Riassunto esame Lingua Inglese: Irish English, prof. Cambria

Irish English: An introduction

The disappearance of Irish in Ireland during the 800 years of British colonization gave birth to Irish English. In Ireland, after a phase of refusal of English, another followed: the shift from Irish to English. This shift had economical, cultural, linguistic, and many other causes. Irish English refers to the variety of English spoken in Ireland.

Various factors led to the emergence of Irish English. Irish English may have developed as resistance, as an alternative vehicle for communication to received colonial English. The passage from one language to another causes cultural suffering. In any relationship between colonizer and colonized, language embodies a series of contradictions. A native language is controlled by 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 analyze in detail the features of Irish English. Since 2008, the International Corpus of English – Ireland, a transcribed corpus of speech and writing, has been available.

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 nowadays the minds of Irish people.

Irish: The dislocation of language

Postcolonial studies arise from the interaction of various cultural forces dating back to the late 20^th century. However, the texts produced by Irish writers in English have been incorporated for many centuries into English literature. As Charles Kingsley, an important novelist of the Victorian age, said, Irish Celts 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, a postcolonial field was inaugurated. 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 suggests the idea of a space that has to be occupied but also to cultivate and dominate other lands. Colonialism is “a historical phenomenon in which a part of the European continent conquered and dominated peoples of other inhabited parts of the world.”

The image of Ireland consists 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, who describes to Eudoxus the circumstances that led to the degeneration of Old English, how the Anglo-Norman families who conquered...