Welcome to our Irish English page.
This is a growing list of resources regarding Irish English. These are links relating to how Irish has influenced English or how English is spoken in Ireland.
Please leave any suggested links in the comments section.
Our blog posts on Irish English
A few more thoughts on Irish-English …
Sometimes Irish-English assimilates an Irish word into an English word that looks or sounds similar.
Smithereens: a word in bits and pieces
The word’s popularity can probably be attributed at least partly to its euphony, the way it bounces out off the lips and teeth, pulling its Gaelic tail after it.
A face like a fur hatchet and alike. English in Norn Iron
I think Northern Irish English is a very rich, highly expressive, and very funny language.
Long finger
I marvel at the influence of the Irish language on English long after the language has ceased to be the native expression of the Irish.
Getting cute about gender
Cute has three senses listed in Macmillan Dictionary, two of them having to do with physical attractiveness. The third, described as mainly American, is “clever in a way that shows a lack of respect or honesty” … In Ireland, things are a little different. Irish English has a version of this lesser sense of cute that is typically heard in the colloquialism “cute hoor”.
RP and Dortspeak
Ireland, though a relatively small island, abounds in dialectal variation. Here, as elsewhere, accents mark geographic identity (and social standing, to a lesser degree), and people sometimes embrace new dialects to distance themselves from areas or attributes they don’t wish to be associated with.
Irish English resources
John Loftus and Terence Patrick Dolan’s Hiberno-English Archive.
Cavanese: English as spoken in Cavan.
CELT, the Corpus of Electronic Texts.
Languages spoken in Ireland.
Here are some examples of Irish and English phrases to show how different the two languages are!
List of English words of Irish origin.
List of Irish words used in the English Language.
The Irish vernacular – idioms and phrases.
or: how to make sense of the Irish.
Talking Irish-English.
If your friends insist on hollering “top o’ the mornin'” and “begosh and begorrah,” you can be pretty sure they’re not Irish.
Dublin English.
Any one of the varieties of the English language used in Dublin, Ireland.
Irish slang
Everyday English and slang in Ireland.
‘… it’s an Irish sort of English’.
Common Irish slang from the BBC.
Irish Slang from Trip Advisor.
Irish slang from WhyGo.
Other regional English pages
Scottish English
Japanese English
Chinese English
Russian English
South African English
American English
Indian English
Australian English
Spanish English
Mexican English
Canadian English
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It seems to be popular today for younger Irish people to say that the Irish didn’t say “Top of the mornin’ to you.” This is false. Maybe you’re not old enough to know. My Irish Grandfather, Henry Grattan, born in County Westmeath in the late 1800s, emigrated to the USA in the early 1900s, was often known to say, “Top of the mornin’ to ya, and the rest of the afternoon to meself.”
If I may add, I never heard my late Irish grandfather say, “begosh and begorrah,” but he often said, “top of the mornin to ya.”
Thanks for your comments Bill. It’s great to get such vivid information from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.