An investigation of phonetic and phonological change and the influence of English on Modern Irish
Humanities
Senior Thesis in Linguistics
There is great concern in and around traditional Irish-speaking communities that Irish, or Gaelic as we might call it, is being influenced by English, particularly in younger generations. These concerns are reflected in news articles (Gleeson 2015, Healy 2015) and academia alike (Ó Béarra 2008). Given that all Irish speakers are also speakers of English and the complex attitudes towards the languages (McCloskey 2008), Irish-speaking regions, known as Gaeltachts, provide an interesting case study for language contact. In this study, I investigated whether and how Irish is changing in the context of language contact by conducting a cross-generational study of mother-daughter pairs of native Connemara Irish speakers. I focused specifically on the realization of the palatalization contrast, a key feature of Irish sound systems that is both rare and not present in English. The palatalization contrast is a sound system in which each consonant has two versions: one produced further forward in the mouth (palatalized) and one produced further back (velarized). While I did find some potential weakening of this contrast in certain speech environments, for the most part, this study shows that the palatalization contrast is not diminishing across generations. I also found a pattern of vowel change in younger speakers that was not present in older speakers. It appears from this study that while some relatively minor changes are occurring across generations, essential patterns of Irish remain well in tact.
