English in Dublin

The English language has been spoken in Dublin since the late 12^th century. English never died out in the capital and there are some features of vernacular Dublin English which can be traced to the first period. The records of Dublin English are slight and consist before 1600 mainly of municipal records which here and there betray the kind of English which must have been spoken in the city (Henry 1958). For a historical background to present-day speech one must look to the elocutionist Thomas Sheridan (the father of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan) who in 1781 published A Rhetorical Grammar of the English Language with an appendix in which he commented on the English used by middle class Dubliners, the “gentlemen of Ireland” in his words, which he regarded as worthy of censure on his part. When discussing consonants, Sheridan remarks on “the thickening (of) the sounds of d and t in certain situations”. Here he is probably referring to the realization of dental fricatives as alveolar plosives as found in vernacular forms of Dublin English today. There is no hint in Sheridan of anything like a distinction between dental and alveolar plosive realizations, which is an essential marker of local versus non-local speech today.