McLeod, Wilson

Lamb, Will

Nic Leoid, Niamh

2023-10-13T10:45:23Z

2023-10-13T10:45:23Z

2023-10-13

Codeswitching (CS) is a complex, subtle and common linguistic practice in bilingual communities. CS in the Irish Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas) is by no means a new phenomenon, but the declining intensity of Irish use and the corresponding increase in English use in these areas raise concerns about the influence which English exerts on the form of Irish spoken today. The speech of younger Gaeltacht speakers is particularly stigmatised. This thesis investigates the language use of young people (aged 10–13) in a Gaeltacht area in Conamara, County Galway, with a particular focus on how CS is structured in their speech and how they use CS as a communicative tool to achieve various social functions. A new corpus of spoken Irish was collected and transcribed as the basis of analysis. Data was gathered from 30 participants in four primary schools. A corpus was compiled from semi-structured group interviews which were organised within the schools. The goal of these interviews was to elicit as much speech as possible from the participants through minimal interference from the researcher. The corpus data was supported by administering parental questionnaires to gather demographic and sociolinguistic data on the participants. The data was analysed from both a grammatical (Myers-Scotton 1992, 1998, 2002) and socio-functional perspective (Gumperz 1982, Appel & Muysken 1987, Auer 1988, Zentella 1990). The aim of approaching the data from a grammatical perspective was to show that CS is not disorderly or random, while the aim of approaching the data from a socio-functional perspective was to investigate how the young speakers employ CS as a communicative strategy and establish some of the key functions that it serves. The analysis found that Irish with CS was the norm for the speakers – echoing that of the wider community – but that CS neither impacts Irish language syntax nor the flow of speech, for the most part. A quantitative view of CS showed that speakers codeswitched more intrasententially (i.e., within sentences) than intersententially (i.e., between sentences) but that Irish-only turns of speech made up the majority of the corpus. Finally, the thesis greatly enhances our understanding of how these bilinguals communicate and use both their languages to achieve various communicative and social goals. For example, speakers were found to codeswitch in order to adapt to their addressee, emphasise or clarify a statement, quote others, convey humour and better express their emotions. As such, the thesis concludes that the speakers use of CS should not be understood as a reflection of limited ability but as the effective employment of their bilingual resources.

https://hdl.handle.net/1842/41059

http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/3798

en

The University of Edinburgh

Irish-English codeswitching

young Conamara Gaeltacht speakers

Conamara Gaeltacht speakers

Codeswitching (CS)

Conamara Gaeltacht

bilingual communities

Irish Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking areas)

Conamara, County Galway

Structure and functions of Irish-English codeswitching as used by young Conamara Gaeltacht speakers

The structure and functions of Irish-English codeswitching as used by young Conamara Gaeltacht speakers

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy