Discussion

This chapter considers three main topics in the phonological development of MUE: contact with Irish; the input from English dialects; and input from Scots. The lack of direct input from Irish is discussed, as is the notion of ‘reinforcement’ and the problems there are with it. Irish input was minimal because of the large native English speaker population, unidirectional bilingualism, a long term shift from Irish with small numbers of English learners at any one time, and the lower social status of Irish speakers. The English input is considered in terms of New Dialect Formation, which was instrumental in the formation of the dialect, and Colonial Lag, which is probably not a useful notion in this context despite some apparent conservatism on the part of the dialect. Scots input was of specific kinds, affecting the phonetic realisation of vowels and certain kinds of lexical distribution of them, suggesting that Scots speakers shifted to English as adults, imposing certain Scots phonetic and phonotactic rules on it.