It's Speaking Australian English We Are: Irish Features in Nineteenth Century Australia

Abstract

A linguistic puzzle has always been the extent of the influence of Irish English on the shaping of postcolonial dialects such as Australian English (AusE). In order to investigate the presence/absence of ‘Irishisms’ in the formative years of AusE, this paper examines two sub-corpora of AusNC—COOEE (texts of Australia, New Zealand and Norfolk Island origin between 1788 and 1900) and, for comparison, the literary representations of Irish in several nineteenth and twentieth century novels of AusLit (a collection of poetry, fiction and criticism ranging from 1790s to the 1930s). While studies of new dialect formation have focused overwhelmingly on phonological features (with the notable exception of Fritz in 2005), this paper is concerned with grammatical aspects, in particular syntactic features of Irish English such as it-clefting; the ‘hot news’ (or ‘immediate’) perfective be after [VERB]-ing; habitual do(es) be [VERB]-ing; the infinitival marker for-to; epistemic mustn't; plural second person pronoun forms (yous(e), yez) and Final but. Our findings help shed light on the linguistic processes that were going on during this crucial period for the formation of AusE, especially with regard to the levelling out of grammatical variation in the new dialect.