Irish Traveller English

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Abstract

1 Introduction Ireland is often considered to be a homogeneous bilingual country, and before the influx of foreigners in the boom years of the Celtic Tiger the Irish themselves may have regarded their country as a monocultural society. However, even though still widely disregarded in their cultural distinctiveness, the Irish Travellers have stood out as a separate community in Irish society for several centuries. The Irish Travellers are a native Irish community with a nomadic background, who naturally share a lot of history with settled Irish people, but culturally, religiously and linguistically they have preserved their own identity. According to researchers and the Irish Travellers themselves, there is no or very little genetic connection with other European nomadic or Gypsy groups, even though they may share with them many traditions and values, such as the preference of self-employment, birth, marriage and burial customs, and values concerning morality, taboos and purity (Freese 1980: 53–63). The Irish Travellers are recognized as an ethnic group in Northern Ireland and in the UK. In the Republic of Ireland their legal status has been widely discussed but remains insecure. According to the Census of 2011, there are 29,573 Irish Travellers living and travelling in the Republic of Ireland, which accounts for 0.6 per cent of the overall population in Ireland. There are also Irish Travellers living in Britain, Australia and the USA. Linguistically, Irish Travellers differ from the settled community in a twofold way. Firstly, their in-group code ‘Shelta’ (also known as ‘Gammon’ or ‘Cant’), a distinctive communicative tool used in specific, Traveller-related contexts, provides the possibility to have private conversations in situations where settled people are present, such as trade and business situations, contexts where warnings need to be exchanged or when talking about taboo topics. Morphosyntactically, Shelta is a mixture of Irish English grammar and the Travellers' own lexicon, a majority of which is derived from Irish Gaelic and disguised in various ways by means of transposition (deliberate switching around of consonants, insertion and deletion of syllables, etc.; see Hickey 2007b: 382 for an overview, Ó hAodha 2002 for a detailed description of the Shelta lexicon), while a smaller amount is of unknown, though possibly very old origin.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFurther Studies in the Lesser-Known Varieties of English
PublisherCambridge University Press
Pages70-96
Number of pages27
ISBN (Electronic)9781139108652
ISBN (Print)9781107021204
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2015

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