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Victories fastened in grammar: historical documentation of Irish English

What evidence is available for earlier Irish English, and what do the texts tell us about the history of this variety?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2011

Kevin McCafferty
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Extract

In ‘Murdering the language’ Moya Cannon imagines Ireland as a shore washed over by human tides. Each invasion added fresh layers to landscape, community and language, until:

[…] we spoke our book of invasions –

an unruly wash of Victorian pedantry,

Cromwellian English, Scots,

the jetsam and the beached bones of Irish –

a grammarian's nightmare. (Cannon, 2007: 88)

Type
Original Article
Information
English Today , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 2011 , pp. 17 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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