Emigrant Letters: Exploring the ‘Grammar of the Conquered’

Abstract

A few lines from Moya Cannon’s poem Our Words distil some of the essence of the evolution of new varieties of English in Ireland:

• (1) as the language of conquest

• grows cold in statute books,

• elsewhere, its words are subsumed

• into the grammars of the conquered

• I be, you be, he bees.

• (Cannon 2007: 16)

As new Englishes developed over the last five centuries — an important outcome of English, later British, conquest and colonisation — their speakers took the English language and made it their own, creating new grammars in the process. One new grammatical feature that emerged in Irish English (IrE) is the habitual aspect of the declension rattled off by the poet. The interaction in speakers’ minds of English/Scots verb forms and an Irish grammatical category resulted in an IrE distinction between indicative and habitual be: She bees early means something different from She’s early. This habitual reflects a category that was (and is) present in the Irish language but not in most of the English and Scots varieties that contributed to the feature pool from which IrE emerged. The exception in British English (BrE) is the south-western dialects of England, which did contribute to the mix in colonial Ireland, though the habitual in south-west England is invariant be, rather than the conjugated form found in parts of Ireland (see the overview in Hickey 2007: 226–8).