Ringvorlesung «Sprache – école – society»

The spread of English as a global language is inextricably linked to Britain’s colonical history. Britain’s first colony was its neighbour Ireland, where, little by little, the English language replaced the native Gaelic tongue, turning Ireland into a predominantly monolingual English culture. The English spoken there today bears testimony to this history, retaining some of the substratal influence of Gaelic, while also exhibiting features from earlier Englishes that have died out elsewhere.

This lecture will explore the variety’s most characteristic phonological, grammatical and lexical features. In addition, using evidence from the speaker’s extensive research into representations of Irish speech in films, comics and joke books, it examines literary dialect portrayals to see whether they reflect canonical features or whether others come to the fore. Likewise, it contrasts representations by Irish writers with those by non-Irish writers to see whether the same features are salient as markers of Irishness for both.

• Referent: Dr. Shane Walshe, Universität Zürich
• Diskutant: Prof. Dr. Dieter Bitterli, PH Luzern