The Biggest Differences Between The Irish Accent and The British Accent

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The biggest differences between the

Irish accent and the British accent.


Hadi Maghnieh

Introduction
An Accent is something that we experience every day and even use without noticing, there are a lot
of different accent that are interesting to go deeper in detail, find out where they come from, why
they sound the way they do and why some are similar and others not. We will get to know more
about two different accents, the Irish accent and the British accent. My hypothesis is that the Irish
and British accent is going to differ a lot in phonology, like word order, etc.

Heading
1.Introduction.............................................................................................................................1

2.Theoreticalframework............................................................................................................. 2

2.1 Accents .................................................................................................................... 2-3

2.2 Phonetics ................................................................................................................. 3

2.3 Phonology ............................................................................................................... 3-4

2.4 Hiberno-English ......................................................................................................... 4

2.5Origins....................................................................................................................... 4-5

2.6 Conclusion/Evolution.................................................................................................. 5

2.7 British-English.............................................................................................................. 5

2.8 Origins ….................................................................................................................... 6

3. Method ....................................................................................................................................6

3.1Researchquestion..........................................................................................................6

3.2Targetaudience.............................................................................................................6

3.3 Method..................................................................................................................... 6-7

4. Results...................................................................................................................................... 7

4.1 Syntaxis .................................................................................................................... 7-8

4.2Phonology.................................................................................................................... 8

4.3Pronunciation............................................................................................................... 8

4.4 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 8

5.Bibliography.............................................................................................................................. 9

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Theoretical Framework

Accents

Accents appears in every language, especially in English, you have almost a different accent for each
region. What are accents exactly an, accent is a way of pronunciation of words that is different in
each country and in each region, some of the factors that play a role are, education, mother
language, ... An accent is something that everyone has but, there are some regions with foreigners
or habitants that are known for its strong and remarkable accents, the pronunciations and sounds
used in Scottish and Irish English are very pronounced and distinct. A type of accent that we
encounter a lot is the foreign accent, it is seen if you are an immigrant for example and you use
other languages in your daily life, if English is not your mother language the difference in
pronunciation and vowels will be remarkable for those people. Accents also simply come from the
origin of the language, just like in Dutch there is a Flemish accent is not the same as a dialect. The
difference between the two is that an accent is only about the pronunciation, while a dialect
includes the general grammar. It is about the pronunciation, and it originates back to the people that
lived here. The people that lived here are the natives that were situated in Flanders, so that is where
the accent comes from. Accents can also be adjusted if a person moves to a place where a lot of
people have a different accent. they will adapt/adopt their pronunciations, where they put the stress
in the sentences and sometimes the rhythm of their speaking, so it will have an influence on the
person’s accent, and it will be adjusted. Accents vary with the circumstances that someone grew up
in, for example a person born and raised by a rich family will have a different accent than someone
born and raised by a poor family, like researched by Diarmait Mac (The Irish Language in Ireland).
The type of education that is given can also affect a person's accent; in some schools they teach the
British pronunciation whilst in others they teach the American pronunciation, the type of education
in Belgium suggests that they use British pronunciation according to R. Willenyms. A person's main
language has the biggest influence on that person's accent, some languages do not use syllables or
use other vowels so, when they want to use English the influence will be seen by the way that the

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person pronounces words. It is not only noticeable in their speech within speaking, but also in
writing. For example, when someone is learning English, etc.

The people that have an accent whilst English is their native language. As said by John C. Wells
(Accents Of English: Volume 1), the accent of a native speaker depends on the structure of the
pronunciation used by the speaker. Every speaker has an accent if we look at the articulation, the
speaker's gender, age or education as said earlier. John C. Wells talks about the “foreign accent” and
says that it sounds the way it does because the phonetics and phonology of their mother tongue is
reflected by English, which is not their native language. In an accent you have two parts: phonetics
and phonology.

Phonetics

Phonetics is mostly about the aspect of a language, the route that your body must take for a certain
word to come out. What exactly are phonetics, according to Henry Rogers phonetics are the
vibrations of sound, it is “the scientific study of sounds used in language” (Henry Rogers the Sounds
of Language). It is the study of what we do with our bodies to produce certain sounds like said
before. There is a lot of research done around the physical aspect of phonetics. For example, they
use a machine to track the movement or “what our body does” to make a different sound. After that
they translate/rewrite it in the phonetic alphabet. What is a phonetic alphabet, i t is a consistent way
of representing the sounds that we make in our body, specifically symbols used to represent speech
and normal letters are also used. The symbols are used aside of the letters. There is an official
alphabet, it is called the International Phonetic Alphabet. It consists of multiple researches done
dating from 1886 till the 20th century, the alphabet is not a regular one because it keeps on growing
since the researchers can find new “tones” or actions that happen in the human body every day. The
symbols that are used in the alphabet are important, because they are the essence of understand
phonetics, since they are the “script” of the alphabet. The symbols represent the sounds we make as
said earlier, but the symbols can also be used to indicate a specific pronunciation in a dictionary. It is
also said to be used in “to record a language in linguistic fieldwork, to form the basis of a writing
system, etc." (Handbook of the international Phonetic Association, University of Cambridge).
Another thing about phonetics is, is that it can be divided in three “parts”: acoustic, articulatory and
auditory.

Phonology
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Phonology plays an important role in the study of languages, phonology and phonetics are the
essentials of understanding and learning how a language is composed in different aspects. Some of
the aspects like pronunciation and certain patterns are found in phonology and phonetics. But what
is phonology, it is the bigger subject, phonetics come from Phonology. Phonology is divided in two:
phonetics and phonemics, phonetics is what was explained earlier, phonemics is about the function
of the words. Phonology is seen as a structure when they research, also seen as a form/ method of
analysis. One of the ways to understand phonology is to “contrast it with other fields within
linguistics” (David Odden, Introducing Phonology). Phonology is the study of the structure of sounds
in a language, that would be one definition, more specific it is how words sound the way they do and
how these sounds come together, for example the way a person pronounces the “t” in the word
“bet”. Phonology is used to see how a human arranges and combines the words to form a meaning
in a human's mind. To research a sound and structure it is needed to understand how a structure of
a sentence is pronounced, also known as sound structure. Sound structure is how sounds are
arranged in a word, also known as morphology.

Hiberno-English

What is Hiberno-English, Hiberno-English is more than one English dialect that was natively spoken
and written in Ireland. The word Hiberno- means natively or originally coming from Ireland. It follows
the Latin writing system like most languages, it comes from Indo-European and its early form is
Middle English. The Hiberno-English is known as a mixture of dialects, because of its history but
today the day known as Irish English and not so more as “a mixture of dialects”. It was created
because of invasions etc. It dates to the 12 th century, explains why a lot of languages have something
in common and why Irish English is the way it is, because of the time that the invasions were active
thus as consequence the cultures will be mixed with each other and create a new accent. Hiberno-
English is known for its grammatical variation like different patterns of lexicalisation and different
use of verbs, as researched by Jenny Cheshire. It is also stated that Hiberno-English has evolved in
different parts of the country in this case Ireland, that depends on the strength of the formerly
dominant language, in this case it is Irish and the difference between Hiberno-English and Irish is
that Hiberno-English is the assembly of more than one English that was brough to Ireland in the 12 th
century and Irish is the native language of the country Ireland. The grammatical features of Hiberno-
English are the closest to English (Jenny Cheshire, English Around The World).

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Origins

Hiberno-English has an interesting history like its origin since it is a mixture of multiple cultures, that
is also an explanation where English takes it form and grammatical features from. A language often
is a story of possession and dispossession, territorial struggle and the establishment or imposition of
a culture (Paulin,1984:178), we can recognize this statement in the structure of English/ Irish English
as well since they both come from that family as stated earlier. How did it all start, it started in the
12th century when the English came to Ireland in two “waves”, first it was the followers of
Strongbow’s Norman invaders (Reyes Forneiro. Hiberno-English) and then it was Tudor Reconquest
in the 17th century. When they first invaded Ireland, they were speaking Norman French and English,
but the Irish remained strong because of its supremacy even though the English were gaining ground
on. Then the English policy in Ireland took place under the Cromwellian Act of Settlement (1650), its
main goal was to replace the native speakers, the ones that spoke Irish, by English folk that spread
their language. The “New English” brought by the English developed slowly among the Irish people
and it was to show power and possession in places where the native speakers were powerless and
dispossessed that slowly lead to Irish English being “made”.

Conclusion/Evolution

What happened in the end? It is concluded that the Irish language will ever be the same mother
language as before, since the English invasion had such an effect on the native speakers of Ireland.
Because of the second wave, Tudor Reconquest, there were a lot of English-speaking immigrants
that led to slowly and briefly affecting the native speaker of Ireland. But it was not only affecting
them to speak English, it was more of forcing them not to speak Irish and that had much more of an
effect then the immigrants. The consequences of this phenomenon were that by the mid-19 th
century most of the country spoke English, it still retains its status today as it is seen that English is
an official language of Ireland. This leads to only a little more than 1 percent that speaks Irish
natively today, even though it was required to be taught in all public schools/ state/funded schools.
This leads to today's numbers of the forty percent that speak Irish only four percent speak it outside
the educational system.

British-English

British-English is the most famous and most used sort of English around the world, is on par
American English. In Europe they teach the students British-English according to Jenny Cheshire,
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English Around The World, the British accents and even the British words. For example, from
personal experience the schools try and teach the students the British pronunciation in oral exams,
tasks, etc. As in its name British English is mainly spoken in Britain, it is the official language of the
United Kingdom. The language is spoken in Scotland, Ireland (like said earlier), North East England,
etc.

Origins

The language was not born in Britain, but it was an immigrant language. It came from the Anglo-
Saxons invading Britain in the 5 th century, before that it was spoken on a Continent bordering the
North Sea. It comes from the Indo-European family like most of the European languages. Initially it
was called Old English, a group of dialects, that reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxons. One
of the many dialects known as Late West Saxon, was the most dominant one. Old English has been
influenced by two waves just like the Hiberno-English, the first was by the Scandinavians from the
German family in the 8th and 9th century, that also come from the Indo-European family, they settled
parts of Britain and the second one was by the Normans in the 11 th century. The Normans spoke Old
Norman which developed into an English “variety” called Anglo-Norman, since the Anglo-Saxons
invaded first, that means they had influence on the Normans and that is clearly seen since the new
language of the Normans after they came to Britain is Anglo-Norman. In this theoretical frame there
will not be anything about the evolution of British-English since it is not relevant to the subject.

Method

Research Question
What are the biggest differences between Irish accent and British accent?

Target audience
For this instance, there is no target audience, because I will be using videos and the people that will
appear in the videos can be from all ages and the gender does not play a role as well.

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Method
Since I am comparing two accents with each other, I will be using two videos, one video for Irish
accent and one video for British accent, it will be a comparative research. I will compare most of the
aspects that I have discussed for both videos to come to a conclusion that will obtain the differences
between the two accents. For both videos the syntaxis, pronunciation and phonology will be
researched. The two videos that I will use are Irish farmers lose their sheep, mad accent for the Irish
accent and Jeremy Clarkson give us a tour of his farm shop for the British accent.
*(Links to the videos last page together with bibliography)

Irish farmers lose their sheep, Jeremy Clarkson gives us a


mad accent. tour of his farm shop

Syntaxis “Should it be bright out, “These I don’t know what


anyone could be in the they are” (1:14)
mountains” (0:27)

Phonology “Whoever is doing knows what “Wheat that we harvested


he is doing” (1:08) yesterday” (0:38) “yesterday”
the syllables differ.

Pronunciation “fourty five” pronounced as “bags and hats” emphasis on


“forty-five” the letter “a”

My hypothesis, keeping count with the framework, I think that the biggest difference will be
pronunciation. The reason will be the origin of the accent or the circumstances in which one is born
or raised. For these videos I would say the biggest difference is syntaxis.

Results

Syntaxis
In the first video of the Irish accent there was a different syntaxis that the standard English SVO
form. As we can see in the video the farmer says: "Should it be bright out; anyone could be in the
mountains.” We can see that the subject is not at the start and that it denies the standard English
form where the sentence would be: "Anyone could be in the mountains, if it’s bright outside” for
example. Another thing that differs for the Irish accent is that they use some question sentences, but

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not for asking a question, they use it to answer one. An example is the farmer says:” What do you do
about it, nothing”.

In the second video there is not much of a difference between the British syntaxis and the Standard
syntaxis. There was one example where it does not differ that much of the Irish one concerning the
question form of a sentence. Jeremy Clarkson says:” These, I don’t know what they are” it is similar
to the Irish syntaxis, where a question is used not to ask but to confirm or answer a question.

Phonology
There are not many differences between the two accents, concerning phonology. In the first video,
the farmer says:” Whoever is doing knows what he is doing”. In this sentence the word “it” has been
left out, this is the biggest difference concerning phonology between the two. The news reporter
states: “it has been causing significant financial loss”, the way that he says the word “financial”
differs from the Standard form, it shows that with the Irish accent some letters are skipped or lightly
pronounced.

For the second video it is about how the Jeremy Clarkson pronounces the word “yesterday”, the “a”
in day is almost pronounced as a “e” or “i”. This show how in the British accent there is a different
structure of words and how they sound, and this is because this “a” that Jeremy Clarkson
pronounced in “yesterday” does not come with that pronunciation in every word.

Pronunciation
For the pronunciation of words for the Irish accent, in the video you will notice that all the “a” in the
video are pronounced as an “e”, for example “farm families” is pronounced as “ferm femilies”. The
other remarkable pronunciation is the letter “t” there is a lot of emphasis on that letter. For
example, the news reporter says:” they are investigating the incident” (1:21) the emphasis on each
letter “t” of those words is remarkable. The letter “u” is pronounced as “o”, for example “return” is
pronounced as “retorn” (1:32).

The British accent, in the video the word “what” is pronounced on a different way. The “t” at the end
is not pronounced, Jeremy Clarkson has a remarkable accent “I don’t know what they are” (1:14).
Another thing with the letter “a” is that there is a lot of emphasis on it, but not always the same
pronunciation. For example: “That is disgusting” the “a” in “that” seems like a long “a”, as if it is
pronounced “thaat” as well as “hats and bags” both words are pronounced with a “long a”. The
other way that Jeremy Clarkson pronounced the letter “a” was in the word “yesterday” where it
sounded as “yesterdey”, so this tells us that the letter “a” has more than one pronunciation. The
letter “t” has an emphasis in word and others not, for example like said in the word “what” the letter
“t” is not pronounced, but in the word “beauty” there is an emphasis on the letter “t”.

Conclusion

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Out of this comparative research it is concluded that the biggest differences are within the factors of
pronunciation of letters in words as the biggest difference and phonology. With the pronunciation of
words, the Irish accent has a stronger accent and an emphasis on a lot of letters and vowels, while
the British accent leaves out some letters when pronouncing words like” what”. Concerning the
phonology, the British accent has more in the structure of the words the pronouncing, unlike the
Irish accent that is all about the pronunciations, the British have structures in their words. We can
see that in the different pronunciations of the same letter in other words.

Bibliography
‌J. (2013, January 01). The Origins and Development of the English Language. Retrieved
November 22, 2020, from https://books.google.be/books?hl=en
Laver, J. (1994). Principles of Phonetics. Retrieved November 22, 2020, from
https://books.google.be/books?hl=en
Huges, John P. “The Irish Language and the ‘Brogue’: A Study in Substratum,” June 16, 2015.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00437956.1966.11435453?
cookieSet=1.
Kallen, J. L. (1997). Focus on Ireland. Retrieved November 22, 2020, from
https://books.google.be/books?hl=en
Mac, D. (2006). The Irish Language in Ireland: From Goídel to Globalisation. Retrieved
November 22, 2020, from https://books.google.be/books?hl=en
Migge, B. (2012). New Perspectives on Irish English. Retrieved November 22, 2020, from
https://books.google.be/books?hl=en
Kula, Nancy C. “The Bloomsbury Companion to Phonology.” Google Books, Google, 2010,
books.google.be/books?hl=en.
Link to the 2 videos that were used in this research:
Irish Farmers Lose Their Sheep, Mad Accent

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Jeremy Clarkson gave us a tour of his farm shop

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