Irish women's writing, 1878–1922 by Anna Pilz Whitney Standlee

Author:Anna Pilz, Whitney Standlee [Anna Pilz, Whitney Standlee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526127112
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2018-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

An ‘intricate network of social life’ is indeed revealed by the preceding ethnographic study in an essay that offers to demonstrate and elucidate to its readers an Irish ‘problem’ beyond the ken of the occasional tourist; yet the closing judgements also serve to consolidate a narrative distance occupied by the amused but ultimately censorious (monoglot) observers.

Somerville and Ross’s 1910 essay ‘The Anglo-Irish Language’, based on a review of Patrick Weston Joyce’s English as We Speak It in Ireland, provides their most extensive commentary on the subject of English in Ireland. The essay opens with the identification of Ireland’s complex linguistic history:

It would be as easy to coax the stars out of the sky into your hat as to catch the heart of a language and put it in a phrase-book. Ireland has two languages; one of them is her own by birthright; the second of them is believed to be English, which is a fallacy; it is a fabric built by Irish architects with English bricks, quite unlike anything of English construction.26

This theory of language evolution underlines the mobility of linguistic transfer and its ability to cross (at least some) class boundaries:

Gentlemen and peasants began to speak the same language, borrowing one from the other; the talk of the men of quality, bred in the classic tradition, enriched the vocabulary of the peasants, while the country gentlemen, themselves Irish speakers, absorbed into their English speech, something of the vigour and passion, the profuse imagery and wilful exaggeration that are inherent in the Gael.27

Contrastingly, the authors also recognise clearly the Anglicising force of upward social mobility: ‘His [Joyce’s] harvest is reaped, as is but natural, among the peasants and the poor people of the towns; each upward step in the social scale is a step further from the Irish language and its enormous influences.’28

Nicole Pepinster Greene’s fine essay on ‘Dialect and Social Identity in The Real Charlotte’ reveals how, by ‘manipulating their knowledge of social and regional Hiberno-English dialects’, Somerville and Ross ‘delineate subtle differences of class and personality, thus characterising language as a representation of social identity’.29 In addition to giving close attention to Somerville and Ross’s most acclaimed novel, her work also usefully returns their non-fictional commentaries on the use and abuse of Hiberno-English (in ‘The Anglo-Irish Language’ cited above, or in Martin’s ‘Children of the Captivity’) to critical analysis.30 While biographical studies of Somerville and Ross refer in passing to their learning of Irish, archival evidence provides more detailed information as to the timing and duration of their language learning.

In the early months of 1897, Edith and Violet (then on a visit to Drishane, the Somerville home) had Irish lessons taught by a Mrs Ward; the lessons were begun by Edith and her sister Hildegarde in February, and they were joined by Violet Martin on 17 March. The lessons continued regularly, on average twice a week, until May. Somerville and Ross, along with Hildegarde, occasionally describe giving ‘ourselves an Irish lesson’ (e.g., 26 March), using, on the advice of Douglas Hyde, the grammars written by Eugene O’Growney, Professor of Irish at St.

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