Irish accent

Guest   Sat Oct 22, 2005 5:03 pm GMT
Which Irish accent is the closest to North American English?
Brennus   Sat Oct 22, 2005 10:21 pm GMT
I think that almost everyone will agree that it is the English of Newfoundland whose speakers are partially descended from 18th century Southern Irish-expatriates along with some Scots, French Canadians and American Loyalists.

There is no accent spoken in the United States today that is Irish even though Irish accents lingered on among immigrants in some of the more rural areas just as German and Scandinavian accents did. For example, Lawrence Welk, a native of South Dakota had his German accent and actor Pat O'Brien (1899-1983) "Hollywood's Irishman" did have an authentic Irish accent even though he was born in Wisconsin. One of my grandfathers had traces of an Irish accent too even though he was born in Smithfield, Pennsylvania (1893). His mother, Mary Kate Brennan, spoke Gaelic.
Uriel   Sat Oct 22, 2005 11:40 pm GMT
I remember watching an interview with the creator of the UK TV show "Father Ted" and his accent was so close to American that I could barely tell he was Irish. But I have no idea where he's from.
Mxsmanic   Sun Oct 23, 2005 8:23 am GMT
Virtually all the Irish people I've encountered in recent years have pronunciations so close to that of American English that I can't even hear any kind of "Irish accent" until they've been speaking for 30 seconds or so. I've asked them about it and they assure me that their accents are no less marked than the average for Irish people today, although there still exists a minority of Irish people with much more distinct accents. The accents you hear in the movies are often very exaggerated.

Overall, Irish pronunciation sounds a lot more like American than most British pronunciations. Standard Australian pronunciation sounds more like American than British does, too. To my American ear, the most obviously "different" pronunciations are those of people in certain parts of England, disregarding a few very localized exceptions (some people from Glasgow are almost incomprehensible, for example).

The whole galaxy of different pronunciations seems to be fading. I know people from Boston, Texas, Chicago, and New York, for example, and the only way to know who is from where is by asking them. There are certainly minor phonological details that differ from one city to another, but the old, stereotyped accents are gone in most individuals, particularly if they come from large urban areas. This seems to be happening in Ireland, Scotland, and Australia, too. And it is happening in England, although the homogenization there seems to be proceeding more slowly than anywhere else.

I consider this a good thing, since a single standard pronunciation of English would be a significant improvement. I'd prefer that it be rhotic and free of unnecessary diphthongs, though, since that would better match the written language.
Travis   Sun Oct 23, 2005 9:59 am GMT
>>The whole galaxy of different pronunciations seems to be fading. I know people from Boston, Texas, Chicago, and New York, for example, and the only way to know who is from where is by asking them. There are certainly minor phonological details that differ from one city to another, but the old, stereotyped accents are gone in most individuals, particularly if they come from large urban areas. This seems to be happening in Ireland, Scotland, and Australia, too. And it is happening in England, although the homogenization there seems to be proceeding more slowly than anywhere else.<<

That's interesting, if it is actually so, as I have been asked on multiple occasions where the hell I'm from (not because they couldn't tell where I was from, but rather because they thought I had a quite noticable accent, which they just could not pin down to a particular place), and also my *parents'* speech generally seems far more "standard", as a whole, than my own or many other individuals' about my age around here (here being southeastern and southern Wisconsin, i.e. the Milwaukee and Madison areas).
Rick Johnson   Sun Oct 23, 2005 10:36 am GMT
Some Dublin vowel sounds are echoed in certain New York accents.
Walker, Texas Ranger   Sun Oct 23, 2005 12:43 pm GMT
<I consider this a good thing, since a single standard pronunciation of English would be a significant improvement. I'd prefer that it be rhotic and free of unnecessary diphthongs, though, since that would better match the written language.>

You don't think diversity is a good thing? You don't think that different accents add color to a language? I'm not a native English speaker but I believe you when you say that the different ways of pronounciation are fading, since they are in other languages, and that's a terrible tragedy.
Guest   Sun Oct 23, 2005 2:06 pm GMT
>>That's interesting, if it is actually so, as I have been asked on multiple occasions where the hell I'm from (not because they couldn't tell where I was from, but rather because they thought I had a quite noticable accent, which they just could not pin down to a particular place), and also my *parents'* speech generally seems far more "standard", as a whole, than my own or many other individuals' about my age around here (here being southeastern and southern Wisconsin, i.e. the Milwaukee and Madison areas).<<

That actually makes a lot of sense. You parents may be speaking with the old midwestern acent with is basically General American, and basically the same as the West. You probably have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift which just cropped up very recently. Btw, can people from the Mid-West tell if someone has a Western accent?
Brennus   Mon Oct 24, 2005 5:12 am GMT
Re: Some Dublin vowel sounds are echoed in certain New York accents.
--- Rick Johnson.

This is interesting Rick but one has to always consider that it may be the result of Dublin and New York having a shared kind of English earlier in their history rather than a true Irish-English influence on New York English. However, I can't tell for sure whether you were implying that or not.

I knew a bus driver from Cork, Ireland a few years ago who pronounced 'tomorrow' as "tuh-marra." This same pronunciation is also heard in Maryland and Virginia but it is very doubtful that it's due to an Irish immigrant influence. Very few Irish settled in that part of the United States. In fact, the prejudices against them were very strong in this region.

(We find the same phenomenon in the Romance languages where Dalmatian, a Romance language formerly spoken in Yugoslavia, has may Spanish and Portuguese-like characteristics. However, this was not due to any Spanish settlement there but rather due to the fact that the Romans conquered Dalmatia at about the same time they conquered Spain, and afterwards, both places received a similar kind of Vulgar Latin. )
Travis   Mon Oct 24, 2005 6:21 am GMT
>>>>That's interesting, if it is actually so, as I have been asked on multiple occasions where the hell I'm from (not because they couldn't tell where I was from, but rather because they thought I had a quite noticable accent, which they just could not pin down to a particular place), and also my *parents'* speech generally seems far more "standard", as a whole, than my own or many other individuals' about my age around here (here being southeastern and southern Wisconsin, i.e. the Milwaukee and Madison areas).<<

That actually makes a lot of sense. You parents may be speaking with the old midwestern acent with is basically General American, and basically the same as the West. You probably have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift which just cropped up very recently.<<

It is not simply that (even though that is a factor, as they both lack a strongly backed /o/ and or "breaking"*of word-final /o/, amongst other things), but rather that often some aspects of their speech, and in particular my dad's speech, seem somewhat *learned* to me, including aspects that would be atypical of the everyday informal speech of most people my age here (such as my dad using "whom" unusually consistently), and has a flow and prosody more like what I associate with purely formal speech and less like most informal speech amongst individuals about my age around here. Such includes a weirdly low level of use of "yeah" and or "yah" for acknowledgement rather than actual answering and as general particles, with functions like agreement or indicating linked information, within sentences, which is generally extremely common amongst individuals about my age here, and other similar differences in general sentence flow and structuring such as less cliticization (especially in the case of my dad) than typical for most people about my age who I've known.

I mention the word "learned" here specifically (in particular in the case of my dad), as they might have actually been *taught* English more directly than individuals my age here, both being from families with bilingual parents but having grown up in a period where English monolingualism effectively became the rule here. Consequently, there is the likelihood that there was an actual deliberate decision at some point, by one or more individuals, to intentionally *not* pass on any language other than English, and to specifically "correctly" teach/learn it. I remember my dad in particular commenting that that he went out of his way to *not* learn German, despite a grandmother of his (known to me just as "Nana") who he seems to have been rather close to having specifically wanted him to learn such (she herself spoke German, and apparently was fully literate in such, rather than just having had passive exposure to it or only known it from use at home). This alone indicates the likelihood that he at some point specifically learned, consciously or unconsciously, more formal and "correct" forms in English, which would seem rather out of place in everyday informal speech for me; this possibility is increased by his overall apparent attitude towards German, that is, of being a language for old people and which has no purpose or reason to be known here in Wisconsin today.

On a similar note, I specifically remember a study done by the linguistics department here at UW Madison about the speech southern and southeastern Wisconsin, specifically about that amongst the speech of individuals there from this generation and from the past two before that, is that my parents' generation's English is the closest to what many would regard as "standard" in the US, with many individuals' from my generation having speech more like that of their grandparents than that of their parents, innovations such as NCVS aside, which in itself seems superficially paradoxical.

However, it seems not that weird when one considers that a significant portion of said grandparents' generation would have been to some extent or another bilingual (whether fully or marginally), and that said parents' generation would have been primarily English-monolingual, while individuals from my generation would have learned English natively with very little if any contact with any languages other than English. Because of such, said parents would have experienced the direct supplantation of languages other than English (primarily German and Polish, and in some localized areas Italian) with English, and thus have likely to have been pushed towards "correct" English by general social forces, yet individuals from my generation, having learned English with no pressure to really learn it "correctly", would have not only been more receptive to overall innovations such as the NCVS, but also would have been more receptive to remaining underlying substratum features with respect to phonology and like, even if they themselves had no contact with individuals who spoke any languages other than English, and even if they did not really know many individuals older than their parents.

(* By breaking I mean the fronting, and either strong diphthongization or raising of word-final /o/ as [8{], more extremely [2y], or [{], instead of realizing it as simply very strongly *backed*)

>>Btw, can people from the Mid-West tell if someone has a Western accent?<<

Probably the easiest to hear indicators would be a combination of "cot"-"caught" merger and a lack of distinctive Upper Midwestern features such as /aI/ raising before /r/ as well as a complete absence of NCVS; note that looking for lack of Canadian Raising is not reliable, as such is often present in more northern dialects in the western US, especially those in Washington.
Damian   Mon Oct 24, 2005 7:09 am GMT
Liam Neeson
Adam   Mon Oct 24, 2005 8:49 am GMT
When I was younger (9 or 10 years old), when I heard an Irish person speak on the TV I used to think they were American, because it sounded similar to me.

Now I know the difference.
Mxsmanic   Tue Oct 25, 2005 12:12 am GMT
Diversity is interesting when it is considered in isolation; in practical terms, it's often a problem.

However, in this context, diversity is not at issue so much as the illusion of diversity. People speak with different accents because pronunciation drifts over time and the world is not (yet) in perfect, instant communication in a way that would synchronize the drift for everyone. Thus people from different environments speak with different accents. This drift of accents, however, has nothing to do with the diversity of individuals as people, and very often it creates impressions that are dramatically inaccurate. There is a tendency in the United States, for example, to assume that anyone with a southern accent is stupid, even though there is no connection whatsoever between a given pronunciation and general intelligence. Conversely, people in the U.S. might assume that someone from Oxford is intelligent solely on the basis of her accent, even though, here again, accent has nothing to do with intelligence.

In general, various accents only serve to distract attention from what a person is actually saying and encourage the harboring of preconceived notions about what a person is like, which are just as likely inaccurate as accurate. That's why having myriad different local accents is more of a problem than something to be encouraged or desired, in my view.

Although I speak a very neutral American English myself, I still encourage students to listen to and work with multiple speakers so as to adopt the most neutral accent possible. If that isn't an option, then they will get a fairly neutral accent learning from me alone, but that's not the ideal. The worst case is when they learn English from a single individual with a very marked accent, and then carry that accent with them for years thereafter.

I had a student a few days ago who was one of that extremely rare breed of Francophones who can manage to speak English without a French accent. In fact, her accent was more British than French—indeed, it sounded like she was from London. Upon questioning her, I learned that she had indeed spent six months studying in Watford a few years ago, and had eliminated her French accent and picked up the local accent in the process. Which made me wonder aloud what she expected to get out of an English class; she replied that it was only to stay in practice, since her current job requires no English.
JAGAMOHAN RATH   Fri Oct 28, 2005 6:38 am GMT
HOW TO SPEAK WITH SPEED AND GOOD ENGLISH WITH CLEAR
NGAM HAHORATAJ   Fri Oct 28, 2005 6:49 am GMT
Okay, I believe you, JAGAMOHAN RATH.