This chapter begins by surveying the linguistic history of Ireland. Although it is situated on the periphery of the British Isles, there is evidence of contact between the island, other regions of Britain and indeed other countries in western Europe for centuries. It explores early and later contacts between the indigenised Celts and more recent colonisers and immigrants, including the Normans, the English, the Scots and twentieth-century settlers from the European Union prior to Brexit. These contacts have created a set of contemporary Irish English varieties that are not only distinctive with respect to other world Englishes but are also differentiated diatopically, ethnically and socially. Two main topics are addressed. The degree to which Irish English from different time frames is structurally similar to other dialects spoken elsewhere is considered alongside evaluating the extent to which contemporary Irish Englishes vary internally and externally with respect to their lexis, phonology, morphosyntax and discourse pragmatics. Some space is also devoted to examining how the study of Irish English has developed and what directions research might take in the twenty-first century in response to new approaches to modelling linguistic contact as well as the availability of larger and more diverse digital datasets.

This was a time of vibrant writing about the Irish past, in which the colonial question and the nature of Irish society before the twelfth-century English conquest remained key contexts. The dispute over the ancient origins of the Irish, always viewed through that colonial prism, continued to engross antiquaries. This chapter examines eighteenth-century iterations of this theme, looking at the two main theories of Irish origins: the Milesian, derived from rich medieval Gaelic sources (employing the biblical template of the Israelites), which posited Scythian, Egyptian and Spanish ancestry, mirroring the various sojourns of the Irish on their epic journey to the “promised land” of Ireland; and the Scandinavian, propounded by the upholders of the benefits of English colonization, and aiming to place that colonization in a framework of pre-existing contact with, and invasion by, the Germanic tribes of northern Europe. The debate was also inflected by the modern imperial project, thus linking England’s oldest colony, Ireland, with its newest, India. Nevertheless, the core question remained the same – the nature of Irish national character – and was primed for the onset of overtly racial constructions towards the end of this period.

In 1600, even as English was slowly becoming established as the dominant language in several parts of the world which were very remote from the island where it had first come into being, back in Britain there were still several regions which were not yet at all English-speaking. This was true even of parts of Herefordshire and Shropshire in England. But the major continuing story in the British Isles from 1600 onwards is the familiar one of the retreat of all the other languages English came into contact with.

New technologies inevitably require new terminology. To refer to rudders, spectacles, telephones, and more, over the centuries Irish speakers borrowed words from other languages as well as repurposing native terms. In recent times, the challenge posed by loanwords has been political as much as linguistic, but, while we cannot know how people of the Middle Ages felt about the inflow of words from Norse or Norman French, technological vocabulary probably tells the history of contact between the Irish and other cultures more clearly than any other word-field. Within Irish itself, terms for inventions and innovations serve as fascinating case studies in language change and resilience: some medieval words for still-common devices have inexplicably fallen out of use; some early terms have been recorded again after long periods of silence; some words have manifested twice, hundreds of years apart. This chapter charts the emergence and development of a selection of technological terms in both medieval and modern Irish.