Supraregionalisation

It is obvious from English loanwords in Irish that early Irish English had not progressed through the major long vowel shift in England, e.g. Irish bacús ‘bakehouse’ shows unshifted /a:/ and /u:/. The play Captain Thomas Stukeley (1596/1605), the first widespread representation of Irish English in literary parody, consistently uses <oo> for words with /au/ from Middle English /u:/, e.g. toon for town. Furthermore, comments from Thomas Sheridan in the late 18^th century (Sheridan 1781) show that Middle English /a:/, as in patron, still had not shifted, nor had Middle English /ε:/ as in meat. But present-day Irish English shows little or no trace of these unshifted vowels. The reason is not that the shift took place in Irish English some time in the 19^th century but that the unshifted forms were replaced by mainstream English pronunciations due to a process which I have labelled supraregionalisation. The essence of this process is the replacement of salient features of a variety by more standard ones, frequently from an extranational norm, as with southern British English vis à vis Irish English. The motivation for this move is to render a variety less locally bound, more acceptable to a wider community, hence the term supraregionalisation.