Abstract
The approach offered in the present book by Marion Schulte is one which has become increasingly popular in recent years. It is based on micro-social investigations of variation in a speech community, focusing on sociolinguistically determined individual choices and pragmatic variation. This approach sees itself as a contrast, if not in fact, as an alternative to macro-social investigations which began in North America and European countries well over half a century ago. Given that there has already been such a macro-social investigation of Dublin English (Hickey 2005), the immediate question for the current one is whether and to what extent it yields linguistic insights over and beyond the earlier study of English in Dublin.
The present book is a concise monograph with some 150 pages of text and is very largely focused on the pragmatic marker like and the realizations of word-final /t/ in Dublin English. It begins with an introduction in which the author outlines the goals of her investigation and offers a thorough overview of research up to the time of her writing.
Neither the introduction nor the following chapter on the sociolinguistics of Dublin English provides any information on the sound system of Dublin English. In fact, nowhere in this book, in contrast with other sources such as Hickey (2005, 2012-, 2024), is the phonology of this variety presented, let alone discussed. This means that readers coming to the book will find two very detailed discussions of elements of a sound system which remains hidden from them. Nor will readers be aware of current sound change, that is, the short front vowel lowering (Hickey 2018) which has spread and is continuing to do so among young females in Dublin and Ireland in general. In addition, this reviewer considers the extensive use of an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed PhD thesis in German (Bertz 1975), which is not available in the public domain, as problematic. Readers of the current book will not have easy access to this source and thus will find it difficult to pursue this literature further and check the accuracy of the many statements Schulte draws from it for her own text.
Chapter 3 ‘Pragmatics of Irish English’ provides a concise review of the extensive literature on pragmatics in the Irish English context and identifies the marker like (and kind of) as objects of later instrumental phonetic study in the book. Chapter 4 ‘Sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and phonetic variation’ offers a summary of the links between sociopragmatics and phonetics, which form the basis for Schulte’s investigation presented in the book.
With chapter 5 ‘Data and methodology’ the research core of the book begins. Schulte’s data was collected from nineteen speakers representing gender and social class in a balanced measure (largely determined by place of residence in Dublin city, large parts of the north being less prosperous than the south). The most linguistically interesting section is 5.3 ‘Acoustic phonetic analysis’ in which Schulte discusses the phonetic realizations of fricated /t/ 1 (detailed discussion in chapter 7) with the help of a selection of spectrograms.
The following chapter ‘Vowel variation: /ai/ in Dublin English’ is devoted to the variation found with this vowel, ranging from [ɑɪ] with a low back starting point to [əɪ] with a central one. Schulte examines a large number of realizations of /ai/ in various contexts with her informants, providing much personal information, but without considering its relationship to other key vowels, such as that in the MOUTH lexical set, which varies considerably in different forms of Dublin English. Any given vowel in a sound system will stand in relation to other vowels so the set of vowels should have been presented as a necessary context.
In chapter 7 ‘Consonantal variation: Word-final /t/ in Dublin English’ Schulte presents the results of some 1330 tokens of word final /t/ in positions of high sonority across her nineteen speakers. Despite the detailed statistical analysis of these many tokens, the treatment reveals a principal weakness of this study overall, that is, the neglect of a general distinction between a local Dublin accent and a non-local accent used generally by educated middle-class speakers in Dublin. Schulte sees fricated /t/ as a variant which has come to enjoy prestige in the late twentieth century and says that “[s]peakers favour this variant when they perform an expert identity” and continues “[s]peakers who portray themselves as non-conforming with the expectations and norms of the speech community at large tend to disfavour fricative (i.e. fricated, RH) /t/. . . . Male speakers and unemployed speakers in this sample particularly favour a drop/unreleased realisation of word-final /t/.” But this reviewer would see such individuals as speakers of local Dublin English, which does not have fricated /t/ but the more fully debuccalised lenited variants [h, ʔ, Ø]. If Schulte had examined the sound systems of Dublin English as a whole then she could have determined whether these individuals were speaking local Dublin English rather than, as she concludes, deciding to disfavor the fricated /t/ variant of non-local Dublin English, that is, supraregional Irish English, because of their lack of social power.
The claims of the book are summarized in the final chapter 8 ‘Discussion and conclusion’ (143-153). In her conclusion Schulte recognizes that her study is “limited to only two phonetic segments produced by a small number of speakers of one variety of English.” Despite this very restricted canvas for her investigation, one can recognize the virtue it has in focusing on the interrelationship of pragmatics and phonetic realization, with reference to like and fricated /t/ in Dublin English taken as data points. The book ends with a somewhat vague call for further research into “other markers, phonetic segments, varieties of English, and other languages” in order “to find answers to these new, and sometimes old, questions.” While it is laudable to point the way forward for future research, this reviewer sees this investigation as limited in scope and insight, useful certainly as part of a mosaic of present-day Dublin English but lacking in any thrust toward a new, more comprehensive interpretation of variation in this variety of Irish English.
