Urban Irish Systematically Analyzed - Dialect? Pidgin? Creole?
The standard understanding of Irish is that there are three principal dialects, all rural, and all spoken on Ireland's coastal periphery. The presence of Irish-language radio stations in Dublin and Belfast, however, as well as Irish-language programming on local stations in Galway and Cork, suggests that there is a significant Irish-speaking population in Ireland's cities. City speakers have often been derided as speakers of "Nua-Ghaeilge" ("New Irish") by Gaeltacht dwellers, and they very often deride themselves as speakers of "Gaeilge Lofa Líofa" ("Rotten Fluent Irish") but there has been no attention given to the type of Irish that they speak.A detailed systematic analysis, comparing newsreaders and presenters on the Gaeltacht station Raidió na Gaeltachta and the urban stations Raidió na Life and Raidió Fáilte strongly suggests that a new dialect, perhaps more accurately described as a Pidgin, is growing among the urban Irish-language population. This dialect, using simplified phonetics and morphology, remains unstable, probably because most urban speakers do not speak Irish at home (and therefore have no native environment in which to speak the language), but also because they have little allegiance to the Gaeltacht, where Irish is still partially spoken as a community language. Because their native language is mostly English, the Irish that they speak, mostly learned at school and from friends, is prone to instability and is likely to remain so until a significant number of urban speakers choose to raise their children in the language, thus creating native speakers and a stable dialect or Creole. Notably, the urban dialect differs from many pidgins in having a comparatively sophisticated lexicon and syntax.
http://wpunj.academia.edu/Brian%C3%93Broin/Talks/40692/Urban_Irish_Systematically_Analyzed_-_Dialect_Pidgin_Creole
posted by sacsanua @ 2:57 PM
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