Irish English and World Englishes

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with Irish English as a World English. It considers the ways in which Irish English has been categorised by various top-down theoretical models of World Englishes. In so doing, it raises the question of what type of Irish English is being categorised by these models: a relatively standardised variety or a more vernacular variety. It goes on to consider how far such models may be empirically exemplified. The chapter considers data not only from the ICE-Ireland Corpus but also from eWAVE and GloWbE. It shows that GloWbE is particularly effective at illustrating Irishisms as well as displaying the global distribution of lexical items that have originated in Ireland. Finally, it considers some statistical approaches which not only look at particular features across corpora but also adopt a multi-dimensional factorial approach. The chapter concludes that, despite the various top-down theoretical suggestions, and notwithstanding its relative Celticity and relative Scottishness, the status of present-day Irish English, as represented in the ICE-Ireland Corpus, is reinforced as an L1 variety.