Irish English in emigrant letters

Abstract

The language of letters, especially from lower social strata, may provide some of the best data available for pre-twentieth-century language history from below, because it may accurately represent features of spoken language. To illustrate how much variation -and examples of 'non-standard'/vernacular usage -may be extracted from letters, this study reports on a survey of citations in an early historical study of Irish emigration based on letters. The survey of citations from a study by a historian reveals numerous features of potential interest to linguists working on earlier Irish English and its influence on other Englishes, thus indicating the wealth of vernacular features that may be found in collections and corpora of personal letters.

Letters to the Paulaharjus from Ruija: The emergence of two writing cultures in Finnish among Kvens in the early twentieth century

“…The emigrant letters that have been investigated in historical sociolinguistics, especially those written by the lower classes, are often private letters (Laitinen & Nordlund 2012, McCafferty 2017, Hickey 2019:5). However, the letters in our study were written at the specific request of the Finnish ethnographers Samuli (1875–1944) and Jenny (1878–1964) Paulaharju, asking for information about their own lives or the lives of other Kvens in their communities.…”

“…Such letters have been collected in many European languages (e.g. Elspass 2012:159-160, Laitinen & Nordlund 2012, Kauranen 2013, McCafferty 2017, Hickey 2019.…”

Irish Identities

“…The context within which Martin's Life takes place is a simulacrum of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, where the ebbs and flows of enforced and voluntary migration and immigration have created a new sociocultural reality; an Ireland that is ethnically more diverse, that has weathered (and is still weathering) a serious economic recession, with Irish nationals still emigrating, though at lower rates, and with returning migrants adjusting to life in this new Irelandan Ireland that is arguably quite different to the one they left. Ireland has a long history of being an emigrant nation, from the key exoduses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the mass emigration due to famine in the 1840s, and various national and global events resulting in peaks and troughs in in emigration into the twentieth century (Fitzgerald and Lamkin 2008;Amador-Moreno and McCafferty 2015;McCafferty 2017). Emigration was simply a fact of life, notably again in the 1980s, until the 1990s and the period of dramatic economic growth, the 'Celtic Tiger'.…”

10. It’s gems like this that make me wish I hadn’t left Ireland!: Humorous representations of Irish English and their role in diasporic identities

“…The context within which Martin's Life takes place is a simulacrum of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, where the ebbs and flows of enforced and voluntary migration and immigration have created a new sociocultural reality; an Ireland that is ethnically more diverse, that has weathered (and is still weathering) a serious economic recession, with Irish nationals still emigrating, though at lower rates, and with returning migrants adjusting to life in this new Irelandan Ireland that is arguably quite different to the one they left. Ireland has a long history of being an emigrant nation, from the key exoduses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the mass emigration due to famine in the 1840s, and various national and global events resulting in peaks and troughs in in emigration into the twentieth century (Fitzgerald and Lamkin 2008;Amador-Moreno and McCafferty 2015;McCafferty 2017). Emigration was simply a fact of life, notably again in the 1980s, until the 1990s and the period of dramatic economic growth, the 'Celtic Tiger'.…”