Map of Cork City:

Cork: An introduction to its unique dialect

Introduction Cork is Irelands largest county; it is located on the southern tip of the country, inside the province of Munster and surrounded by the majestic Atlantic Ocean. The flood prone city of Cork is built upon 365 islets which are surrounded by the River Lee; it is from this that it derives its name Corcaigh, meaning a marshy area. I chose to write an informative paper on the dialect of Cork because most people outside of Ireland will be unfamiliar with this unique and distinctive variation of Hiberno-English. I shall touch upon the history of the English language in Ireland, with an impetus placed upon Cork; where the flavour of Hiberno-English that is CorkEnglish draws its influences; and provide some examples of the rich vocabulary, expressive phrases and unique nuances found within the Cork dialect. A brief overview of the history of the English language in Cork and Ireland. Although Anglo-Normans first began to settle on the east coast of Ireland in 1169, as the invading knights and gentry spoke Anglo-Norman French, it would be quite some time before the English language would begin to make any headway amongst the Gaeilge (/gelgw/) speaking Irish natives. Cork City was captured by the Anglo-Normans in 1177 and its first charter was drawn up in 1185 by Henry IIs son Prince John. Between the 12th and 13th centuries, a 6 metre high wall was erected around the city, and according to Raphael Hollinshed (1577), the people living within the city walls lived in constant fear of their e|uill neighboures, the Irihe [Gaeilge speaking] outlawes (Vol 3, p. 74). Due to the walls surrounding the city and the xenophobic sentiments1 of the citizens within those walls, the city of Cork would remain an insular and isolated Anglo-Norman settlement on the south coast of Ireland until the 17th century. However even after the Elizabethan English speaking Cromwellian planters began to settle throughout Ireland, the English language would only manage to successfully take root in some parts of the country with its progress in Cork and most of Ireland stuttering along slowly until the 19th century.

Galvin (2005) cites the 1241 city charter which forbade anyone from beyond the city walls engaging in trade or commerce. 300 years later Holnished (1577) confirms that insularity still pervaded within the city when he wrote that Corke is so incumbred with vnquiet neighbors of great power, that they are forced to gard their gates continuallie, & to kepe them shut at seruice times, at meales, and from sun setting to sun rising, not suffering anie stranger to enter the towne with his weapon, but to leaue the same at a lodge appointed. They match in wedlocke among themselues, so that welnere the whole citie is alied and ioined togither in consan|guinitie.(Vol 3. p74)

According to McCrum, MacNeil and Cran (1986) at the beginning of the 19th century, out of a total population in Ireland of about five million, [Gaeilge] was the mother tongue of perhaps two million; one and a half million spoke only English, while a further one and a half million were bilingual (p. 195). Gaeilge remained the tongue of choice for the majority of the Irish population; bilingualism was in use on an everyday basis in some areas and English was only in use on an everyday basis in Dublin, the area surrounding Dublin known as the English Pale, some parts of the midlands and some parts of the Ulster. According to Hindley (as cited by Filppula, 1999, p. 8) in 1799 as many as 800,000 people had no knowledge of English and were Gaeilge monoglots. However this all changed with the occurrence of two unrelated events: the introduction of primary education in 1831, within which Gaeilge was prohibited from being taught or used; and the Great Famine of 1845-1852, which led to the deaths of over one million people and forced a great many more to emigrate. When the 19th century drew to a close, English had become the tongue of choice for the majority of the Irish population, and according to Gregor (as cited by Filppula, 1999) by 1891 the number of Gaeilge monoglots had declined to 38,000 (p. 10). By 1897 Gaeilge speaking strongholds still remained in the southern and western counties of Ireland, with some small pockets in Leinster and Ulster also surviving (see appendix 1), but by the middle of the 20th century these Gaeilge speaking strongholds became overwhelmed by English speakers, leaving only small areas known as Gaeltachts in their wake. Gaeilge monoglots no longer existed; and for all intents and purposes, the vast majority of Irish people had become Hiberno-English monoglots. Hiberno-English: How its distinctive variety in the South came to be. According to Asin and McCullough (1997) after the 17th century plantations no further migration of a significant magnitude [from English speaking countries into Ireland] took place [and] there was no steady widespread exposure to more modern forms of English until the advent of audio-visual mass media in the twentieth century (p. 4). Due to the lack of continued exposure, the English that evolved in Cork developed in a way that preserved characteristic pronunciations [known] to be Elizabethan (McCrum et al., 2011. p. 187). Some of the pronunciations that have survived into modern day usage amongst the speakers of Cork include: Original Pronunciation (OP) of /flm/ for film, which in Shakespeares time was pronounced as

it was spelled: philome; // is pronounced post vocally in Cork, making it, like OP, a rhotic dialect, and in Cork the OP pronunciation of world is still realized by the locals as: /wald/; the OP pronunciation of creature is still used in Cork, /ket/; and as McCrum et al. (1986) noted: Like Shakespeare [the people of Cork] say bairley for barley(p. 187). As well as the preservation of archaic pronunciations, certain grammatical features of Elizabethan English are still present amongst the English speakers of Cork today. Examples of which would be: the use of second person plural ye; syntax reversal if a verb is imperative i.e: Go, let ye.; the use of most as an intensifier as opposed to very, often presenting itself in the form of a double superlative i.e: Hes the most nicest fella youll ever meet.; and the Elizabethan greeting: How now? has been preserved, although it is now augmented with the 1st person plural pronoun we to give the following: How we now?. According to Bliss (1984) another factor that gave the English speakers of Cork their distinctive brogue was that the sounds of Elizabethan English had to be accommodated to the sounds of the phonemic system present in the Gaeilge speaking Irish natives; Irish had 31 consonant phonemes in comparison to the 23 [found in] English, but it only had 5 short vowels, 5 long vowels and lacked several of the diphthongs found in English; therefore, there was an insufficient number of vowel phonemes in Irish to match the vowel phonemes of English, so that the speaker of [Gaeilge] would have difficulty in recognizing and reproducing the English sounds (p. 135-137). The people of Cork had no option but to compensate for what they were lacking phonetically; and in doing so, they developed their own distinctive dialect that still preserves many Elizabethan characteristics. The influence of Gaeilge within the dialect of English spoken in Cork does not simply only present itself through pronunciation, many grammatical features of the native Irish language have also managed to pervade its use. Bliss (1984) states that verbs in Gaeilge have 5 inflicted tenses "present, future, past, imperfect, conditional [but] no perfect or plurperfect and that "Southern Hiberno-English has precisely the same range of tenses as Irish has, but the forms are built up out of English material", this gives rise to unique sentence structures in Cork such as: He does be writing [all the time]. meaning: He usually writes(p. 143-144). The words for yes and no are only recent constructions within Gaeilge, sea (//) meaning yes has evolved from is ea (/s e/) which means it is; nl (/nil/) or n hea (/ni h), meaning no, literally means it is not. When English was being absorbed by the Irish population,

people faced with a polar question would give an echo response, recycling the verb from the question in a similar way to how they would respond in Gaeilge, for example: Did you turn the lights off? received the response: I did, or: I did not. This nuance, along with scores of others, still survives in the modern day variety of Hiberno-English spoken in Cork, and, along with the surviving characteristics of Elizabethan English, these distinctive trademarks have all combined together to form the unique dialect of Cork-English. Cork-English: An example of some of its words, expressions and nuances. Theres a rake (a lot) of unique words and phrases that the people of Cork have at their disposal to feck around with (play with), some of them can trace their origins to Elizabethan English, others to Gaeilge and a few are still up in a heap (causing confusion) because no clear cut origin can seem to be found to fit them. The most well known word from Cork-English is langer, a word which was brought to national attention due to a song released by a band from Cork; and then, thanks to a campaign by a national radio broadcaster in Ireland, it managed to gain entry into the Collins English Dictionary. It is a word for which no origin can be agreed upon. Sen Beecher (1983) in his Dictionary of Cork Slang notes that langur is a long tailed monkey of India. Given the fact that the recruitment area of the 101st regiment of the Honourable East India Companys army included Cork, and that another Cork word pawny (rain/water) has been found to come from the Hindustani word pani, meaning water; Beecher may have been right2. Langer can mean one of three things: a penis, a fool/stupid person; or when pluralized to langers, as well as still possibly meaning a plural version of the two former definitions, it can also mean drunk. In recent times a portmanteau has been created by combining langer with inebriated to create the word langerated. It means to be fierce (very) drunk. Im happy out, is a phrase that people in Cork may use to show satisfaction and contentment when they are questioned about their particular position in life. Although it is sentence composed of only 3 words, its true meaning and emotive power take a great many more words in Standard English (SE) to convey, and to someone unfamiliar with the dialect of English spoken in Cork, its meaning is well and truly lost. T thas a bheith orm as rud a dhanamh,
2

An argument could be made for langer being a remnant of the Old Norse langr. The pronunciation of langer in Cork is strikingly similar to the Swedish lngre. Given that the words can be used to describe penis length, and this is one of its definitions in Cork-English, this may be more than just a coincidence. See the appendix for a short piece that humourous piece that elaborates on this theory.

the Gaeilge sentence from which the phrase evolved, literally means: There is happiness over me out of this doing. In SE in order to carry across the full weight and depth of meaning that: Im happy out, has managed to pack into its 3 short words, the following would need to be said: At this current point in time, I really am truly satisfied with my position in life. One of the most salient features of Cork-English is the preponderance of the word like. Like is used as a discourse particle and can come as a sentence final discourse filler, to indicate the speaker has finished talking; or as a speech disfluency filler, to indicate the speaker means to continue talking. It is one of the more contagious aspects of Cork-English. Its easy absorption into the vocabulary of people who are not native Cork-English speakers may be due in part to both the conversational phenomenon of parroting and the fact that unlike filler words such as yknow and basically, like is a single syllable discourse filler and can be easily said and repeated. Summary Cork-English is steeped in a rich and tumultuous history. In its short lifetime it has developed into one of the most distinctive dialects in Ireland. Cork-English is just as distinctive Dublin-English, and it is more than simply just an accent of Hiberno-English. It houses many phonetic realizations, grammatical constructions and words that are completely unique and not to be found in any other parts of Ireland. References Asin, A., & McCullough, J. (1997). Hiberno-English and the teaching of modern and contemporary Irish literature in an EFL context. Retrieved on July 25th 2012 from
http://ddd.uab.cat/pub/lal/11337397n5p37.pdf

Beecher, S. (1983). A Dictionary of Cork Slang. Cork: Collins. Retrieved on the 30th of July from: http://www.corkslang.com/ Bliss, A.J. (1984). English in the south of Ireland, in P.Trudgill (ed.) Language in the British Isles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved on July 25th 2012 from
http://books.google.ie/books?id=liY4AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=Language+ in+the+British+Isles+bliss&source=bl&ots=59fFv1tbK&sig=mgiMoF1EV0UICDEgkllDqlyZyB0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZFIQUPC9FsKLhQeB2 4CgDA&ved=0CEYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=bliss&f=false

Cork City Council Library. (1891). Map of Cork City. Retreived on July 25 2012 from http://www.corkpastandpresent.ie/mapsimages/printsanddrawings/mapofcorkcity/

E.G Ravenstein. (1897). Map of Irish Language use in 1871. Journal of the Statistical Society of London vol 42, no 3, 583. Retrieved on July 25th 2012 from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Irishin1871.jpg/492pxIrishin1871.jpg Filppula, M. (1999). Grammar of Irish English : Language in Hibernian Style, London: Routledge. Galvin, T. (2005). Thats Cork, Cork, Collins Press. Hollinshed, R. (1577). Chronicles of Englande, Scotlande and Irlande, London: Henry Bynneman. Retrieved on the 30th of July 2012 from:
http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/holinshed/texts.php?text1=1587_0498

McCrum, R., MacNeil M., & Cran, W. (1986). The Story of English, London: Faber & Faber Ltd.

Appendix 1

Map of Irish language use 1871. (E.G Ravenstein. 1897)

Comical theory on the word Langer: The Cork slang word: langer, might be a remnant of the Old Norse: langr (longer). The pronunciation of langer in Cork-English is very similar to the modern Swedish word for longer: lngre. Considering that Viking's normally had inclinations to stick their penises into places where they were not wanted, it could be assumed that they were probably not shy about seeing each-other's 'langers' and may have compared lengths to see who was langr. The fact that this word came to be used in Cork slang for both: a penis and a person who is dislked, is probably more than just a coincidence; after all, when the monks who lived peacefully on the banks of the

Lee were being attacked and faced with the prospect of rape, the last person they would want to see walking towards them is the Viking who is 'langr'.One can imagine their cries, "Nl t s langre!" (No he is langer!).