Advanced Dublin English in Irish radio advertising

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the late 1990s, Ireland's increased prosperity and elevated international position created a need among ‘socially‐mobile’ speakers in the capital, Dublin, for a less local and more sophisticated form of Irish English. This sparked the development of a new form of pronunciation which differentiated and distanced itself from local Dublin speech forms. This form has spread at a rapid pace, not only in Dublin, but throughout southern Ireland and has been given the term new pronunciation (Hickey 2004b:48), and more recently, advanced Dublin English (Hickey 2012). Since this new pronunciation form is seen by Hickey (2005) as indisputably the most important case of language change in contemporary Ireland, the extent to which it is reflected in and exploited in the Irish advertising context demands attention. This paper outlines research into the extent and functions of advanced Dublin English in Irish advertising through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of 160 radio advertisements from a prominent Irish radio station. Following Lee (1992), Sussex's (1989) categorisation of the Action (associated with dialogic interaction in particular contexts) and comment (associated with slogan or voice of authority) components of the ads are employed.