Data sources for Irish English phonology

In the recent history of Irish English studies there have been two incomplete surveys of English in Ireland. The first was initiated by P. L. Henry and preliminary findings were published in 1958. Nothing more was heard of the project, but the material presented is of value for the study of Irish English up to that date.

The second survey is called The Tape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech and was supervised by Michael Barry, then of the English Department at Queen’s University, Belfast. A large amount of material was collected, particularly for the north and approximately 50% of this material, which by a fortunate circumstance was given to the present author in the mid 1980s, has been digitized and is available as two CDs from the present author. The material comes with a software interface to examine the data of the survey which in this form consists of some 80 files (approximately 22 hours of recording). The survey includes both wordlists and free speech.

The Irish English Resource Centre is a website dedicated to all matters pertaining to academic research into Irish English. It is maintained by the present author at the following address: http://www.uni-essen.de/IERC. The resource centre as it stands contains much information on past and current research on Irish English, an online history and overview of Irish English, summaries of issues in the field, biosketches of scholars, details of various corpora and data collections, links to related sites, etc. Importantly, it contains much bibliographical information of use to interested scholars and students. The website is updated regularly with new information as this becomes available. It is intended as a primary source for up-to-date data on topical research into Irish English which can be used liberally by scholars and students alike.

A Sound Atlas of Irish English (Hickey 2005) is a set of over 1,500 recordings of Irish English from the entire country covering urban and rural informants with an age spread from under 10 to over 80 (both genders). A supplied software interface allows end-users to view the recordings in a tree divided by province and county and then listen to individual recordings. The recordings can also be sorted by county, age, gender and rural versus urban speakers. Five of these recordings are available on the accompanying CD-ROM.