Irish Accent

Jessyca   Tue Jan 23, 2007 7:16 pm GMT
"Everytime I hear an Irish accent, especially a Northern Irish one, I always think that he's about to kill innocent people with a large bomb."

You know what's funny....? We can always depend on Adam to make a snide racist remark about any Celtic culture, or non-British culture for that matter.

...what we do without you, Adam, what would we do?
Guest   Tue Jan 23, 2007 7:26 pm GMT
<<I don't think Irish and Scottish sound similar. But Irish and American do.>>

Nice sense of humour there, Adam!
Another Guest   Tue Jan 23, 2007 7:34 pm GMT
That was humour? Good God, he's dull...
iou   Tue Jan 23, 2007 9:30 pm GMT
"Everytime I hear an Irish accent, especially a Northern Irish one, I always think that he's about to kill innocent people with a large bomb."

Well that's loyalists for you. The British governemnt shouldn't have supported them in their murder campaigns.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6285101.stm
Lynda in Australia.   Sat Mar 10, 2007 11:59 am GMT
@ Pete, if you'll still check this thread three months down the track.

There's a website that has a recording of a native Irish speaker speaking for about 45 minutes about his home town in County Wicklow, near Dublin. It is quite heavenly I reckon.

www.wicklow.com/walk/
Josh Lalonde   Sat Mar 10, 2007 7:17 pm GMT
Here's a page that has some accent samples of Irish English.
http://web.ku.edu/idea/europe/ireland/ireland.htm
There's also a page for Northern Ireland, if you're interested.
One thing that people here seem to be confused about is that there are many different accents in Ireland, Scotland, and the US, so if we're comparing them, we need to be more precise. The samples listed as Ireland Three and Ireland Five both sound like General American to me, but the samples for Northern Ireland sound closer to a Lowland Scottish Accent. Someone mentioned above that the Scots came from Ireland, but that is only partially true; the Highland Scots did (and brought the Gaelic language with them, though it has changed somewhat since separation), but the Lowland Scots are descended from the Picts, Norse, etc. who have lived in the area over the centuries. The accents of Lowland Scots are quite different from those of Highlanders, as you can hear in the samples for Scotland.