Remembering language: bilingualism, Hiberno-English, and the Gaeltacht peasant memoir.

Moreno, Carolina P. Amador

The figure of the Irish peasant is seen as a central image of Irish identity in the writing of authors such as William Carleton, Maria Edgeworth, Lady Morgan, Lady Gregory, and John Millington Synge. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a clear attempt to dignify the role of peasant characters through portrayals that diverged from the stereotypical 'Stage Irishman', which had been used since the sixteenth century, especially in drama, by English and Irish writers alike. (1) However, although authors like Synge no doubt drew their inspiration from their own experience of the rural Ireland they had observed, (2) the insider's view, as this essay will show, was rather different: contrasting with the romantic idealizations of the Gaeltacht seen from the outside, were the hardship of (e)migration, the extreme conditions caused by poor soil, exploitation, and the inevitable distress of those who were intimidated by English, a language to which in some cases they did not fully relate. This essay examines the work of three peasant writers from Gaeltacht areas in Donegal and discusses how they create a memoir of rural life in what was very much a bilingual county at the turn of the twentieth century. The three authors that will be dealt with here, Micheal MacGabhan (1865-1948), Patrick MacGill (1891-1963), and Seamus O Grianna (1889-1969), were all born in different Irish-speaking areas of Donegal at a crucial period from the point of view of language change in Ireland. Their narratives have much in common from a thematic viewpoint. They belong to what can be considered a genre in itself, 'the Gaeltacht peasant memoir', in which life in the rural communities of the west of Ireland is described in a rich, colloquial, autobiographical style. The 'Gaeltacht Peasant Memoir' became one of the dominant genres in Irish literature largely due to the influence of the Gaelic League. (3) As A.J. Hughes states, 'the earliest example of note was that of Co. Cork priest, novelist and language activist Father Peadar O Laoghaire (1832-1920) who produced his autobiography Mo Sgeal (sic) Fein in 1915'. (4) Later came Allagar na hInse (translated as Island Cross-Talk), Tomas O Criomhthainn's diary of the years 1919 to 1923, which was first published in 1928, An tOilednach (1929), translated as The Islandman; Fiche Bliain ag Fas (1933), translated into English the same year as Twenty Years A-Growing, and Peig (1936). (5) In Donegal, the tradition of the autobiographical novel was followed by Mici Mac Gabhan, Seosamh and Seamus O Grianna in the Irish language, and Patrick MacGill and Paddy the Cope Gallagher in English. However, unlike the autobiographies from the Blasket Islands, which, as James E. Doan points out, 'became charter documents for the new Irish Free State', (6) the Donegal corpus has received much less attention from critics and historians, despite the fact that they also give voice to the experience of the Gaeltacht peasant, providing an insight into the fundamental shift that was taking place with the onset of a new century and the changing linguistic landscape. This is not to say that such works have been wholly ignored. In an article published in 1996, Joe Mulholland (7) draws attention to the importance of these authors, and Bernard Aspinwall (8) highlights the social realism contained in these autobiographical novels. However, the role played by their depiction of language usage and the clash of the Irish and the English languages has remained largely overlooked, despite the fact that they are, as this essay argues, central elements in the narratives of these authors.

Rotha Mor an tSaoil (by MacGabhan), and Nuair a Bhi me Og (by O Grianna), which were first published in 1959 and 1942 respectively, were both originally written in Irish, whereas MacGill's novels, Children of the Dead End (1914) and its sequel, The Rat Pit (1915), were written in English. Apart from their autobiographical style, these accounts of life in Donegal have in common an important component from a sociolinguistic perspective: their description and fictionalization of the encounters with and struggles between the Irish and the English languages provide valuable insights into two linguistic factors of great interest, the decline of the Irish language, and the adoption of a new variety of English (Hiberno-English, or Irish English), which arose from the contact between the English and the Irish languages in Ireland. In that sense, they are not only documents of great social value, but important testaments at a sociolinguistic level too, as they appear to be our best available source for Gaeltacht speech practices, discourse and conversation analysis, the ethnography of speaking, and ethnostylistics around the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, these novels show how written evidence can compensate for the relative dearth of recorded data available on Donegal English during a period of time in which the linguistic and geographical crossing of boundaries contributed to the transformation of this isolated part of Ireland. (9) As some of the passages examined in this essay will make evident, cross-examination of these autobiographical novels also provides an indication of how individuals reacted to the language shift. The foregrounding of this Irish-English bilingualism and the situations of language contact derived from it are, one could argue, a key element for the depiction of the personal history, development, and identity which are contained in these memoirs.

But before looking in more detail at how language contact is depicted in the novels, a general description of the linguistic landscape of Ireland around the turn of the twentieth century is necessary.

Language Change in Donegal

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the use of Irish in Ireland began to decline (although bilingualism still survived especially in rural areas), and the language shift from Irish to English was set in motion. English henceforth became the language of prestige and power. Among the reasons which are often alleged for the rapid shift from the vernacular language to the language of the planters is the progress of the railway connections between the two major English-speaking cities, Belfast and Dublin, the influence of schools (where the use of Irish was banned), emigration, and the deaths caused by the famines. (10)

The 1851 Census figures indicate that the number of Irish speakers was only 23% of the total Irish population. However, although this is the first official census in which linguistic issues are documented, many authors have drawn attention to the fact that it understated the number of Irish speakers. (11) In any case, the figures reported for Donegal seem to show a rather different position in relation to the rest of the country, given that, as Brian O Cuiv remarks, 'in three western baronies and one northern there were more Irish speakers than in the other eight counties of Ulster together. Another noticeable feature in Donegal was the high percentage of Irish-speaking monoglots'. (12) Indeed, the census figures show 73,258 Irish-speakers in Donegal (counting monoglot and bilinguals together) out of a population of 136,476 Irish speakers recorded for Ulster in total. (13) Approximately 54% of the Irish speakers in Ulster were living in Donegal.

In comparison, the census figures for the county as a whole in 1911 point to a decline of the Irish language, although Donegal still holds the highest number of Irish-speakers in Ulster (59,313 out of a total population of 96,440 Irish-speakers in Ulster), (14) that is, a little over 61% of the population.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, English had become not only the language of prestige but also of economic progress. And, although by this time nearly all of the Irish speakers in east and central Ulster were no longer monolingual, 'in Donegal about half of them could speak nothing else'. (15) English was learnt by many, only after leaving Donegal. A study of the 1901 and 1911 census returns reveals an increase in the number of young English speakers, which was closely related to the fact that knowledge of English was necessary for those who wished to seek employment elsewhere. The most popular destinations for the west Donegal migrant were the Lagan region and Scotland, both English-speaking areas. As G. Brendan Adams further notes:

 because of seasonal migration from that county to Scotland many
 who had little contact with English as already established in other
 parts of Ulster only began to acquire the language in its Lowland
 Scots form on harvesting trips to Scotland, and when eventually
 younger generations began to become bilingual at home it was
 this type of English which was passed on to them and reinforced
 when they in turn took to seasonal migration. (16)

The consequences of seasonal migration from Ulster to Scotland, which was still very active in the nineteenth century, were, indeed, highly significant. As Adams points out here, one of the factors which would have made the Irish-speaking people from Donegal acquire the English language and become bilingual was the need to emigrate. Many children of the generation of MacGill, MacGabhan, and O Grianna shifted into English during this period. There is plenty of evidence of this shift in their novels.

Donegal Memoirs and Language Contact

The autobiographical novels of MacGill, MacGabhan, and O Grianna reflect how the two languages--English and Irish--co-existed. They appear to have a special ability to perceive the consequences of this co-existence.

Thus, in their narratives we find continuous references to the characters' use of the two languages, translations of words and names, and examples of dialectal words and expressions resulting from the contact between the two languages. That their writing was not unmotivated is obvious in the strong linguistic awareness that their novels display. We frequently find different characters using Irish as well as English. For example, at the beginning of The Rat Pit, MacGill draws attention to the fact that one of the characters, called Fergus, is speaking English, thus indicating to the reader that all the previous dialogues in that chapter have taken place in Irish. Constant references to the use of one language or the other are often inserted by the narrator. Thue the reader is always reminded of the co-existence of the two languages: 'Maire a Crick, speaking Gaelic, was telling a story, while wringing the water from her clothes' (The Rat Pit, p.34). In another passage it is noted, 'Merci be on you, child!', roared the female in Gaelic (The Rat Pit, p.6). (17)

In O Grianna's novel, there are several scenes where a character translates for others: 'It was at that time I saw my first newspaper, one day my mother came back from Bunbeg with The Derry Journal. The house was packed to the door that night and Niall Sheimisin read the paper and explained it in Gaelic to the others' (When I Was Young, p. (132). A few chapters before, the author recounts how the parish priest's English has to be translated for others on their way back from mass: 'anyone who knew a smattering of English would explain the sermon to the others' (When I Was Young, p.71). Indeed, those who have access to the English language are portrayed as having an advantage over the monolingual Irish speakers. The character of Jim, in one of MacGill's novels, is seen as worldly as his speech is different from that of the locals: 'He spoke in English and had learned many strange oaths abroad' (The Rat Pit, p.92). This character is, in fact, revealing in terms of social history: seasonal labourers like the narrators of these stories lived and worked in gangs and they had a gaffer, like Jim, who was able to translate and negotiate wages with the landowners in Scotland. In that respect, they were instrumental in the linguistic evolution of their own areas and of the county in general.

The switch from one language to the other and the recently imposed use of English in the National schools at that time is recounted by all three authors. In MacGill's novel, The Rat Pit, we read: 'The prayers of the morning were repeated in English, those of the evening in Gaelic' (p.56), while the passages below (translated by A. J. Hughes from the Irish version of Nuair a Bhi Me Og) show the difficulties Irish-speaking students and English-speaking masters must have endured in the classroom. O Grianna describes the frustration felt by both pupils and teachers as Confirmation Day was approaching:

 The master with whom I spent most time--the poor man is in the
 place of truth and it would not be right for me to lie about
 him--did not speak a word of Gaelic and we had not a single word of
 English, so our little world was uneasy and full of strife. We all
 got many beatings on account of English. The misery did not come
 fully to a head, however, until the year the Bishop was due to come
 to examine us in our catechism. At that time I knew my catechism
 off by heart, and from start to finish, in Gaelic, for my father
 used to instruct us every Sunday night during the winter, and I was
 as familiar with it as I was with the Our Father. But that was of
 little good to me, or to anyone else, as the teacher could not
 speak Gaelic. Of course, the poor man could not help that, for he
 could only speak English, but still Confirmation Day was drawing
 near. The best the unfortunate fellow could do was to try and
 instruct us in the articles of our faith in the only language we
 knew. (18)

Later in the novel, O Grianna narrates how his poor command of English makes him feel inferior to other children who, like him, were sitting an exam for a two-year scholarship which would have allowed him to continue his education. At the start of the chapter he says: 'I was not able to carry on a conversation in English at the time, but even so, I knew a good deal of English' (p.138), but despite this, he explains:

In any case, a couple of weeks later the exam took place in An Clochain Ban, and over I went. There was a large crowd of boys there, dressed in fine suits of clothes, speaking plenty of English and appearing to know so much that they had nothing to fear from the examination. They looked at me as if they disdained my appearance and my rags. One of them spoke to me and when I answered, the rest broke into laughter. I guessed that they were mocking my English. I moved away from them and a little while later they threw a few small clods of turf at me. I was bitterly hurt. Why did they give me the cold shoulder the moment they saw me? What was wrong with me? What millstone was around my neck? (When I Was Young, p.139).

A similar incident is described in The Hard Road to Klondike, by MacGabhan, whose first contact with English speakers seems to have been in the hiring fairs where children were employed as labourers for a season, as described in a report of The Evicted Tenants Commission 1893-94:

 These hiring fairs are like slave-markets. Fathers and mothers
 bring their children by the hand and walk them distances of ten,
 fifteen or twenty miles to these places and stand over them in the
 open streets of Strabane and Letterkenny, or wherever it may be and
 barter them away for whatever they can get so that these children
 are deprived of schooling, of course, and catholic education. I
 don't know anything so brutalizing on our own people as that. (19)

MacGabhan's description of these fairs foregrounds the difficulties posed by the inaccessibility of the English language to him: '[...] two men came over to my mother and started to make bargain with her. One of them had plenty of Irish and I think the other man had brought him with him to translate'. (20) It appears that his first experience working in the Lagan allowed him to acquire English, as the following year, he says, 'I was wiser than I had been a year previously and as well as that, I understood English better' (The Hard Road to Klondike, p. (24). In this passage, MacGabhan also recalls that he stayed with 'an old woman from Cloghaneely named Mary McCaffrey who lived in Letterkenny', and makes an interesting comment about the use of Irish in her household: 'There was someone there from every district in the county, and particularly from the Irish-speaking areas. Everyone from those parts knew that she would speak Irish and those who hadn't much English would come straight to her' (p. (24). His command of English seems to have made his second time in the Lagan easier, even though he still experienced some difficulties:

This was my second year and it's amazing the change that a year makes in a boy. The year before I was practically hanging out of the tassels of my mother's shawl but this time I was running around on my own and having little conversations in English with the Lagan people. Indeed, their accent and idiom was hard to follow: it was not the same as what the master who had taught me at school had. When they'd be talking about boys such as myself, 'bairns', they'd call them. [...] Another man averred that he was 'sagged with the rheumatics' and that we were lucky to have 'suchan a brave day'. When I heard all this, and more, I was of the opinion that it would be just as easy for them to understand my Irish as it was for me to make head or tail of their English (The Hard Road to Klondike, pp. (26-7).

References to the accent of some of the Irish characters when they speak English are made by MacGill and O Grianna: in The Rat Pit, a Scottish woman, for instance, says to Norah (who is one of the main characters): 'Ye're Irish too, for I ken you by yet talk' (p. (220), and a few chapters later, when Norah and her brother Fergus meet, he says: 'Ye talk like an Irish girl' (p. (273). In Children of the Dead End, a girl whom Dermod meets on his way to the rabble market notices that he has 'the Donegal tongue' (p.68). The differences between the Irish spoken in other areas are also highlighted in O Grianna's memoir: 'They learned Gaelic on the Point; indeed they spoke nothing else up until forty years or so ago. Their Gaelic was broken and blemished in parts' (When I Was Young, p.124). All these observations, which were most likely inspired by real situations, not only contribute to the realism of the plot, but they are also evidence of how linguistic issues were certainly present in everyday life. In that sense, and although, as Terence Odlin points out, the precise ways in which language contact contributed to language change in Donegal will never be fully known, these autobiographies 'provide a useful if fragmented picture of the encounters that enabled language contact to take place'. (21) Their authors' ability to incorporate their linguistic observations into their narratives endows these novels with great literary value, as their recording of language contact and change provides the stories with a stylistic exactitude that adds credibility to them.

Hiberno-English in Donegal at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

In language contact situations, borrowing and language transfer are the most immediate consequences at a structural level, (22) and it can take place in both directions. At the wake of one of the characters in Children of the Dead End, the narrator provides the following gloss on the words of a fisherman: 'He spoke the Gaelic, as nearly everybody in Frosses did, but the words "instalments" and "Congested District Board" were said in English' (Children of the Dead End, p.80). This passage is particularly interesting, as it shows how two concepts which were associated with English-speaking culture are neither translated nor adapted, but employed in their original English form in conversation by native Irish speakers. Examples of this phenomenon can also be observed in the narratives in Irish. Thus, in the English version of O Grianna's novel, we notice that the translator has chosen to italicize the words which in the original are inserted in their English form:

'What sort of humour was the master in this morning' I asked. 'He was fuming mad', said Domhnall. 'The inspector was in and he asked some of us if there was anyone in the Fourth or the Fifth yesterday or any day of the last week.' 'Don't mention that at home,' I said, 'but tell me everything. Did he ask the older scholars about geography?' (When I Was Young, p.85).

The borrowing and adaptation of lexical items from the Irish language are characteristic of Hiberno-English, the variety of English spoken in Ireland. As we can see from the Hiberno-English vocabulary that we find in the novels, both the influence of the Irish language and the importation of words from Scottish and English dialects give evidence of centuries-old contacts between the north of Ireland and Scotland and England. That the influence of Irish on the vocabulary of Donegal English should be more manifest than in many of the other Ulster varieties is hardly surprising, given the survival of Irish speakers there in such numbers, as was mentioned above. (23) In that sense, the analysis of lexical items in the novels can give us a general indication of the type of words that would have been in use in this particular area at the turn of the twentieth century. Many of those words are related to everyday objects or activities, and some of them (such as creel, brae, poteen, gob, and clabber) are even used in the translations of the Irish novels into English, which seems to indicate that they are still recognized by an Irish readership: they are left in their Hiberno-English form in order to add flavour to the stories.

In the case of the autobiographical novels written in English, MacGill's linguistic awareness is evident in his explanation of certain words and phrases that he considered would be unfamiliar or pose problems of understanding for the reader of Standard English. This is the case with the Hiberno-English word mairteens, for instance, which is followed by an explanation ('double thick stockings') provided in brackets. The word mairteens, an unquestionably hybrid adaptation of the Irish mairtin, is a similar case to brattie, another term which the author feels obliged to explain to the reader. The word brattie (defined in The Rat Pit as 'an apron made of coarse cloth'), comes from the Irish form brat, which translates as 'mantle, cloak'. Other words also explained to the reader are girsha, beansho, banshee, dhan, caishin, curragh, brock, shebeen, and fargortha. All these explanations and references to certain linguistic differences appear to be a way of making a general English readership realize that his characters come from an English-speaking area where Irish was still dominant. This stylistic device contributes to the author's construction of characters and to his attempt to portray them more realistically, while his linguistic self-conciousness is an indication of the type of reader he had in mind.

Interestingly, the use of some other dialectal features does not seem as self-conscious. If we take a look at the vocabulary that appears in the novels, certain terms such as man of the house or woman of the house, which are clearly translated from Irish fear ti/an ti and bean ti/tighe respectively, are used by the narrator both in Children of the Dead End and in The Rat Pit, without typographical marks or any other indication of their being dialectal forms (these terms are also used in the English translations of the novels of MacGabhan and O Grianna). The same occurs with the word boreen, a well known Hiberno-English term used to refer to a 'country lane; small seldom used road, usually with grass growing up the middle'. (24) The dialectal words glen, brae, croft, clabber, bannock, and gasair, for instance, are also used in the narration without any specific comment about their meanings.

At a grammatical level, the contact between Irish and English is also evident in certain structures used by narrators and characters alike. The deployment of the definite article in expressions such as 'He's going out to the fishing tonight' (The Rat Pit, p.71), for instance, or of some verb tenses such as the habitual be in 'at other times, when I am tramping about [...] I do be thinking that there is a God [...]' (The Rat Pit, p.35) serve to illustrate the existence of dialectal features in the narrative voice in MacGill's novel. (25) The fact that these appear not only in the fictional dialogues, but also in the actual narration indicates that they must have been very common in the English spoken in Donegal at the time. Some of these structures and phrases are, interestingly, chosen by A. J. Hughes in his translation of Nuair a Bhi Me Og into English, as can be observed in the following lines, where the Irish form leitheid, meaning 'Like, counterpart, equal; such' (26) (see O Donaill s.v. leitheid, and Trainor 1953, s.v. like) is translated as the likes of: 'I came up Carrick Street and turned into High Street looking for somewhere the likes of me could get a bite to eat' (When I Was Young, p.172).

A close analysis of the dialogues in these novels reveals other Hiberno-English features which, it appears, would have been commonly found in conversation in the Donegal varieties depicted in these memoirs. Given that an exhaustive examination of all of these features is beyond the scope of this essay, a selection of some of the most significant characteristics will be dealt with here. A very distinctive way of expressing a recently completed action in the novels is by means of the preposition after + V-ing, as the following example illustrates: 'I am after forgettin' that I came out to pluck bog-bine' (The Rat Pit, p.66). Studies carried out around the same period in which these authors lived comment on this structure too. Mary Hayden and Marcus Hartog, for instance, state that 'the form denotes a completed past, but not a remote past'. (27) P.W. Joyce also mentions it in his book, and attributes this use to the existence of a similar structure in Irish (with iar or a n-diaigh). (28) This latter observation made by Joyce had already been put forward by Shee, who cited the sentence I am after eating (for I have just eaten) as an example of translation from Irish. (29) The availability of this structure in Hiberno-English is what must have motivated A. J. Hughes's rendering of the following utterance by one of the characters in When I was Young:

'That's what I hear anyhow,' said Hiudai 'I spoke to Frainc Ac Gairbheath this very minute. He is only after coming down from Peebles and he says that there will not be a single wisp ripe there for another week yet' (p.162).

Prepositional usages in the novels deserve some attention as well. The deployment of the preposition on in the examples shown below, has been widely documented in studies dealing with Hiberno-English: (30)

'So I do be trampin' about the roads with the sweat on me, and the shivers of cold on me at the same time' (Children of the Dead End, p.69).

'Here now, Donnchadh', said my father, 'don't be spoiling the story on us, for it is a great pity to spoil it' (When I Was Young, p.122). (31)

The two usages of on + pronoun that we find here have been studied as examples of substratum influence from Irish. In the fragment from Children of the Dead End there seems to be a reference to a physical process, which is affecting the listener (Norah) negatively. Examples like this are similarly recorded by P. L. Henry, Seamus Moylan, and Markku Filppula, (32) whereas the function of on + pronoun in the second example is a clear illustration of what is known as the 'ethical dative', (33) which seems to have been modelled on a similar use of the preposition ar in the Irish language.

Transfer of prepositional constructions is common in language contact situations. (34) In the context of Hiberno-English, Bliss states:

 Among all the parts of speech, prepositions give most difficulty to
 learners of a second language, because their semantic fields vary
 widely from language to language; a bilingual speaker is very
 likely to transfer details of the use of prepositions from his
 primary to his secondary language. (35)

These features, then, can vouch for the influence of Irish on English during a period of intense contact between the two languages. These novels, even if only semi-autobiographical, not only shed light on the importance of language change in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century, but also offer an invaluable insider's observation which in some cases alter and in others corroborate presumptions about how language change took place in Ireland.

This essay has argued that autobiographies are important constructs of the past at many different levels. The rich corpus of autobiographical writings by Donegal migrants depicts the lived experience of their own particular group, which can often be misinterpreted and distorted when observed from the outside. Autobiographical accounts of migration and life in the Gaeltacht, as has been discussed here, indicate how bilingualism and language contact between Irish and English played a central role in the identity of these individuals and in the development of the areas from which they came. That they are also crucial at a literary level is something that critics have overlooked, and yet, it cannot be denied that a good deal of the literary value of what I have referred to as the 'Gaeltacht peasant memoirs' here lies in the detailed depiction of the linguistic situation. Language contact and change, code-switching, and borrowing are certainly part of the plots and the imaginary settings of these texts.

The imagery of the rural Irish-speaking West which for de Valera was the essence of Irishness is subtly revisited by these authors, who look at rural Ireland through a less idyllic glass: their accounts of life in West Donegal are stripped of the nostalgia and the romanticism with which Irish-speaking rural communities were viewed by others. In that sense, it is evident that these works alter presumptions about how language change occurred and how this process was perceived by language users at the time.

Because they are autobiographical narratives, these texts are important both at a literary level (for the stylistic value of the fictional dialogues) and a sociolinguistic level too. Indeed, the dearth of recorded oral data available on Northern Hiberno-English before 1951 makes written documents such as the Donegal autobiographical corpus valuable in providing a full description of the English of Donegal at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although the novels briefly dealt with here evidently do not contain instances of all the linguistic utterances that might be typical of Hiberno-English, the rendering of Donegal speech during the period in which these authors were growing up provides interesting insights into the linguistic situation of Donegal during a period in which the linguistic landscape was changing rapidly. Their descriptions, nevertheless, rely on individual memories, and further research would be required before we can determine whether they can be used as a basis for generalizations about language change for the whole of Ireland.

NOTES

(1.) See G. C. Duggan, The Stage Irishman: A History of the Irish Play and Stage Characters from the Earliest Times (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1937), J. O. Bartley, 'The Development of a Stock Character, I: The Stage Irishman to 1800', Modern Language Review, Vol. XXXVII (1942), 438-47, Alan Bliss, Spoken English in Ireland 1600-1740 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1979), and Charles Trainor, 'The Irish Servant on the English Stage', Etudes Irlandaises, XVIII-Z (1993), 27-31.

(2.) Declan Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language (1979; London: Macmillan, 1993), pp.196-215.

(3.) James E. Doan, 'Revisiting the Blasket Island Memoirs', Irish Studies Review, 9.1 (2001), 81-6 (p.82).

(4.) Seamus O Grianna, When I Was Young, translated by A.J. Hughes (Dublin: A & A Farmar, 2001), p. (206.

(5.) Sean O Tuama, Repossessions: Selected Essays on the Irish Literary Heritage (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp.199-211.

(6.) Doan, "Revisiting', p.83.

(7.) Joe Mulholland, 'The Writers of Donegal', Donegal Annual, No. 48 (1996), 70-83.

(8.) Bernard Aspinwall, 'Half-Slave, Half-Free: Patrick Macgill and the Catholic Church', New Blackfriars, 65 (1984), 359-371.

(9.) Carolina P. Amador Moreno, 'The Crossing of Boundaries in Donegal Writing', in Re-Writing Boundaries: Critical Approaches in Irish Studies, edited by Asier Altuna and Cristina Andreu (Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 2007), pp.209-216.

(10.) See M. V. Barry, 'The English Language in Ireland', in English as a World Language, edited by R. W. Bailey, and M. M. G6rlack (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982), pp.84-133 (p.92). For a general discussion of the role of the National Schools as an instrument of linguistic change, see Donald H. Akenson, The Irish Education Experiment: The National System of Education in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970). Akenson also includes statistics derived from the Census. With regard to the exclusion of Irish from education, see Sean de Freine, 'The Dominance of the English Language in the 19th Century', in The English Language in Ireland, edited by Diarmaid O Muirithe (Dublin and Cork: The Mercier Press, 1977), pp.71-87. De Freine contends that the people in general had no interest in keeping up the language by then: 'They accepted the ethnocentric Ascendancy viewpoint that Irish was a backward language, and that even to speak it was a positive hindrance to progress' (p.84). For an illustration of the status of English and Irish in the nineteenth century, see also the texts selected in Tony Crowley, The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366-1922 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp.133-74.

(11.) See, for instance, Garrett Fitzgerald, 'Estimates for Baronies of Minimum Level of Irish speaking amongst Successive Decennial Cohorts 1771-1881 to 1861-1871', Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. 84 C, (1984), 20-121, Brian O Cuiv, 'The Gaeltacht, Past and Present 1', in Irish Dialects and Irish-Speaking Districts, edited by Brian O Cuiv (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced studies, 1980), p.20, and de Freine, 'The Dominance of the English Language in the 19th Century', pp.80-2.

(12.) O Cuiv, 'The Gaeltacht, Past and Present I', p.25.

(13.) G. Brendan Adams, 'The Validity of Language Census Figures in Ulster, 1851-1911', in The English Dialects of Ulster, edited by G. Brendan Adams, Michael V. Barry, and Philip Tilling (Hollywood, Northern Ireland: Ulster Folk and Transport Museum 1986), p.129.

(14.) Reg Hindley, The Death of the Irish Language (London: Routledge, 1990), pp.16-19.

(15.) G. Brendan Adams, 'The Emergence of Ulster as a Distinct Dialect Area', Ulster Folklife 4 (1958), p.70.

(16.) Adams, 'The Emergence of Ulster as a Distinct Dialect District Area', p.70.

(17.) My italics in both examples.

(18.) O Grianna, When I Was Young, p.20.

(19.) Quoted in Joe Mulholland, 'The Writers of Donegal', pp.74-5.

(20.) Michael MacGowan, The Hard Road to Klondike, translated from Irish by Valentin Iremonger (Cork: The Collins Press, 2003), p.16.

(21.) Terence Odlin, 'Language Ecology and the Columbian Exchange', in When Languages Collide: Perspectives on Language Conflict, Language Competition and Language Coexistence, edited by Brian D. Joseph, Johanna Destafano, Neil G. Jacobs, Ilse Lehiste (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002), p.80.

(22.) Sarah G. Thomason, Language Contact: An Introduction (Washington D C: Georgetown University Press, 2001), p.69.

(23.) See also Caitriona NI Ghallchoir, 'Aspects of Bilingualism in North West Donegal', in Aspects of English Dialects in Ireland, edited M. V. Barry, Vol. I (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University of Belfast, 1981), pp.142-70 (p.144).

(24.) The form boreen (also spelt bohereen in Hiberno-English) is an anglicization of the Irish word boithrin, or botahirin, which is the diminutive form of Irish bothar (road). See T. P. Dolan, A Dictionary of Hiberno-English (1998; Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2004), s.v. boreen.

(25.) A more detailed account of this and other features of Hiberno-English is provided in Carolina P. Amador Moreno, The Use of Hiberno-English in Patrick MacGill's Early Novels: Bilingualism and Language Shift from Irish to English in County Donegal (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).

(26.) See N. O Donaill, Focloir Gaeilge-Bearla. Irish-English Dictionary (1977; Baile Atha Cliath: An Gum. An Roinn Oideachais, 1977/1992), s.v. leitheid, and Michael Traynor, The English Dialect of Donegal (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1953), s.v. like.

(27.) Mary Hayden and Marcus Hartog, 'The Irish Dialect of English: Its Origins and Vocabulary', Fortnightly Review. New Series, 85 (1909), pp.933-47.

(28.) P.W. Joyce, English as We Speak it in Ireland (1910; Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1991), p.85.

(29.) G. Shee, 'The Irish "Brogue" in Fiction: A Protest', The Month, 45 (1882), p.365.

(30.) See for example Anton Gerard van Hamel, 'On Anglo-Irish Syntax', Englische Studien 45 (1912), 272-292, P. L. Henry, Anglo-Irish Dialect of North Roscommon (Dublin: UCD, 1957), Raymond Hickey, 'An Assessment of Language Contact in the Development of Irish English', in Linguistic Change under Contact Conditions, edited by Jacek Fisiak (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), pp.109-130, Jeffrey Kallen, 'English in Ireland', in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 5: English in Britain and Overseas: Origins and Development, edited by Robert Burchfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.148-196, Seamus Moylan, The Language of Kilkenny (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1996), Roibeard O hUrdail, 'Hiberno-English: Historical Background and Synchronic Features and Variation', in The Celtic Englishes (Anglisfische Forschungen 247), edited by Hildegard L.C. Tristram (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1997), pp.80-200, and Markku Filppula, The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).

(31.) These particular utterances also contain examples of the habitual aspect, where verb do collocates with be in order to express habituality. One of the first authors to note it is Shee (p.365), in the context of literature. However, a few years later, Stoney also makes reference to this feature in a non-literary context. In his prescriptivist style, he considers that '[j]oining the verbs "do" and "be" [...] is very common in Ireland, and, moreover, very ungrammatical'. See Stoney, pp.64-5). Most hypotheses regarding the origin of the habitual forms have decidedly leant in the direction of substratum accounts. See, for example, K. P. Corrigan, 'Language Contact and Language Shift in County Armagh, 1178-1659', in Linguistic Diversity in Ulster, Special Issue edited by J. P. Mallory, Ulster Folklife 45 (1999), 53-69.

(32.) Henry, Anglo-Irish Dialect of North Roscommon, p.148, Moylan, Kilkenny, p.340, and Filppula, The Grammar of Irish English, p.220.

(33.) van Hamel, 'On Anglo-Irish Syntax', p.282.

(34.) See, for instance, Suzanne Romaine, Bilingualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

(35.) Bliss, Spoken English in Ireland 1600-1740, p.309.