subsequent loss are difficult, if not impossible, to identify definitively. But the salience of features (Hickey 2000) certainly played a role. Some features, such as ‘Unraised long E’ – speak [spe:k] – were perceived as indicative of a non-standard Irish English accent. This is clear from comments by authors on the Irish ‘brogue’ (Murphy 1943), a pronunciation of English in Ireland far removed from southern British accents. It is also obvious from the exploitation of such features in the speech of stage Irish characters by many 19th century authors in Ireland, e.g. Dion Boucicault in his plays (Blunt 1967, Duggan 1969). For the examination of feature loss in the current chapter, A Corpus of Irish English, compiled and published by the author (see Hickey 2003b), has been used. This corpus consists of some 80 texts spread across the history of Irish English from the early 14th century down to the 20th century. There are different texts represented in the corpus. For the present investigation, narrative prose and drama were the focus of particular attention. These text types are those where vernacular features appear most readily and hence are of value when tracing feature change and loss. In the tables given in the discussion below the dates for the latest attestations were determined by examining the text types just mentioned. More information on A Corpus of Irish English can be found in Hickey (2003a) and on the dedicated website www.uni-due.de/CP. The statistical analysis of the findings was done using the author’s own Corpus Presenter software, contained in Hickey (2003a) with the latest version available through the website.
Features lost since the 18th century1
The history of Irish English can be divided into two periods, an early one which began in the late Middle Ages and continued until the 16th century and a second period which began around 1600. The features of the early period were by and large replaced from the 17th century onwards. Some phonetic traces of English from the first period (before 1600) can, however, be seen in colloquial Dublin English today (Hickey 2005). Features of a phonological nature, e.g. vowel values which contrasted in the sound system of Irish English, were generally aligned to those of English in England by the 18th century. A few were retained by relegation to the vernacular level, i.e. by representing an alternative, non-standard Raymond Hickey Feature loss in 19th century Irish English Page 4 of 13 pronunciation which is still used for local flavour in colloquial Irish English, e.g. ‘Unshifted long E’ as in leave, tea, eat, speak with [e:] or [e:] rather than [i:]. Early vowel values which were lost completely are those which comprise part of the major English long vowel shift. The ‘Great Vowel Shift’ (Pyles and Algeo 1993 [1964]: 170-3), which began in the late Middle English period, was slow to be implemented in Ireland. For instance, unshifted /u:/, /i:/ and /a:/ were still recorded in the early 18th century in the MOUTH, PRICE and FACE lexical sets respectively (Wells 1982).
Table 1. Pre-vowel shift features
Feature Realisation Representation Attested until
Long U-retention town [tu:n]
Long I-retention dry [dri:]
Long A-retention place [pla:s]
It is important to point out that these and similar pronunciations were not lost due to a similar change to the English long vowel shift taking place in Ireland. Rather they were lost by a process of lexical replacement. The older pronunciation was abandoned by speakers and the current one in England was adopted, probably by a process of lexical diffusion. This would account for the survival of some few words with the older unshifted pronunciation (see remarks on ‘Unshifted long E’ above). The unshifted vowel values were used by literary authors in their parodies of Irish accents of English into the 18th century. For example, George Farquhar in his play The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) has many of the stereotypes of Irish pronunciation (see attestations in Table 1. above). Somewhat later, Jonathan Swift used end-rhymes which indicate that for him words like placed and last rhymed. At the end of the 18th century, Thomas Sheridan criticised the Irish use of /a:/ in matron, patron, etc. But by the mid 19th century there are no more references to /a:/ in the FACE lexical set (or to the unshifted vowels in the MOUTH and PRICE sets for that matter). The playwright Dion Boucicault, who shows many non-standard pronunciations in his dramas, does not indicate unshifted ME /a:/ when writing some eighty years after Sheridan. What must have happened is that the older pronunciation was replaced by the newer one in the generations between the late 18th and the mid 19th century, i.e. within three generations. Raymond Hickey Feature loss in 19th century Irish English Page 5 of 13
This kind of development can be shown to have applied to a number of features. For instance, SERVE-lowering appears to have died out during the 19th century: By the beginning of the 20th century the feature had all but disappeared (see comments below).
Specifically Irish features
A-back raising The occurrence use of /o:/ in words like make was apparently a feature of Irish English at the beginning of the early modern period. ‘A-back raising’ is a feature that was censured by Thomas Sheridan in the late 18th century, see Sheridan (1781: 141). Its origin is uncertain and it disappeared in the early 19th century. This feature was probably a trait of the Irish pronunciation of English from before 1600 and is attested in the archaic dialect of Forth and Bargy in the south-east of the country, a survival of medieval Irish English which disappeared in the early 19th century.
ER-retraction after W Rounding after /w/ is probably responsible for this retraction. This was also a feature of the West Midland dialect of Middle English (Mossé 1952: 84) which was present in later input varieties of English in Ireland. Earlier Irish English (from the Kildare Poems – early 14th century – to the 18th century) contains no attestations of this retraction. However, in the 19th century it is common, for instance with both William Carleton and Dion Boucicault. Given that rounding of vowels after /w/ is phonetically natural, the feature may have been a later development.
I-v-interchange This interchange is well established in the recent history of Irish English and was remarked on by authors up to the early 20th century, e.g. with P. W. Joyce who stated that the word onion /vnjqn/ was pronounced as /injqn/ (Joyce 1979 [1910]: 99). This was recorded by the lexicographer Nathan Bailey in 1726 (Universal Etymological English Dictionary) but was not typical of mainstream pronunciations of British English as Walker notes at the end of the 18th century. The reason for considering it an Irish feature in the current context is that this is widely attested in contact Irish English where it has a definite source in Irish. [e] for [v] is a common here, e.g. brush [bre$], justice /dgestis/ and is probably due to the automatic alternation /v/ ~ /e/ which is found in Irish between the nominative and genitive with many nouns, e.g. roc /rvk/ ‘wrinkle-NOM’ ~ roic /rek"/ ‘wrinkle-GEN’. Because the front vowel is used in Irish in the environment of a palatal consonant (here: /k"/), contact Irish English speakers often use this vowel in English words where the consonant flanking a short vowel is interpreted as palatal, e.g. [$]. Raymond Hickey Feature loss in 19th century Irish English Page 6 of 13
Table 2. Specifically Irish features
Feature Realisation Representation Attested until
A-back raising make [mo:k]
ER-retraction were [wo:r]
English dialect / archaic features
Unraised long E Unraised long E has a special status as a stereotypically Irish feature and it has been lexicalised in the expletive Jaysus! [dge:ziz] and in set expressions like lea’ [le:] me alone! It is found regularly in vernacular varieties throughout Ireland. The unraised vowel is a remnant from much earlier varieties which continued Middle English /e:/ in words like meat, beat, leave. But the feature has disappeared from the supraregional standard of the south after its relegation to vernacular varieties. In 18th and early 19th Ireland ‘Unraised long E’ was not confined to specific styles and hypercorrection was common. Both Sheridan (1781) and Walker (1791) remark on the fact that the Irish frequently say greet, beer, sweer (for great, bear, swear) unaware of the fact that these words had /e:/ rather than /i:/ in British English. Hypercorrection would appear to die away with the development of supraregional varieties. This stands to reason: if local features are replaced by more standard ones then later generations master the correct distribution of sounds immediately.
OL-diphthongisation OL-diphthongisation, the use of [-aul] for <-old> is a further vernacular feature of Irish English and one which had a far wider distribution before and during the 19th century. Nowadays it is most common with old and bold (Joyce 1979 [1910]: 99 mentions these and other forms). There are slight differences in meaning vis à vis the more standard pronunciations with [-o:ld]. The pronunciations old [aul] and bold [baul] imply a certain affection and admiration on the part of the speaker Raymond Hickey Feature loss in 19th century Irish English Page 7 of 13 regarding what is qualified by these adjectives. On the occurrence of [-aul] for <-old> in British English, see Tagliamonte and Temple (2005).
SERVE lowering This is the same feature as produced barn, dark, Berkshire, Hertfordshire, etc. in British English. It had a much wider range in Irish English, probably due to its quantitative representation in input varieties. Its persistence throughout the centuries in Ireland is clearly a case of a feature surviving, independent of its position at source, i.e. it represents an instance of ‘colonial lag’. Up to the early 19th century this lowering was very widespread, but it gradually disappeared in the course of this century. The figures in Table 3. show how SERVE-lowering receded in the textual record between the early 19th and the early 20th century when the feature disappeared completely.
Table 3. Occurrences for serve, service, deserve, certain with SERVE-lowering among 19th and 20th century authors
John and Michael Banim (1820s), one story (6,000 words) Total Percentage sarve (2); desarve (2); sart(a)in (8) 12 0.2% William Carleton (1830s), one story (20,000 words) sarve (13); sarvice (3); desarve (7); sartin (6) 29 0.15% Boucicault (1860s), three plays (56,500 words) desarve (2); sarvice (1); sarched (1); sartin (1) 5 0.01% Shaw (1904), John Bull’s Other Island (33,500 words) sarve (1) 1 0.00% Synge (early 1900s, 6 plays), Gregory (1890s, 4 plays), O'Casey (1920s, 4 plays) and Behan (1950s, 2 plays) have no instances of SERVE-lowering.
CATCH-raising Sheridan, at the end of the 18th century, mentions this raising, In words like CATCH and GATHER, i.e. after velars, the raising continued throughout the 19th century. It did not become a feature of the supraregional standard, i.e. CATCH-raising was discontinued in Ireland as it was in England. But in colloquial varieties, especially in the south-west of Ireland, this raising is still to be found (Hickey 2007).
ASK-metathesis Metathesis of /s/ + stop was already a feature of Old English (Lass 1984: 188) and the sequence /ks/ in ask is attested there. It was most likely a feature of input varieties to Ireland which was retained. The last attestations in the textual record are from the third quarter of the 19th century after which it fades from view, although it allegedly was a feature of vernacular Irish English into the early 20th century.
Long O-raising This archaic pronunciation is still to be found in early modern documents of Irish Raymond Hickey Feature loss in 19th century Irish English Page 8 of 13
English. For instance, the word for gold still had the pronunciation goold /gu:ld/ (as did Rome) in late 18th century Ireland, a pronunciation criticised by Walker (1791). Vowels before /r/ provide further instances where Irish English was out of step with developments in England. R-lowering did not occur in words like door /du:r/, floor /flu:r/, source /su:rs/, course /ku:rs/, court /ku:rt/ which, according to the Appendix to Sheridan’s Grammar (1781: 137-55), were typical Irish pronunciations. This means that the southern mainland English lowering of back high vowels before /r/ had not occurred in Ireland by the late 18th century but was introduced by lexically replacing those pronunciations which conflicted with mainland British usage, probably in the course of the 19th century.
Short E-raising This raising is common today, but only in south-west and mid-west rural Irish English and only in pre-nasal position, e.g. when [win], pen [pin]. Joyce (1979 [1910]: 100) states that ‘short e is always sounded before n and m, and sometimes in other positions, like short i: “How many arrived? Tin min and five women.”’ What happened here is that a general raising was confined to raising before nasals, i.e. it was restricted to a phonetically natural environment, reducing its salience (Kerswill and Williams 2002) in the process. This also happened with the metathesis of short vowels and /r/ which now only occurs in unstressed syllables, e.g. modern [/m>drqn], secretary [/sekqrteri], although it was attested in stressed ones into the 19th century, see the following table.
Table 4. Restriction of vernacular features as of 20th century
Feature Pre-20th century 20th century and later
/e/ to /i/ raising unconditional only before nasals (south-west) togither, yis, git pen [pin], ten [tin] Metathesis in stressed syllables only in unstressed syllables purty [/pQ:ti] ‘pretty’ modern [/m>drqn] Attestation: as purty a girl as you’d meet in a fair; a sartin purty face I’m acquainted with (William Carleton Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry 1833)
Final-O-fronting Final-O-fronting is another feature which was been retained in the vernacular after its removal from the supraregional accent of Irish English, e.g. follow [/f SOFT-lengthening SOFT-lengthening is still a regular feature of Dublin English, but one which has only a precarious status in the supraregional standard of Irish English which tends to favour a short vowel. This is changing, however, because new pronunciations from Dublin, which include SOFT-lengthening, are spreading throughout the country (Hickey 2005). SOFT-lengthening is clearly a case of colonial lag as lengthening of the />/ vowel in this position was formerly common in varieties of southern British English but is not any more. Table 5. English dialect / archaic features Feature Realisation Representation Attested until Unraised long E speak [spe:k] OL-diphthongisation old [auld] SERVE lowering serve [sa:rv] CATCH-raising catch [ket$] <(k)e>, ketch early 20c Attestation: you haven’t th’ guts to ketch a few o’ th’ things (Sean O’Casey The Plough and the Stars 1926) ASK-metathesis ask [æks] Long O-raising floor [flu:r] Short E-raising yes [jis] , yis now only pre-nasally Attestation: Raymond Hickey Feature loss in 19th century Irish English Page 10 of 13 ... the shadow of an illegant gintleman (Dion Boucicault The Colleen Bawn 1860); ...’tis a Profissor of Humanity itself, he is. (William Carleton The Hedge School 1833); divil, togithir, (Dion Boucicault Arragh na Pogue 1864), riverince, niver (Dion Boucicault The Colleen Bawn 1860) Final-O-fronting follow [/f SOFT-lengthening soft [s>:ft] — today Attestation: (not indicated in writing) Likely transfer features from Irish WH/W-approximation This feature is probably due to the fact that, during the language shift, Irish non-palatal /f/ (phonetically [0]) was used as an equivalent for English [w] and Irish non-palatal /v/ (phonetically [b]) was used for [w]. In eye dialect the bilabial fricative [0] is rendered as f or ph, and its voiced counterpart [b] as v. This development would appear to be independent of developments in Britain, although a case might be made for the transportation of [0] and [b] to the Caribbean by indentured Irish in the 17th century (see Trudgill, Schreier, Long and Williams 2004 on approximants in this context but without a consideration of the Irish situation). S-palatalisation S-palatalisation is a still feature of contact Irish English and is attested in the data collections used by the author for the analysis given in Hickey (2007), e.g. Hone[$]t, they believe in hone[$]t people (this now only occurs in syllable-codas whereas one previously had cases like shelf ‘self’ and shin ‘sin’ in syllable onsets). Related to this is the feature noted by Joyce (1979 [1910]: 98) that ‘there is a curious tendency among us to reverse the sounds of certain letters, as for instance sh and ch ‘When you’re coming to-morrow bring the spade and chovel, and a pound of butter frech from the shurn’. Neither feature occurs in supraregional varieties of Irish English. T/D-dentalisation T/D-dentalisation is a feature which is confined to vernacular varieties and found across Ireland, e.g. better [/betQ]. It occurs before /r/ but not in supraregional varieties. TH-fortition TH-fortition takes on two forms (i) fortition to dental stops and (ii) fortition to Raymond Hickey Feature loss in 19th century Irish English Page 11 of 13 alveolar stops. The former is part of supraregional Irish English, e.g. thin [tin], this [dis], whereas the latter is stigmatised. The source of TH-fortition would appear to be the Irish language where, in western and northern dialects, coronal stops are realised as dentals. This meant that these dental stops were used as equivalents to the interdental fricatives of English. This has a long history, going back to the period before 1600. The stigmatisation attached to using alveolar rather than dental stops for interdental fricatives may well have to do with the homophony it leads to, e.g. tank and thank as [tænk]. Table 6. Likely transfer features from Irish Feature Realisation Representation Attested until WH/W-approximation when [0en] S-palatalisation self [$elf] T/D-dentalisation drop [dr TH-fortition thank [tænk] Conclusion The examination of how dialect features are lost shows that there are different paths which can be taken. Features can disappear entirely without trace, e.g. SERVE-lowering or ASK-metathesis in Irish English. Others can be confined to environments of low salience, especially those in which they are phonetically natural and hence not unexpected for speakers. This holds for Short E raising before nasals which is still found in the south-west of Ireland. Other low salience contexts include unstressed syllables where vowel – r metathesis is still found in supraregional Irish English today. Still other features can be relegated to vernacular varieties, such as Unshifted long E or OL-diphthongisation. These features can, however, still be accessed by speakers of standard varieties alowing them to shift to a more colloquial style when they want to. Raymond Hickey Feature loss in 19th century Irish English Page 12 of 13 The loss of features during the emergence of supraregional varieties of Irish English during the 19th century does not appear to be something which speakers were aware of and no comments on how it was occurring are recorded in Ireland. There is no question of it being a planned process and so some features, which might have been affected, are not involved, e.g. the long vowel in cook [ku:k]. Examples from other linguistic levels could also be quoted here, e.g. the use of embedded questions with direct question word order, e.g. She asked him would he help her or the use of infinitives without to, e.g. They allowed him go, which speakers tends not to be aware of at all. 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