Linguistic identity and the study
of Emigrant Letters: Irish English
in the making
Carolina P. Amador-Moreno
Kevin McCafferty
This paper builds on the findings from a larger research project that
analyses written data extracted from a corpus of emigrant letters.
This preliminary study is an exploration of the Irish Emigration
Database (IED), an electronic word-searchable collection of primary
source documents on Irish emigration to North America (USA and
Canada) in the 18th and 19th centuries. The IED contains a variety
of original material including emigrant letters, newspaper articles,
shipping advertisements, shipping news, passenger lists, official
government reports, family papers, births, deaths and marriages and
extracts from books and periodicals.
The paper focuses specifically on the sections dealing with
transcriptions of Emigrant Letters sent home and Letters to Irish
Emigrants abroad, from which CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish
English Correspondence, is developed. Our study is intended as a
first step towards an empirical diachronic account of an important
period for the formation of Irish English. A close look at the
ocurrence in the corpus of some features such as the use of the
progressive form (e.g. I am reading) and the uses of will vs. shall
reveals that these features were already part of what is known as
Irish English nowadays. Our study covers the period from the
early eighteenth century to 1840, a timespan that stretches from the
beginning to the middle of the main period of language shift from
Irish to English.
Keywords: emigrant letters, Irish English, Corpus of Irish English
Correspondence, progressive, will vs. shall.
Identidad lingüística y el estudio de cartas de emigrantes: la formación del inglés de Irlanda. Este artículo se basa en los resultados de
un proyecto de investigación que analiza los datos extraídos de un
corpus de cartas de emigrantes. Este estudio es una exploración preliminar de la Irish Emigration Database (IED), una colección electrónica de fuentes relacionadas con la emigración irlandesa a América
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Linguistic identity and the study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the making
del Norte (EE.UU. y Canadá) en los siglos XVIII y XIX. La base de
datos IED contiene una gran variedad de material original que incluye cartas de emigrantes, artículos de periódicos, anuncios, noticias,
noticias, listas de pasajeros, informes oficiales del gobierno, documentos familiares, partidas de nacimiento, matrimonio y defunción,
y extractos de libros y publicaciones periódicas.
El presente artículo se centra específicamente en las secciones que se
ocupan de las transcripciones de la correspondencia entre emigrantes
irlandeses en el extranjero y sus familiares y amigos en Irlanda. Estos documentos constituyen la base de CORIECOR, the Corpus of
Irish English Correspondence. Nuestro estudio pretende ser un primer paso hacia un estudio diacrónico empírico de un período de gran
importancia para la formación del inglés de Irlanda. Un análisis exhaustivo de el uso en el corpus de algunas características tales como el
uso de la forma continua (por ejemplo, I am reading) y los usos de las
formas will y shall demuestra que estas estructuras sintácticas formaban ya parte de lo que en la actualidad se conoce como Irish English.
Nuestro estudio abarca el período comprendido entre principios del
siglo XVIII hasta 1840, un lapso que abarca desde el principio hasta
la mitad del período en el que el inglés vino a sustituir al irlandés
como lengua principal.
Palabras claves: cartas de emigrantes, el inglés de Irlanda, el Corpus
of Irish English Correspondence, formas continuas, will y shall.
1. Introduction
26
Private letters represent an invaluable source of historical and
sociological evidence and are also unique records for the documentation
of language development (Giner and Montgomery 1997). Written
material of this type is in a sense a window into earlier generations. It
allows for two types of tracing: on the one hand its portrayal of ordinary
life as it was in the past provides the clues which enable historians to
reconstruct certain contexts, and, on the other, it allows linguists to
examine and trace the gradual development of linguistic features which
may have been subject to change in the meantime.
The permanency of writing enables us to dissect texts and take a closer
look at the way language was used in the past. The field of historical
sociolinguistics has benefitted greatly from the study of personal and
official letters. The work of Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (1996,
2003), for instance, has shown how this type of written data can help in
analyzing the correlation between social status, gender and other social
factors and language change. Work in this paradigm shows how modern
sociolinguistic methodologies capable of handling large amounts of
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variable data can be applied to the study of the historical development of
English and other languages. Personal letters have served to document
the presence and development of specific syntactic structures (Bailey et
al. 1989) and historical sound changes (Meurman-Solin 1999). Within
this field of study, the value of emigrant letters for linguistic analysis
has been highlighted in the work of Michael Montgomery, who claims
that “no other type of document, be it dialect poetry, folk tales, or any
other, reveals the speech patterns of earlier days nearly so well or as
fully as family letters” (1995: 28). Indeed, emigration and letter writing
often go hand in hand. Throughout history, letters have been considered
important: for the emigrant they provided emotional support and were
a way of preserving the memory of the homeland; for those who had
stayed behind they helped to palliate absence. For these reasons, letters
were often carefully preserved by addressees. The sentimental value of
this material, as a result, guaranteed its survival, thus preserving a highly
useful source for linguistic analysis.
In the context of Irish history, as Fitzgerald and Lambkin (2008)
point out, emigrant letters had a great impact on rural Irish communities,
where people who had had only limited access to writing were forced
to write, or illiterate family members forced to dictate letters to others.
In both cases the type of text produced is of great sociolinguistic
interest, given their closeness to speech (see Schneider 2002: 75-76).
In that sense, such documents have a very specific linguistic value, as
they display spoken features which would have been spontaneously
uttered and immediately recorded. The linguistic interest of this type
of material, therefore, lies in its close reflection of the spoken usage of
a particular community. As Biber (1991: 45) puts it, although they are
written, personal letters “show oral situational characteristics for shared
personal knowledge, effort expended to maintain the relationship and
informational load”. Hence they incorporate spoken features generally
regarded as part of the colloquial register, such as contracted verb forms,
non-standard spellings that match the pronunciation of certain dialectal
words, local lexical items, malapropisms, non-standard grammar, etc.
The dearth of recorded oral data available for Irish English (IrE) makes
this type of written document useful in providing a full description of the
English spoken in Ireland prior to the advent of recording equipment.
The present study analyses written data extracted from a corpus
of emigrant letters: CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English
Correspondence (McCafferty and Amador Moreno in preparation). The
letters come from the Irish Emigration Database (IED), an electronic
word-searchable collection of primary source documents on Irish
emigration to North America (USA and Canada) in the 18th and 19th
centuries. The database contains a variety of original material including
not only emigrant letters, but also newspaper articles, shipping
advertisements, shipping news, passenger lists, official government
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Linguistic identity and the study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the making
reports, family papers, births, deaths and marriages and extracts from
books and periodicals. This paper focuses specifically on the sections
dealing with transcriptions of Emigrant Letters sent home and Letters to
Irish Emigrants abroad. Our study builds on the findings from a larger
research project that traces the historical development of certain features
of Irish English, and is intended as a first step towards an empirical
diachronic account of an important stage in the formation of this variety
of English. It covers the period from the early eighteenth century to
1880, a timespan that stretches from the beginning to the middle of the
main period of language shift from Irish to English. In order to show
how the material left by the movement of Irish emigrants can inform
(socio)linguistic studies, two features are selected for the present paper:
the use of the progressive form (e.g. I am reading) and the use of will as
opposed to shall with first-person subjects. A close look at the ocurrence
in the corpus of these two features reveals that they were already part of
what is known as Irish English nowadays.
2. Irish emigration and letter writing
28
Although the claim has often been made that the Great Famine of the
1840s was the cause of a significant increase in emigration from Ireland,
it has been pointed out that ‘mass’ migration was already underway
from 1825 (Coleman 1999: 107). Historians have argued that the era
of Irish emigration had already started during the pre-famine years
(Mokyr 2006: 47). Poor harvests and the subsistence crisis caused by the
Napoleonic Wars were responsible for a a steady outflow of emigrants
well before the Great Famine, which was to further accelerate the rapid
depopulation of Ireland in the 19th century. Full passenger lists and port
records of this period are not available, which means that the actual total
numbers of emigrants can only be estimated. Thus, the total number
of emigrants from Ireland to North America between 1700 and 1775
is thought to have been between 100,000 and 250,000, whereas in the
period between 1800 and 1845 “just over a million emigrants left Ireland
for North America and about half a million for Britain” (Fitzgerald and
Lambkin 2008: 162). During the Great Famine decade the flow increased
to 2.1 million, and to somewhere between 4.1 and 4.5 million between
1856 and 1921, according to Miller (1985). As the tradition of emigration
developed, a number of ports in Ireland, including Belfast, Dublin,
Derry, Sligo and Cork, as well as Liverpool started offering direct
transatlantic passages. Many of those who initially went to Britain were
in fact in transit to America, which adds to the difficulty of calculating
exact numbers. Chain migration, particularly during the Famine
period, became very common. As is the case with emigrants from other
countries (Haugen 1969), the Irish tended to cluster in certain areas. As
Hickey puts it:
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Those who went first passed the message about where they had
settled back to those in the area they came from. Others then
followed on, going to the same area at the overseas location. In the
case of the recruitment of emigrants the same should have applied:
the recruiters in the homeland would have had contacts to specific
points in the overseas locations. (2004: 12).
That these emigration patterns were built on well-established routes
and tended to have particular associations with certain areas is also
highlighted by Fitzgerald and Lambkin, who state: “the Irish diaspora of
1800 is best analysed as an aggregate of local diasporas constituted by the
networks of relationships between the peoples of particular townlands,
parishes, towns and counties and their emigrants” (2008: 142).
Communication between emigrants and their families/friends was
by letter. For this reason, literacy needs to be briefly mentioned here (cf.
McCafferty 2011; McCafferty and Amador Moreno 2012). According
to Fitzpatrick (1994: 500), the proportion of Irish emigrants able to read
and write rose significantly with emigration, and this seems to have been
particularly true of women migrants, who were particularly “keen to
acquire literacy before leaving school” (Fitzgerald and Lambkin 2008:
195). Also, we have to bear in mind that of all the regions of Ireland
Ulster kept up a strong flow of emigrants from the start and that a
great proportion of the pioneering migrants to America were Ulster
Presbyterians with relatively high levels of literacy. This in part explains
why the great majority of the letters that we have analysed so far come
from Ulster.
The corpus of letters contained in our CORIECOR database shows
how the emigrants stayed in contact with home. In general, there are
a number of aspects common to all the letters: requests for replies,
apologies for not having written sooner, concern for the welfare of
people at home, references to farming, and to money sent by those
abroad, mention of people who have died, etc. From a more linguistic
point of view, they show lack of punctuation, non-standard spellings
and spelling mistakes, unintelligible words that the transcribers have
guessed at and indicated with question marks, and of course, a number
of stylistic features typical of letter writing.
The most interesting aspect from a sociolinguistic point of view, as
stated in the introduction, is that, given their personal, unselfconscious
and spontaneous nature, these letters are a good source of data for
linguistic analysis. In Schneider’s categorization of the relationship
between a speech event and its written record, they belong to the realm
of the imagined:
[c]learly, letters do not represent spoken utterances; but when
persons who have had but limited experience in writing and exposure
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Linguistic identity and the study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the making
to the norms of written expression are forced to write nevertheless,
their writing reflects many features of their speech fairly accurately:
what they do is put their own “imagined” words on to paper, if only
with difficulty. (Schneider 2002: 75-76).
These ‘imagined’ words in the letters we have analysed have a clear
identity hallmark, as they represent the English spoken in Ireland at the
time of writing. Although we do not claim that letters are in any way a
substitute for speech, they are a good source for the study of language
at a time when no other sound recording evidence is available. Certain
genres of writing, such as electronic mail, letters or postcards, show that
the channel of communication can be made to operate in such a way that
the interactive aspect is more salient. Following the same train of thought,
a number of corpus-based studies of the history of English in the last
500 years have shown private correspondence to be consistently more
vernacular and more sensitive to linguistic change than other text types
(e.g., Kytö 1991; Nurmi 1996; Meurman-Solin 2002; Nevalainen and
Raumolin-Brunberg 2003; Fritz 2007; McCafferty and Amador Moreno
forthcoming), so part of the motivation for developing CORIECOR is
that the kind of data included there is more vernacular than most other
data that might be studied for historical linguistic purposes, and might
therefore give a better indication of the development and use of IrE in
the formative period of this variety.
3. Using the Corpus of Irish English
Correspondence to trace IrE
The Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) contains a
large body of letters written by Irish people and sent between Ireland
and other countries (primarily the United States and Canada, Great
Britain, New Zealand and Australia) from about 1700 to approximately
1940, which covers the period of the emergence of IrE. It incorporates
the letter collection of the Irish Emigration Database and a couple
of smaller collections, comprising just under 5000 texts, of which
approximately 4300 are letters. The database as a whole contains about
3.1 million words (2.7 million words in letters). As Figure 1 shows,
coverage is good from 1780 to 1920, with a minimum of 50,000 words
per 20-year sub-period.
30
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Figure 1. IED/CORIECOR words per decade
One of the aims of developing CORIECOR is to allow for a
systematic analysis of written evidence for earlier IrE at a scale that
permits us to thoroughly trace the emergence and development of
this variety of English through time. Relatively few diachronic studies
attempt to trace the emergence and evolution of either IrE as a whole,
or linguistic traits of IrE through time. Historical accounts tend to
be narrowly focused case studies, concentrating on certain linguistic
features, literary representations, and particular, shorter periods. The
lack of historical accounts of IrE presents a number of problems. It means
that researchers interested in this variety do not have a clear picture of
its past, and how it became what it is today. The creation of a corpus like
CORIECOR means linguists will be able to compare earlier IrE to other
varieties. Given that this corpus of relatively vernacular documents will
represent speakers from all over Ireland, it will also allow researchers
to trace IrE through time, as well as studying stylistic, regional, and
social variation along the lines of the historical sociolinguistic survey
reported in, e.g., Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg (2003). Such
studies would be interesting in themselves as documentation of the
history of a variety of English which is often claimed to be responsible
for a number of changes affecting other varieties. Some of the changes
attributed to IrE include the two features discussed below as examples
of how correspondence can reveal the material residue of a variety in the
making. These are the use of the progressive form (e.g. I am thinking),
which has increased dramatically, especially during the Late Modern
English period, i.e., from about 1700 onwards, and the replacement of
31
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Linguistic identity and the study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the making
first-person shall by will in expressions of future time, a change which
can also be observed in American English (AmE), and in BrE. Both
changes are often attributed to IrE influence (e.g., Kytö 1991; Dollinger
2008).
3.1. Shall/will in Irish English
32
As is well known, in standard English the use of shall and will to express
futurity is differentiated by grammatical person: shall is used with firstperson subjects (I/we shall) and will with other grammatical persons (you
will, they will, etc.). Although will is becoming more frequent in certain
contexts, it is generally considered less formal when used with I and
we (Carter and McCarthy 2006: 632-633). One of the most intensively
studied differences between BrE and AmE (Krogvig and Johansson
1981: 32), variation between shall and will is not an issue in the variety
of English spoken in Ireland nowadays. In present-day IrE, future shall
is virtually non-existent, as noted in recent general discussions (Hickey
2007: 179; Corrigan 2000: 37, 2010: 65; Amador-Moreno 2010: 44-45).
One of the biggest semantic differences is that in standard English the
use of will in the first person singular indicates volition (i.e. that the act
will be carried out) whereas the Irish use will as a marker of prediction
without necessarily implying volition. That the Irish used will instead of
shall with first-person subjects was a favourite complaint of normative
grammarians (cf., Beal 2004: 96-97). Nineteenth-century accounts of IrE
single out this feature for strong prescriptivist criticism (Biggar 1897:
46-47), and accounts from the early twentieth century (Joyce 1910/1991:
74-77) to the present day (Dolan 2006: xxv-xxvi; Hickey 2007: 179;
Walshe 2009: 67-68; Corrigan 2010: 64-65) continue to associate this
use with IrE. Recent corpus-based comparative research between IrE
and British English carried out by Kallen and Kirk (2001) seems to
confirm the preference for will in IrE. Thus, in line with the prescriptive
observations of normative grammarians and other commentators, we
might assume shall has simply never been used in IrE.
In order to test this hypothesis we turn to the CORIECOR data to
see if it can offer an account of the diachronic development that might
reveal something in relation to its use in letters in the past. We look at
first-person shall / will in IrE in three CORIECOR subperiods: 176190, the 1830s and the 1880s, and compare usage in our own data with
Early Modern English (Kytö 1991; Nurmi 2002, 2003), early American
English (Kytö 1991), and the surveys of eighteenth-century NorthWest English and early Canadian English reported in Dollinger (2008:
227-248). All these studies, like our own, are based on letter corpora
compiled for diachronic linguistic study.
Before turning to the results found in CORIECOR, a look at the
state of these forms in Britain before the expansion into the Atlantic
seems necessary. While research into the occurrence of these forms
indicates fluctuation in the use of will and shall in English since the
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twelfth century, the undeniable trend until the mid-seventeenth century
was for will to replace shall in all grammatical persons, as shown in
Figures 2 and 3 (after Kytö 1991: 274). This trend was reversed after
1640, but only in first-person usage – with second- and third-person
subjects, will continued to replace shall.
Figure 2. Shall by grammatical person in ME and EModE (percentage,
after Kytö 1991:274, Figures 1-3)
Figure 3. Will by grammatical person in ME and EModE (percentage,
after Kytö 1991:274, Figures 1-3)
The turn to first-person shall in British English during the seventeenth
century does not only coincide with the period when the southern
British English rule was first formulated, it was also precisely the period
when English-speakers began settling in large numbers in Ireland (in the
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Linguistic identity and the study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the making
Midlands, Munster and east Ulster during the late sixteenth century, in
the rest of Ulster from 1608), and North America (Virginia from 1607,
Massachusetts from 1620). The timing of this linguistic turn of events is
significant for the development of IrE. If we assume that the appearance
of this usage in writing came some time after it began in speech, the
main settlement of Ireland occurred just as shall began to be used with
first-person subjects in (southern) British English, and the large-scale
settlement of Ireland continued until the end of the seventeenth and into
the early eighteenth century (Fitzgerald and Lambkin 2008).
Dollinger’s (2008) study of the emergence of Canadian English
(CanE) in the period 1776-1850, based on newspapers, diaries and letters
concludes that CanE was slightly more conservative in maintaining firstperson shall than American English (AmE); compared to Kytö’s (1991)
findings from letters written a century earlier, Dollinger’s American
data shows increased use of will in AmE that points to the general trend
that is inferable from present-day evidence (Dollinger 2008: 236-237).
Dollinger indicates that, from a present-day perspective, late eighteenthcentury CanE is most conservative, followed by AmE, while NorthWest British English is most advanced in using will instead of shall in
the late eighteenth century (2008: 237). The position of IrE (shown in
Figure 4 below) indicates that it was just as conservative as CanE in the
late eighteenth century.
Figure 4. Shall/will in 5 late-18th-c. Englishes
(after Dollinger 2008:236, Figure 9.4, 301, Appendix 9.1, CanE n=30,
AmE n=22, BrE n=40, NWBrE n=237, IrE (CORIECOR) n=254)
34
The conservatism of CanE and IrE did not last long – in the early
nineteenth century, CanE showed a marked decline in shall use, from
73% to 48% (statistically significant at 95% level), while British English
(BrE) shall actually increased over the same period (from 63% to 75%,
not sign. at 95%) and AmE remained stable, so CanE was diverging
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from both AmE and BrE in this period (Dollinger 2008: 238). Although
Dollinger’s study is based on a very small corpus, he argues that the
change in CanE is due to the large influx after 1815 of speakers from
Ireland, Scotland and the North of England, who either triggered or
drastically accelerated the change towards first-person will (2008: 238240).
Our initial analysis of the first-person data in CORIECOR shows a
considerable decline in the frequency of shall use and a corresponding
increase in will over the 130-year period from 1761-1890. In the late
eighteenth century, shall predominated in the letter data we have
studied, accounting for 73% of all first-person tokens. This dropped to
45% by the 1830s, and even further to 19% by the 1880s. Will, on the
other hand, increased from 27% in the late eighteenth century letters,
to 55% in the 1830s, and to a near-categorical 81% by the 1880s (see
McCafferty 2011).
More detailed analysis of the IrE data seems to show that a number
of linguistic and social factors in relation to the use of shall and will
may be at play: as argued in McCafferty and Amador-Moreno (2012),
the use of shall in eighteenth-century IrE appears to be constrained
by geographical origin – users from the larger urban areas, Belfast and
Dublin, and rural Tyrone, are more likely to use shall than others,
whereas letter writers from Antrim, Down and Derry disfavour shall.
Male correspondents are more likely to use shall than females, but do not
weight heavily in favour of shall. Also, the effects of intimacy/formality
seem consistent with a linguistic change from below, i.e., the spread of a
more colloquial or vernacular, even stigmatised, form. In this case, will
was replacing shall in more informal contexts (i.e., people addressing a
social superior are much more likely to use shall than correspondents
addressing close nuclear family, more distant family, close personal
friends, or more distant addressees).
3.2. The Progressive in Irish English
Little empirical work has been done on the progressive in IrE –
exceptions are Ronan (2001), Filppula (2003), Filppula, Klemola &
Paulasto (2008: 176-181)– although its use in IrE is said to differ from
other Englishes in a number of respects.
First, the progressive is said to be more frequent in IrE than in
mainstream standard Englishes (e.g., Hayden and Hartog 1909; van
Hamel 1912; Dennis 1940; Henry 1957; Arnaud 1998). Some, like
Arnaud (1998) and Filppula et al. (2008: 180), attribute rapid increase
in the use of the progressive in English in general during the nineteenth
century to Irish immigration into other English-speaking territories.
Second, the “wider range of use of the Progressive” – specifically,
the use of stative verbs – as in I’m liking this and What are you wanting?
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Linguistic identity and the study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the making
(Kortmann 2008: xxvi), is said to be characteristic of Irish English (e.g.,
Henry 1957; Ronan 2001; Filppula 2001, 2003, 2008) and other ‘Celtic
Englishes’ (e.g., Beal 1997: 372-323; Johnston 2007: 120; Miller 2008;
Pitkänen 2003; Paulasto 2006).
Third, the progressive is claimed to be especially more frequent
in IrE and other Celtic Englishes in combination with another modal
auxiliary (Filppula et al. 2008: 176ff.).
Fourth, it is said to be more common in IrE to express habitual
meanings where be + V-ing combines with would/’d or use(d) (to) (e.g.,
Filppula 2003; Filppula et al. 2008: 176-181; Ronan 2001; Pitkänen 2003;
Paulasto 2006). For this and the previous category, Filppula et al. (2008:
176ff.) report densities of usage in IrE (and Hebridean English) that are
three to four times higher than in other Englishes.
Finally, the present or past progressive –like the simple present
and past can be used in Irish English for functions where mainstream
Englishes would normally use the perfect: I am looking for A letter
from some of you this long time (Elizabeth Boardman, Canada, to James
Boardman, Armagh 18/06/1821).
An initial survey of the overall frequency of the be + V-ing
construction, summarised in Figure 5, shows that the rate of use in
Irish English letters increases a great deal from c. 1700 to 1840. Use of
the progressive, measured in tokens per 100,000 words doubles from
the 1760s to the 1770s and largely continues on quite a steep upward
trajectory, until the 1830s at least, by which time it is four times as
frequent as before 1760.
36
Figure 5. Progressives in IrE letters in CORIECOR (per 100k words),
to 1840
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A comparison of the IrE results from CORIECOR with the results
of all –as far as we are aware– available corpus-based studies of the
progressive up to 1800, reveals that the progressive is not particularly
more frequent in the Irish data for the period to 1770. For the late
eighteenth century, similar data is available in the Corpus of Late
Eighteenth-Century Prose (van Bergen and Denison 2007), which
consists of personal letters from the north-west of England. This corpus
is a good match for our data in text type and time period, so that we
can compare use of the progressive in both corpora over the same three
decades. As Figure 6 below shows, in the period 1761-90 the progressive
was twice as frequent in IrE as in the British letter data.
Figure 6. CORIECOR in historical context – comparison with
Corpus of Late Eighteenth Century Prose
However, comparing IrE up with letter data from other diachronic
studies of nineteenth-century Englishes (McCafferty and AmadorMoreno 2012, forthcoming) we notice that other varieties of English
only approach the 1830s Irish density towards the end of the nineteenth
century. Its use increased more rapidly in nineteenth-century IrE than
in any other variety for which data is available: Australian English (Fritz
2007), British English (Smitterberg 2005), or British and American
English (Arnaud 1998). In this case, IrE might have contributed to the
spread of the progressive where the Irish emigrated and settled.
Turning now to the question of whether particular uses might
account for higher density and the more rapid rise of the progressive
in Irish English, let’s look first at stative verbs. For statives, we find
examples such as:
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Linguistic identity and the study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the making
My father saw Sam Riddle in Belfast he was wanting him to go to
Comber to see his wife (Prudence Love, 06.08.1821)
Stative verbs in the progressive have considerably higher density
and account for a higher percentage of all progressives throughout our
period than any of the other supposedly Irish uses checked. Statives also
increase nearly fourfold from the 1770s to the 30s and are more frequent
in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth.
As for collocations with modal auxiliaries (e.g. I am going to write
him a letter he may Be looking for it, Elizabeth Boardman, 18.06.1821),
in our CORIECOR data, the progressive is very infrequent with either
a modal auxiliary in general (see McCafferty and Amador-Moreno
2012) or more specifically with would/’d/used to (e.g. we thought
your progress must have been much slower than you expected, as
you supposed you would be passing Cork at the time, Rosa Marshall,
16.08.1838). Filppula et al. (2008) reported that the IrE rates for this and
the former category were 53 and 31 per 100,000 words, respectively,
which was well in excess of the rates for English English, Welsh English
and Early Modern English, and rivalled only by another Celticinfluenced variety, Hebridean English. In contrast, CORIECOR on
the one hand shows a slight increase in general modal auxiliary use,
but negligible use of would/’d/used to plus be+V-ing to 1840. If these
uses are especially typical of IrE and other Celtic Englishes, then these
results suggest they have arisen in IrE only sometime since the 1840s.
This is also true of the progressive used as an extended-now perfect (e.g.
she is walking this good while, John McBride, 05.04.1824), which in our
data only comes into use sometime after 1840.
Our results offer empirical support for the view that some of the
growth of the progressive in Late Modern English might be due to Irish
immigrants. Our findings seem to confirm Fritz’s conclusion that the
Irish used more progressives than other ethnic groups in nineteenthcentury Australia, and suggest that IrE speakers were likely to have been
using the progressive with considerably greater frequency in time for
the onset of mass emigration to North America, Great Britain and the
southern hemisphere, which is dated by Fitzgerald & Lambkin (2008)
to 1800 rather than the traditional date of the start of the Great Famine.
However, more studies of the progressive in varieties other than
(standard) British and American English in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries would be needed to be able to establish comparisons that will
allow us to trace the development in more vernacular varieties of most
colonial Englishes, and in the varieties spoken in England itself.
38
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Carolina P. Amador-Moreno, Kevin McCafferty
4. Conclusions
This paper has shown how the tracing of a particular variety of English
can be achieved through corpus analysis. Emigrant letters, as discussed
throughout the paper, can provide useful evidence for the development
of linguistic features such as the progressive and the use of will and shall.
As mentioned above, the spread of the progressive and of first-person
will in American English and from there to British English have been
attributed to the influence of Irish immigrants. Our analysis shows that
while this might well be true to some extent for the progressive, it is also
evident that the peculiarly Irish characteristic uses of the progressive
(i.e. with stative verbs and modal auxiliaries) are late developments. The
IrE use of first-person will is shown in our data to have been largely a
development of the nineteenth century, implying that the eighteenthcentury grammarians’ accounts were inaccurate. The shift towards firstperson will in IrE seems to have been affected by sociolinguistic factors
such as intimacy, gender and geographical distribution.
We have argued for an empirical diachronic approach to the
study of IrE in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when IrE
itself evolved and the Anglophone settlement of North America and
the southern hemisphere colonies led to the development of Irish,
American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and other colonial
Englishes. Accurate accounts of the Irish input to new overseas varieties
are dependent, first, on reliable historical accounts of the historical
situation in British Englishes prior to overseas expansion, and second,
on empirical accounts of IrE in its formative period and in the periods
before and during large-scale Irish emigration.
In the same way that e-mail and instant messaging might now
be used to examine the use of different language varieties, private
correspondence allows us to trace the use of linguistic features in the
past as they emerged and evolved or disappeared. In this sense, the
availability of corpora such as CORIECOR can be of great benefit to
linguists. The analysis of linguistic features based on this type of corpus
can throw much light on the study of an interesting variety of English
like IrE, and can contribute to fuller and more accurate accounts of
other varieties in which IrE was part of the input as a result of the longterm mass migration of Irish people.
Carolina Amador
Departamento de Filología Inglesa
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Avda. Universidad s/n
10071 – Cáceres - España
camador@unex.es
Kevin McCafferty
Department of Foreign Languages
University of Bergen
PO Box 7805
N-5020 – Bergen – Norway
kevin.McCafferty@if.uib.no
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Linguistic identity and the study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the making
Notes
1
The Irish Emigration Database is hosted by Queen’s University Belfast’s Centre for
Migration Studies at the Ulster-American Folk Park, in Omagh, Co. Tyrone. We are
grateful to the centre’s director, Dr Brian Lambkin, and Dr Patrick Fitzgerald, for
access to the databse and permission to incorporate it into a linguistic corpus.
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