Is There Hiberno-English on Them?

Irish has always had a strange relationship with English. For years Irish served as a kind of code to keep the English out; its resurgence among the people was solidified in public schools and resurrected among literary figures, and the Irish renaissance seems to be thriving. However, the transition from straight English or Irish to the more naturalistic Hiberno-English was not smooth; the ＂code＂ was still engrained in literature, and authors who used it, including Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Shaw and Friel, used Hiberno-English as a literary device and clearly considered translation in using it in their work rather than letting it stand on its own. Zingg examines the linguistic background of Irish and Hiberno-English, listing such variants as Anglo-Irish, Irish English, Irish dialect, and brogue. Then she examines features of Hiberno-English that make it distinct from the aforesaid variants. She then examines the place of Hiberno-English in literature, including James Joyce’s Ulysses, Flann O’Brien’s The Best of Myles and The Poor Mouth, Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island and Translations by Brian Friel. Zingg then concentrates on the corpora, including lexical features, of such elements as phonetic features. The result is impressively thorough. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)