South-West Irish English (also known as South-West

Hiberno-English Hiberno-English (from Latin '' Hibernia'': "Ireland"), and in ga, Béarla na hÉireann. or Irish English, also formerly Anglo-Irish, is the set of English dialects native to the island of Ireland (including both the Republic of Ireland ...

) is a class of broad varieties of English spoken in Ireland's South-West Region (the province of

Munster Munster ( gle, an Mhumhain or ) is one of the provinces of Ireland, in the south of Ireland. In early Ireland, the Kingdom of Munster was one of the kingdoms of Gaelic Ireland ruled by a "king of over-kings" ( ga, rí ruirech). Following t ...

). Within Ireland, the varieties are best associated with either the urban

working class The working class (or labouring class) comprises those engaged in manual-labour occupations or industrial work, who are remunerated via waged or salaried contracts. Working-class occupations (see also " Designation of workers by collar colou ...

of the South-West or traditional rural Ireland in general, and they are popularly identified by their specific city or

county A county is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposes Chambers Dictionary, L. Brookes (ed.), 2005, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh in certain modern nations. The term is derived from the Old French ...

, such as Cork English, Kerry English, or Limerick English.

Phonology

Among speakers in the South-West alone (famously Cork, Kerry, or Limerick), the vowel of raises to when before or (a

pin–pen merger The close and mid-height front vowels of English (vowels of ''i'' and ''e'' type) have undergone a variety of changes over time and often vary by dialect. Developments involving long vowels Until Great Vowel Shift Middle English had a long ...

) and sentences may show a unique intonation pattern. This intonation is a slightly higher pitch followed by a significant drop in pitch on stressed long-vowel syllables (across multiple syllables or even within a single one), which is popularly heard in rapid conversation, by other English-speakers, as an undulating "sing-song" quality. Among older speakers, and may respectively be pronounced as and before a consonant and so ''fist'' sounds like ''fished'', ''castle'' like ', and ''arrest'' like '. Certain South-West features may also exist in Ireland outside that region but typically only in rural areas. An example is the backing, slight lowering, and perhaps rounding of towards , so that, to a Dublin or

General American General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans. In the United States it is often perceived as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or so ...

speaker, ''about'' nears the sound of ''a boat''. The consonants and (as in ''thick'' and ''those''), which are typically dental in other Irish English varieties, are traditionally alveolar: and , respectively (thus, ''thick'' and ''those'' merge to the sound of ''tick'' and ''doze''). and are preserved as long

monophthong A monophthong ( ; , ) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, wh ...

s: and , respectively. Those varieties are all rhotic, like most other Irish accents, but the sound is specifically a velarised

alveolar approximant The voiced alveolar approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the alveolar and postalveolar approximants is , a lowercase letter ''r'' rotated 180 ...

: . (Among some very traditional speakers, other possible variants include a "tapped R", the

alveolar tap Alveolus (; pl. alveoli, adj. alveolar) is a general anatomical term for a concave cavity or pit. Uses in anatomy and zoology * Pulmonary alveolus, an air sac in the lungs ** Alveolar cell or pneumocyte ** Alveolar duct ** Alveolar macrophage * M ...

, or even a "uvular R", the

voiced uvular fricative The voiced uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , an inverted small uppercase letter , or in broad transcription if rhot ...

, in rural south-central Ireland.) Features shared with both rural Irish English and working-class Dublin English include the vowels in , , and having a more open starting point and lacking a rounded quality: . Furthermore, for all of those varieties, and may also lack a rounded quality, the lexical set is very fronted (), the may be dropped before (''hue'' pronounced like ''you''), a distinction remains between ''tern'' and ''turn'', and and remain separate sounds.

Grammar

South-West Irish English allows the use of a ''do be''

habitual aspect In linguistics, the aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state. As its name suggests, the habitual aspect ( abbreviated ), not to be confused with iterative aspe ...

. Examples include ''I do be thinking about it'' or ''she does be late'' and replace Standard English constructions of those sentences: ''I think about it (often)'' or ''she is late (usually)''. Non-canonical constituent order is also possible,in which a sentence may be arranged as ''Thinking to steal a few eggs I was'' (rather than ''I was thinking to steal a few eggs'') to give the first clause salience or emphasis.Shimada, Tamami (2010). "What grammatical features are more marked in Hiberno-English?: a survey of speakers’ awareness and its primary details." Bulletin of Graduate School of Social and Cultural Systems at Yamagata University 7: 8-10.

References

* {{English dialects by continent Culture in County Cork Culture in County Kerry Dialects of English Languages of Ireland Irish culture