Irish English vocabulary can derive from English dialect input, e.g., mitch ‘truant’, chisler ‘child’, hames ‘mess’ (of Dutch origin), or from archaic pronunciation, e.g. The latter can in turn be subdivided into an east-coast dialect area, from Dublin to the southeast corner, reflecting the period of earliest English settlement, and the southwest, west and northwest which are areas in which the Irish language survived longest and where varieties are spoken which show many features deriving from the historical shift from Irish to English. Below the level of Irish English, a distinction can be made between English in Ulster (more narrowly Northern Ireland) and varieties in the south, i.e., in the Republic of Ireland. Irish English is a cover term for varieties of English spoken in Ireland-there are a number of shared features in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary across the forms of English throughout the entire island. The lack of regular schooling for the native Catholic Irish before the 1830s meant that the shift to English occurred without the aid of formal education, and so many features from Irish were carried over. These events are often considered justification for dividing the history of English in Ireland into two periods: 1200-16 onwards.Īfter 1600 the language shift to English gained momentum and was to continue unabated to the present, with the Great Famine (1845-8) resulting in a great reduction in the number of Irish native speakers through death or emigration to Britain and North America. English subsequently declined and it was not until the seventeenth century that it became the dominant language in the entire island, due to increased settlement of English in the centre and south, and the movement of tens of thousands of Lowland Scots to Ulster. The linguistic legacy of this is an archaic dialect area from Dublin down to Waterford. In subsequent centuries both French and English established themselves, the latter being concentrated in towns on the east coast.

Irish and English are official languages in Ireland English is now spoken natively by over 99% of the Irish-born population.īefore the arrival of Norman and English settlers in the late twelfth century, Ireland was entirely Irish-speaking. There are speakers of Ulster English in Northern Ireland but they do not constitute a recognizable ethnic group today. The main ethnic groups are Irish and Ulster Scots. Geographically, the country consists of a flat central area, the Midlands, and a mountainous, jagged western seaboard and a flatter east coast with Dublin, the largest city, in the centre of the east and Belfast, the main city of Northern Ireland, in the northeast. The island has an area of 84,000 square kilometres and a total population of just under 6.5 million. Ireland is an island in northwest Europe, west of England, which consists politically of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, the latter of which has been a constituent part of the United Kingdom since 1922.

English irish dictionaries