Riassunto esame Lingua Inglese: Irish English, prof. Cambria

IRISH ENGLISH: AN INTRODUCTION

The disappearance of Irish in Ireland during the 800 hundred years of British colonization gave

birth to Irish English. In Ireland, after a phase of refusal English, another followed: the shift from

Irish to English. This shift had economical, cultural, linguistic and many other causes.

Irish English is referred to the variety of English spoken in Ireland.

Various factors led to the emergence of Irish English. Irish English may have developed as a

resistance as an alternative vehicle for communication to received colonial English.

The passage from a language to another one causes cultural suffering. In any relationship

between colonizer and colonized, language embodies a series of contradictions.

A native language is controlled by the imperialistic power by imposing the language of the

Empire (English, in the case of Ireland) in the colony or even by banning the native language.

Tom Paulin investigates the presence, in the Irish psyche, of a fractured identity; consequently,

Seamus Deane argues “to be unique in 2 languages – in the native one we never speak which

is ours, in the other one which is not ours although native to us. It’s a neurotic condition”.

Several questions arise regarding the contact between Irish and Irish English.

Tom Paulin has already raised the issue of the absence of an Irish-English/English dictionary.

Dictionaries and bibliographies on the subject have been published; the corpora was created to

analyse in detail the features of Irish English. Since 2008 is available the International Corpus

of English – Ireland, a transcribed corpus of speech and writing.

The history of the “stepmother tongue” spoken today in Ireland is tightly bound to the history

of the Island’s mother tongue, Irish , which formed and continues to form nowdays the minds

of Irish people.

1. IRISH: THE DISLOCATION OF LANGUAGE

Postcolonial studies arise from the interaction of various cultural forces dating back to the late

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20 century. However, the texts produced by Irish writers in English have been incorporated for

many centuries into English literature.

As said Charles Kingsley, an important novelist of the Victorian age, Irish Celt are considered to

be “unfit” for self-government because they view freedom and law as weapons for their

interests. Kingsley compared the Irish to animals, and he also rejected the idea that the

condition of the Irish people can be imputed to English people.

In 1989 has been inaugurated a postcolonial field. The postcolonial period is the period that

comes after the colonialism phenomenon.

The term colony is derived from the Latin colere (“to live” but also “to grow” ) and from colony

which means “settlement”. This double meaning suggest the idea of a space that has to be

occupied but also to cultivate, dominate other lands, colonialism is “a historical phenomenon in

which a part of Europeans continent conquered and dominated peoples of other inhabited

parts of the world”.

The image of Ireland consist of unspoilt landscapes, green spaces populated by elves; but

Ireland has not always been considered a land of fairy tales: its history is characterized by

cultural and political dynamics that place the colonizer and the colonized in a highly conflictual

relationship.

As Spencer said of his “A view of a present State of Ireland”, he presented Irenius, an expert in

Irish affairs, describes to Eudoxus, the circumstances that led to the degeneration of Old

English, how the Anglo-Norman families who conquered Ireland, had adopted the customs and

language of Irish. One of the reason of this degeneration is the “abuse of language” of the

Anglo-Norman, when they started to speak Irish among the English. They used Irish language

because the English were mixing with Irish women, marrying them.

Irish revolutionary spirit was a problem for the English. Although the first Norman invaders

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arrived in Ireland in 1170, it was not until Henry VIII in the 16 century that an appropriation of

the territory of Ireland began.

The Normans were placed in the socio-cultural Gaelic landscape and become “more Irish that

the Irish themselves”. The lack of control over the Irish people was a sign of weakness in the

Tudor dynasty. The King’s enemies were not just the Irish, but also 30 English chiefs, emblems

of the betrayal that took place in British colony. In the 1601 began a bitter military campaign in

Ireland which led to the last battle for Gaelic Ireland (the famous Flight of the Earls).

Gheeraerts painted a portrait of Captain Thomas Lee standing in a landscape wearing an Irish

dress. The man is an Anglo-Norman noble, with man elements of Gaelic. This portrait is known

as “the man with the bare legs”, the clothes are typical of the Queen Elizabeth, mixed with

those of the “wild” Irish population.

Arriving in Ireland as a protector, Sir Thomas Lee used English language and clothes, and didn’t

employ any Irishman who grew up outside this country.

He lived in a period between the old and the new.

The old was personified by the Crown policy, that tried to persuade Irish people to adopt an

English way of life, while the new as the growing old Gaelic system towards the colonizers.

The English Crown tried to halter the process of assimilation of “barbarism” into which the

Normans had fallen through treaties.

One of the strongest treaties was that of Kilkenny, which prohibited the adoption of Irish Gaelic

clothing and the use of Irish by people called “English born in Ireland”.

Despite these measures, the influence of the English Crown remained limited to the area of

Dublin. So Henry VIII made a territorial reform. All the landowners were forced to give their land

back to the Crown that re-distributed it only among the nobles.

Spencer’s fear was the problem of the contamination of British cultural. Spencer was

considered excessively anti-Irish but only because he lived in a time in which there was that

ideology.

Keating’s “the history of Ireland” narrates the history of Ireland from the creation of the new

world to the invasion of the Normans. Keating suggested that the Ireland’s nobility derived from

Gaelic and old English clan.

Relevant in the extract is the metaphor of the beetle. Like beetles, former historians didn’t stop

to take notice beautiful flowers, but kept on bustling until they fell into ”dung of horse or cow”.

English historians writing on Irish culture were involved in anti-Irish propaganda, to portray the

Irish as savages in order to justify their conquest.

The years of Queen Victoria’s reign saw the greatest period of colonial expansion.

2. INVENTING A CELTINC LANGUAGE: THE BIRTH OF THE ABBEY THEATRE

Nationalism is related to anti-imperialistic revolts. Commenting on Indian nationalism, there is a

distinction between

- nationalism as political movement it is a derivative, and is based on an “imagined

community”

- nationalism as a cultural construction relates to the need to create an identity

contrasting with the colonizers’ representation of them.

On one hand, colonized people tend to reject the literary models of the colonizers, on the other

hand the same models are the cultural background of the colonized.

A major established literature follows a vector that goes from content to expression. But a

minor or revolutionary literature begins by expressing itself and doesn’t conceptualize until

afterward.

Ireland has rebelled against the colonial experience and in 1916 there was a the “Easter

Rising“ which led to the proclamation of the independence in 1921.

“Our Irish Theatre” of Lady Gregory is a source of information about the history of the national

theater. In the manifesto, the creation of an Irish school for dramatic literature is possible only

if an “uncorrupted and imaginative audience” is found in Ireland.

Ireland should not be seen as the house of buffoonery, but as the home of an ancient noble

idealism.

With this text, there is another one called “An Irish National Theater” of Yets , who tries to

define what a National theater is. The audience is the most important element. Yets

emphasizes the need to have a good, open-minded audience, and he also invited people to be

free in the opinion-making process.

The Abbey Theater was born as the National Theater and tended to be the site of the

concrete portrait of the Ireland.

People who worked at the Abbey Theater understood that a restoration of the Gaelic language

was impossible; the creation of a national theater made sense only if it was able to

communicate with its audience and this couldn’t happen without the use of English, which

become the language of communication among Irish people.

The Gaelic language was an obstacle to progress and modernization. th

The aristocracy, which spoke Gaelic, had been destroyed by the British in the 16 century, so

Gaelic speaking population was in decline, and most of them began to speak English. In this

way, had begun the process of Anglicization of Ireland, in order to be more modern.

Hyde said that for a creation of a New Ireland is necessary the restoration of Irish language. In

his “The necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” Hyde said the necessary to depurate Ireland from

English. The best way to do this is the modality. Epistemic modality indicates the degree of

probability of a fact, and is mixed with deontic modality which has to do with volition and

obligation with regard to an action. This text want to preserve and promote Irish culture.

Hyde said that the abandonment of Gaelic is not fault of the British; Gaelic was slowly decaying

when people decided to learn English, necessary for emigration to find a job and have a

prosperous life.

The revivalists had begun t look back t the pre-colonial Ireland which had disintegrated during

the colonial period. These narratives led to the inspiration of an ideal Ireland.

3. IRISH-ENGLISH: HISTORY AND ORIGINS

The Celtic language is referred to Irish. Epigraphs in Latin characters testify the presence of

Roman in Britain; but Latin never excluded Celtic language, and so emerged a bilingual phase.

In some parts of Ireland, there was even a trilingual system of communication (English,

Norman-French and Irish). When Dublin became the capital, it was occupied by English people.

Ireland was a multicultural context in which Norman French was the superstrate language, Irish

a substrate language, and English as a foreign parvenu. English wasn’t a dominant language at

this stage.

The assimilation into Irish caused the Norman-French to decline. This led to an abandonment of

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English in favour of Irish. By the end of the 16 century, the people of Ireland were

Irish-speaking only.

Against Irish, there was the Statutes of Kilkenny of the 1366, which provide punishments for

those who used Irish. The laws were written in