The object of this major work is to make easily accessible to linguists or students all material of relevance, direct or indirect, to the English spoken in Ireland, North and South, and by the Irish in different parts of the world. The influence of the Irish language on this variety of English is of prime importance, but the remit is much broader than this; the work also deals with the influence of all languages associated with Irish history, such as Flemish and the Scandinavian languages, on the development of both “Irish English” and Irish itself, and the way in which they in turn were changed by their use in Ireland. Influence is treated as a two‐way affair. The research interests of the author, who teaches in the Department of English at Essen University, include computer corpus processing (the CD‐ROM which accompanies the book provides complex searching and customised processing of material), variety linguistics, especially extraterritorial varieties of English, and language change, all of which are reflected in this work.
Accurate terminology of languages and geographic terms is of great importance. The author takes care to explain the rejection of the older term “Anglo‐Irish” and the more recent “Hiberno‐English” in favour of the broader, but less objectionable, “Irish English” which can be differentiated accordingly without carrying the baggage of political ideology or ambiguous meaning. At the linguistic level it is evident that this is a work for the practitioner, since, although terms like “the common features … such as a perfective with after, the use of and as a subordinating conjunction … ” require no explanation, the lay reader with an interest in the subject may regret that some of the more technical linguistic terminology is not illustrated by practical examples.
The main bibliography is prefaced by two smaller sections: The first, An Historical Outline, describes the development of Irish English which falls into two main parts, the earlier culminating in the actual decline of English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Only with the seventeenth‐century plantations was the dominance of English over Irish made possible and, indeed, irreversible, since it involved the wholesale replacement of the artisan/farmer class, rather than merely the governing class. The author is especially interested in the south‐east of the country and in the lost Middle‐English dialect of the baronies of Forth and Bargy in particular. The second section, Research Themes, introduces those topics of particular concern in the field of Irish English studies and how these relate to problems in the broader field of variety studies.
The annotated bibliography, which comprises over three‐quarters of the book, is a structured bibliography of linguistic works which concern themselves with Irish English, and includes every type of publication from monographs to “letters to the editor”. It also includes popular non‐linguistic studies. Annotations serve to give a general impression of the work’s coverage, but not all works are annotated. A unique cross‐reference number is applied to all works in the bibliography wherever they appear in the text, and this works well apart from a couple of occasions when the number is omitted or the author does not appear in the index. As the cut‐off point is 2000, the bibliography is supplemented by a section on “forthcoming items”, and works which were published too late to appear in the text appear in a file on the CD‐ROM. After this, readers are directed to the author’s home page for the most recent version of this file.
Other useful adjuncts include biographical notes of main scholars in the field and a chronology of Irish history. The scope and detail of the bibliography make this an invaluable research tool and an impressive work of scholarship.
