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type of change, studied in Britain by Paul Kerswill and others. Kerswill has studied dialect variation in the ‘new town’ of Milton Keynes, where the developments take a different shape. In such cases a new levelled form appears to replace any earlier form very abruptly and with complete loss of earlier forms in the whole area. Kerswill calls this type of levelling ‘koine formation’. Examples of this in Britain seem most obvious in the southern part of the country, where there is considerable levelling in any case, yet the process seems to be markedly different from the usual types of levelling; see further Kerswill & Williams (2000).
7.7Other dialects
So far in this survey there has been virtually no mention of Welsh or Irish dialects of English. The reasons for this are rather different. In the case of Welsh English the local dialects are all quite subordinate to the English dialects to their east, either, in the case of south Wales, to the southwestern dialects of England, or in north Wales to the dialects centred, in particular, on Liverpool and the Wirral. As such, dialectal features particular to areas of Wales are thin on the ground. Parry’s Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (1977, 1979) begins to fill the gaps, as does Coupland’s (1988) sociolinguistic study of Cardiff English; for these and others, see Thomas (1994).
At first sight the situation in Ireland seems similar, but the similarities are actually insignificant. In Wales, English was introduced into indigenous areas from the fourteenth century. Irish English (I use the term preferred in Kallen, 1994) was first introduced in 1169, and texts are first found from about around 1250. But in Ireland there was competition between three languages – English, French and Irish – possibly, if we include Latin, four. Furthermore, the loss of French appears to have enhanced the status of Irish, rather than of English, at least until the seventeenth century. At this time there was a deliberate attempt to resettle Ireland and establish British rule. The most important attempts involved the Plantation Settlements, firstly in Leix and Offaly and later, and more crucially, in the northeast of Ulster, by Scots. As a result, English now had two bases in Ireland, one around Dublin and Wexford, the other around Antrim. Since then English has become the dominant language over the whole country. Although its spread has been irregular and patchy, native-speaker ability in Irish may now be as low as 3 per cent; see Kallen (1994: 164).
In terms of medieval inheritance of English, much attention is paid to the speech of the baronies of Forth and Bargy in Wexford, first commented upon by the chronicler Stanyhurst in 1577:
Howbeit to this day, the dregs of the olde auncient Chaucer English, are kept as well as in Fingall. As they term a spider, attercop, a wispe, a wad . . .
(Gorlach,¨ 1991)
Many of the present-day features of Irish English appear in these Wexford dialects, which appear to have survived until the nineteenth century. Thus the dentalisation
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of the fricatives /θ, ð/ to [t, d] in words such as thin, thirty appears to have been established very early on. Equally early is the shift of /f/ to bilabial /φ /, hence faat ‘what’; compare the form fit in Buchan in northeast Scotland. The influence of Irish Gaelic is at least as obvious in syntax as in phonology. Even in early Modern Irish, therefore, the use of after as a perfective mark, as in:
I’m after missing the bus (‘I have missed the bus’)
is extensive.
It is often remarked that Irish dialects are typically more conservative than those on the mainland. One obvious sign of this is that Irish dialects are almost uniformly rhotic. Another feature is the failure of the so-called FLEECE-merger (Wells, 1982: 194–6), so that meet and meat are not homophones, although today this failure is lost from all but the most conservative dialects; see further Harris (1985). In syntax it is noticeable that Irish dialects make rather more use of do-periphrasis than elsewhere:
They does be lonesome by night, the priest does, surely (Filppula, 1999)
although similar constructions also occur in the southwest of England, and this is one of the principal sources for the earlier settlement of Ireland by English speakers. However, it is also possible that the periphrasis is the result of Gaelic influence, and the question remains unresolved; see Filppula (1999: 130–50).
We have already mentioned the existence of the later Plantation Settlements of Antrim and this led to marked features of Ulster English which are due to Scots, including, for example, the presence of Aitken’s Law. It would be wrong, however, to see linguistic variation in Irish English, essentially a m´elange created from southwestern English, Scots and substratal Gaelic, which operate on a continuum, as in any way reflecting the sharply divided political (and quasi-religious) cultures in parts of the island.
As we reach the conclusion of this chapter, there remains one further distinctive dialect which we must mention, namely British Black English (BBE; see Sutcliffe, 1982). This refers to the creole-type of English used by English descendants from Caribbean migrants who came to Britain in the decades after the Second World War. Amongst these speakers the mainly Jamaican-based creole has been maintained to a considerable degree, particularly in peer-to-peer interaction; see Sebba (1993). There are signs, however, that British speakers are losing some of the Caribbean structures even in their creole. And, of course, most speakers of BBE are fluent in either some local British dialect or standard English. Most studies have worked with southeastern subjects, in particular from London, and as Sebba (1993) shows, his subjects, when speaking English (as opposed to creole), share many of the features of the local dialect. Whether BBE will survive, or for how long, is an open question. And it should be noted that some BBE forms have entered other non-standard dialects, for example the widespread use of bad ‘good’.