- n° 49
Cote : PER.ENS - réserve
Although scholars have studied Hiberno-English for over a century it has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. The vernacular English of Ireland has interested not only specialists in the history and dialectology of English, but also creolists (e.g., Winford 1993), students of second language acquisition (e.g., Duff 1993), folklorists (e.g., O'Dowd 1991), and literary critics (e.g., Hirsch 1983/ 1988). It is no exaggeration to say that Ireland offers one of the best research sites to study certain types of linguistic and cultural change: indeed, investigators such as Thomason and Kaufinann (1988) have seen Irish Enghsh as one of the most promising modern cases of a kind of 1anguage shift" once more common, the shift here being the nearextinction of Irish as a community language and the concomitant adoption of English. In effect, studies of such a shift offer valuable hints about processes at work in earlier contact situations, such as the spread of Semitic languages in Ethiopia and Indo-European languages in India.
Considerable work has been done on the structure, variation, and history of Hiberno-English (e.g., Henry 1957, Braidwood 1964, Bliss 1979, Harris 1984a, Filppula 1986, Kallen 1995). However, many important aspects of Hiberno-English remain only vaguely understood. One especially important question is how speakers of Irish came to learn English. The shift from. a Celtic to a Germanic language did not happen overnight: over four centuries of bilingualism were required. This long spart of time naturally complicates any attempts to understand the dynamics of the shift. Yet despite the long span and despite the fact we cannot know all the individual histories of the many Irish speakers who learned English, it is possible to study widespread trends to learn English at the expense and arrive at generalizations that will hold true for many individuals in many places.
This paper is thus an attempt to formulate some viable generalizations about how the shift from Irish to English took place. The first
part of the paper argues that schooling played far less of a role in the shift than some scholars have suggested. The next part considers the role that migratory labour played: there is abundant evidence that migrations from, Irish-speaking to Enghsh-speaking regions had a major impact on Gaeltachts (Le., Irish-speaking regions). That evidence provides the basis for discussion in the next part of the paper, which looks at what the facts can say about the theoretical relation between language shift and patterns of language contact known as pidginization and creolization.
Although scholars have studied Hiberno-English for over a century it has received an increasing amount of attention in recent years. The vernacular English of Ireland has interested not only specialists in the history and dialectology of English, but also creolists (e.g., Winford 1993), students of second language acquisition (e.g., Duff 1993), folklorists (e.g., O'Dowd 1991), and literary critics (e.g., Hirsch 1983/ 1988). It is no exaggeration ...
langage ; pidgin ; créole anglais
