How One Word Borrows Another: The Process of Language-contact in two Irish-speaking Communities

Abstract

Quantitative and qualitative data from two Irish-speaking communities in Ireland (F, a core community within the heartland of Irish-speaking Galway and B, a peripheral community on the edge of Galway city) are examined in order to investigate the role of location in language contact. The analysis of the observed linguistic outcomes based on interviews conducted in these two communities showed that English nouns were more frequently borrowed in the F community furthest away from the community of English speakers and English discourse markers were very common and statistically significant in terms of differentiating F and B. In a sample of 20,400 words from F speakers only 559 words were English words. Almost 30% of the English words that appear in the data were nouns and over 66% were discourse markers. In the qualitative analysis, F speakers were shown to use English discourse markers in the construction of informal style. B speakers were shown to engage with the two languages in contact in a very different way by codeswitching for metalinguistic purposes. Overall the paper argues that sociolinguistic context as location determines the choices of bilingual speakers living in environments where both Irish and English are available for use.

Keywords:

• language contact
• Irish English
• discourse markers
• sociolinguistic context
• intraspeaker variation
• borrowing
• codeswitching