Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-04T17:29:34.991Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What is Irish Standard English?

The International Corpus of English-Ireland can be used to understand how standard English manifests itself in both the north and south of Ireland.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2011

John M. Kirk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Standard English need not be a matter of prescriptivism or any attempt to ‘create’ a particular standard, but, rather, can be a matter of observation of actual linguistic behaviour. For Hudson (2000), standard English is the kind of English which is written in published work, which is spoken in situations where published writing is most influential – especially in university level education and so in post-university professions – and which is spoken ‘natively’ at home by the ‘professional class’, i.e. people who are most influenced by published writing. In the papers in Bex and Watts (eds, 1999), it is recurrently claimed that, when speaking English, what the ‘social group with highest degree of power, wealth or prestige’ or more neutrally ‘educated people’ or ‘socially admired people’ speak is the variety known as ‘standard English’. However, ‘standard English’ may also mean that shared aspect of English which makes global communication possible. This latter perspective allows for two meanings of ‘standard’: it may refer both to an idealised set of shared features, and also to different sets of national features, reflecting different demographic and political histories and language influences. The methodology adopted in the International Corpus of English (henceforth ICE – cf. Greenbaum, 1996) enables us to observe and investigate each set of features, showing what everybody shares and also what makes each national variety of English different.

Type
Original Article
Information
English Today , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 32 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bex, T. & Watts, R. J. (eds), 1999. Standard English: The Widening Debate. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Carter, R. & McCarthy, M. 2006. Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. K. 2004. ‘Dynamic typology and vernacular universals.’ In Kortmann, B. (ed.), Dialectology Meets Typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 127–45.Google Scholar
Cheshire, J. 1999. ‘Spoken Standard English.’ In Bex & Watts (eds), pp. 129–48.Google Scholar
Clarke, S. 2010. Dialects of English: Newfoundland and Labrador English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Filppula, M. 1999. The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Greenbaum, S. (ed.) 1996. Comparing English Worldwide: The International Corpus of English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Hickey, R. 2002. ‘The Atlantic edge. The relationship between Irish English and Newfoundland English.’ English World-Wide 23(2), 281–314.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hickey, R. 2007. Irish English: History and Present-day Forms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kallen, J. L. 1985. ‘A global view of the English language in Ireland.’ In Ó Baoill, D. (ed.), Papers on Irish English. Dublin: Irish Association for Applied Linguistics, pp. 63–78.Google Scholar
Kallen, J. L. & Kirk, J. M. 2001. ‘Convergence and divergence in the verb phrase in Standard Irish English: A corpus-based approach.’ In Kirk, J. M. & Ó Baoill, D. P. (ed.), Language Links: The Languages of Scotland and Ireland, Belfast: Cló Olscoill na Banríona, pp. 61–82.Google Scholar
Kirk, J. M. 1985. ‘Linguistic atlases and grammar: the investigation and description of regional variation in English syntax.’ In Kirk, J. M., Sanderson, S. & Widdowson, J. D. A. (ed.), Studies in Linguistic Geography. London: Croom Helm, pp. 130–56.Google Scholar
Kirk, J. M. & Kallen, J. L. 2007. ‘Assessing Celticity in a corpus of Irish standard English.’ In Tristram, H. L. C. (ed.), The Celtic Languages in Contact. Potsdam: Potsdam University Press, pp. 270–88.Google Scholar
Kirk, J. M. & Kallen, J. L. 2008. ICE-Ireland: A User's Guide. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona.Google Scholar
Kirk, J. M. & Kallen, J. L. 2009. ‘Just in Irish Standard English.’ In Bowen, R.Mobärg, M. & Ohlander, S. (ed.), Corpora and Discourse – and Stuff. Papers in Honour of Karin Aijmer. Gothenburg Studies in English. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, pp. 149–58.Google Scholar
Kirk, J. M.Kallen, J. L., Lowry, O. & Rooney, A. 2003. ‘Issues arising from the compilation of ICE-Ireland.’ In Belfast Papers in Language and Linguistics 16, 23–41.Google Scholar
Kirk, J. M. & Kallen, J. L. 2010. ‘How Scottish is Irish Standard English?’ In Millar, R.McC. (ed.) Northern Lights, Northern Words. Selected Papers from the FRLSU Conference, Kirkwall 2009. Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ireland. 178–213.Google Scholar
Kirk, J. M. & Kallen, J.L. In press. ‘The Cultural Context of ICE-Ireland’. In Hickey, R. (ed.) Researching the Languages of Ireland. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, Acta Celtica Upsaliensis.Google Scholar
Kirk, J.M., Kallen, J.L. and Filppula, M. 2008. ‘The progressive in British and Irish Standard English’. Paper presented at International Conference on Methods in Dialectology 13, Leeds.Google Scholar
Kirk, J. M., Kallen, J. L., Lowry, O., Rooney, A. & Mannion, M. 2007. International Corpus of English: Ireland Component. The ICE-Ireland Corpus: Version 1.2. Belfast: Queen's University Belfast and Dublin: Trinity College Dublin. [version 1.2.1 released December 2009]Google Scholar
Kortmann, B. 2008. ‘Synopsis: Morphological and syntactic variation in the British Isles.’ In Kortmann, B. & Upton, C. (ed.), Varieties of English 1: The British Isles. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 478–95.Google Scholar
Kortmann, B. & Szmrecsanyi, B. 2004. ‘Global synopsis: morphological and syntactic variation in English.’ In Kortmann, B. & Schneider, E. (ed.), A Handbook of Varieties of English. Vol. 2: Morphology, Syntax, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1142–1202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leech, G., Hundt, M., Mair, C. & Smith, N. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Milroy, J. & Milroy, L. 1999. Authority in Language. Third edition. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Murphy, B. 2010. Corpus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating Age and Gender in Female Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Keeffe, A. & Adolphs, S. 2008. ‘Response tokens in British and Irish discourse: corpus, context and variational pragmatics.’ In Schneider, K. P. & Barron, A. (ed.), Variational Pragmatics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 69–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, B. & Kortmann, B. 2009. ‘Vernacular universals and angloversals in a typological perspective.’ In Filppula, M.Klemola, J. & Paulasto, H. (eds), Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts: Evidence from Varieties of English and Beyond. London/New York: Routledge, pp. 33–53.Google Scholar