New speakers of Irish English - pragmatic and sociophonetic perspectives
Résumé
The Republic of Ireland has become home to a large number of non-English speaking immigrants in recent decades.
Linguists have recently started to investigate how these new multilingual speakers use English. Linguistic investigations often focus on the use and functions of discourse-pragmatic markers and on attitudes towards Irish English as a variety (Diskin 2017a, 2017b; Migge 2012, 2015; Nestor & Regan 2015). These studies are usually conducted on the basis of a small number of speakers with different linguistic backgrounds. In addition, none of these studies takes sociophonetic variation into account, so we know next to nothing about if, how, and to which extent new speakers of Irish English acquire sociolinguistic variation in the area of phonetics and phonology.
We would like to broaden the scope of research on non-native Irish English and investigate the language production of new speakers of this variety in terms of sociophonetic and sociopragmatic variation. We investigate the use, function, and phonetic realisation of two frequent discourse-pragmatic markers: like and but. Our data base consist of recorded sociolinguistic interviews with 60 speakers, who were interviewed twice in the space of a year. We draw on a subset of interviews with speakers of similar linguistic backgrounds, i.e. identical native languages, and analyse their language use both qualitatively and quantitatively. The phonetic analysis is conducted with instrumental phonetic methods in Praat and R, and we focus on the realisation of individual consonant and vowel segments: /ai/ for like, and /t/ for but. Both markers have been described in terms of sociophonetic realisation for native Irish English (Schulte 2019; see also O’Dwyer 2019 for an analysis of the same segments in other discourse-pragmatic markers), and we will compare the patterns found in non-native IrE to those that have been established for native IrE.