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INTRODUCTION
A tale of two cities
Immigration is a new phenomenon on the island of Ireland, which was once synonymous with emigration (Corrigan 2010:124–26; Kallen 2013:34). Language acquisition is a key consequence of such processes. Here we compare the adoption of a well-documented characteristic of Irish-English (IE), the discourse-pragmatic marker like (henceforth like), by migrant populations in two urban contexts. The former is Armagh city in Northern Ireland (NI) and within the dialect region known variously as Northern Irish-English/Hiberno-English/Ulster English (NIE/HE/UE) (Corrigan 2010). The latter is Dublin, capital of the Republic of Ireland (ROI), and associated typologically with Southern Irish-English/Hiberno- English (SIE/HE) (Kallen 2013; see Figure 1).
Figure 1.
Locations of Armagh City and Dublin.2
[Figure omitted. See PDF]
NIE/HE/UE and SIE/HE have long been recognised as dialectologically distinct from other non-Celtic influenced Englishes (Barron & Schneider 2005; Corrigan 2010:31; Kallen 2013:224–29) because of their language contact origins. Thus, dialects across the island share unique features such as retaining the Irish contrastive verbal categories ‘punctual’ versus ‘habitual’. Although this distinction is productive island-wide, NIE/HE/UE favours a habitual be variant while do + be predominates in SIE/HE (Corrigan 2010:63–64; Kallen 2013:90–93). The existence of morphosyntactic variation alongside the extensively documented phonological differences north and south of the border (Corrigan 2010:ch. 2; Kallen 2013:ch. 2) piqued our interest in investigating whether there might likewise be regional variation at the level of discourse-pragmatics and whether it could be replicated by newcomers.
Here we focus on like, a feature that is subject to variation and change with respect to ‘overall frequency, social meaning and positioning’ (Schweinberger 2015:114) across many English dialects (D'Arcy 2008, 2017), making it an excellent choice for investigating migrants’ acquisition of regional varieties. We specifically address the position of like, tracking the use and adoption of clause-initial and clause-medial variants, but particularly focusing on a clause-final variant, reported to be typical of British Isles’ Englishes (Truesdale & Meyerhoff 2015:9–10), and especially Irish Englishes (Diskin 2013; D'Arcy 2017), leading it to be viewed as somewhat ‘emblematic’ of Irish identity (Diskin 2017).
Studies addressing the adoption of discourse-pragmatic features by second language (L2) speakers of SIE/HE have been expanding, for example, Diskin (2017), Nestor, Ní Chasaide, & Regan (2012), and Migge (2015). However, the...