Assessing the Linguistic Impact in Ireland of England’s First Experiment in the ‘Science of Settlement’
Karen P. Corrigan, Newcastle University
A major debate that has evolved in research addressing Englishes which potentially arose through contact with Indigenous languages is the extent to which they should be considered ‘Colonial’, ‘Settler Colonial’ or indeed ‘Postcolonial’ varieties (Denis & D’Arcy 2018, 2019, 2022; Deterding 2008:233). This granular view runs counter to Schneider’s (2003, 2007) ‘Dynamic Model’ which assumes an identical evolutionary pathway for the colonial Englishes of New Zealand and Kenya despite their rather diverse socio-political histories and language ecologies articulated in Hay et al. (2008) and Buregeya (2019), respectively. Denis & D’Arcy’s (2018: 3) “alternative epistemological standpoint” is embedded within anthropological and sociological models in which Colonialism and Settler Colonialism are viewed as polar opposites. The former involves the domination of an Indigenous population which is exploited by the coloniser whereas the latter refers to settlements in which terra nullius already obtains or which can be made thus by the “elimination” (in the terms of Wolfe 2006) of local ethnolinguistic groups (cf. Manning 2018; Osterhammel 1997; Taylor 2021; Veracini 2008, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014; Wolfe 1999, 2001 inter alia). Accounting for this dichotomy allows Denis & D’Arcy (2018) to make what they consider to be more robust predictions regarding the linguistic differences typifying ‘Settler Colonial’ versus ‘Colonial’ or ‘Postcolonial’ Englishes. Colonists of the settler type who are oriented primarily to the appropriation of new territories have little truck with the “mutual negotiation” (Schneider 2007:45) required to develop a shared variety. In these circumstances, Indigenous languages (often legislated against) play only a minor role. They are rarely, if ever, the source of grammatical innovations or explicit contact-transfer effects. By contrast, Indigenous languages are not side-stepped when it comes to Colonial English varieties which do consistently reflect the L1s of the colonised populations. Although Denis & D’Arcy’s position paper is restricted to interrogating the relatively recent settlement histories of Australia, Canada, India and Singapore, they argue that it is applicable “to colonial contact situations in the more distant past as well” (2018:23). In this talk, I test this proposal by exploring the impacts of migratory movements into and out of England’s first colony, the island of Ireland, as they relate to matters of language and identity across both temporal and geographical space (see Nic Dhaibhéid et al. 2021; Rahman et al. 2017).
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