The external history of Irish English The involvement of England with Ireland is a long and complicated story. For the purpose of the present paper only a brief outline of English in Ireland is offered. The first point to grasp is that there are two periods in the history of Irish English, a medieval one (1170-1600) and an early modern one (1600-present); only the latter will be considered here.

The early modern period The re-establishment of English power got under way in the 17th century after the decisive military defeat of the Irish in 1601 in Kinsale, Co. Cork. It attained a new quality with the Cromwellian settlements of the 1650’s. These were undertaken by Oliver Cromwell to recompense mercenaries for services rendered during the political struggles in England following the deposition of Charles I in 1649 and were much more effective than the settlements in Munster (in the south) in the late 16th century.

The plantations of the mid 17th century can be taken to mark the beginning of the second, modern period of English in Ireland. All characteristics of contemporary Irish English are taken to stem from the beginning of the early period, though there is evidence in the phonology of popular Dublin English that elements survived from the late medieval period. At the beginning of the early modern period the development of the north and south of the country had already begun to diverge. The key event for the province of Ulster was the arrival of large numbers of settlers from Lowland Scotland as of the early 17th century (after the political vacuum left by the exodus of Irish leaders in 1607). They were Protestant Presbyterians and spoke varieties of Lowland Scots. The Scots tended to settle in the north-east and immigrants from northern England settled in the centre and south of the province. Given the quantity of settlers and the fact that they were non-aristocratic settlers who farmed the land and established towns as their bases their linguistic influence on the local population was far greater than that of earlier settlers in the south. It is this Scottish input which to this day is responsible for the very clear linguistic demarcation between Ulster (in essence the state of Northern Ireland and a couple of adjacent counties such as Donegal which are politically part of the Republic of Ireland) and the remainder of the country to the south.

Note that in the rest of the country there is little or no distinction in present-day Ireland between those who are descended from native Irish and those whose ancestors were planters in the 17th century. In the south, i.e. outside of Ulster, there is a small Protestant section of the community which is definitely not native Irish. The language of this section of the southern population does not, however, differ significantly from that of the Catholic majority.

Language shift In summary allow me to stress the two main aspects of the development of Irish English in the early modern period.

1) A long switch-over period lasted from at least the mid 17th century to the second half of the 19th century and was characterised by extensive if poor bilingualism among the native Irish. Imperfect acquisition of English would have meant for a speaker of Irish that the latter would have had a continuing influence on the former. In addition the acquisition of English was regarded as desirable for social advancement in Irish society.

2) There was no displacement of population in Ireland; there was nothing like the mixture of (West African) backgrounds which characterised the forced immigrants in the Caribbean area in the early phase of the slave trade. Nonetheless there was a concentration of native population with the expulsion of the Irish to west of the Shannon (reflected in Cromwell’s dictum ‘to hell or to Connaught’) in the mid 17th century.

3) The substrate language Irish was widely spoken and thus continually available. There was never a situation in which the Irish were deprived of a native language. Before the language shift was completed, English was acquired not for communication among the Irish but between these and English speakers.

The historical picture one is left with is that of a gradual dissemination of English from east to west and from urban centres to rural districts over a period of at least two centuries, from the Cromwellian era in the mid 17th century to the post-Famine period, i.e. to the second half of the 19th century. Such a long period of bilingualism would have furthered the transfer of structure from the outset language to the target one. The use of speech habits and patterns from Irish on an individual level lasted long enough for these to spread to the entire community of Irish speakers of English as general features of their variety of the new language.