Irish Society as Portrayed in Irish Films

Abstract

Discussions relating to Irish English and the media invariably focus on how the media are transforming or, indeed, threatening the way the English language is spoken in Ireland. Newspaper articles bearing headlines such as ‘Leave upspeak to the, like, Americans?’ (Behan 2005) or ‘Janey Mac! Irish-English is banjaxed, so it is …’ (Bielenberg 2008) tend to lay the blame for any change to Irish dialects squarely on the media. Although an examination into such claims would certainly be interesting, and similar research in the Scottish context has already been conducted by Stuart-Smith and Timmins (2014) in Sociolinguistics in Scotland, this is not the approach that will be taken here. Like Coupland in his influential ‘The mediated performance of vernaculars’, I, too, believe that it is unnecessary ‘to limit the study of mediated dialect to a “vitality” agenda (“Will the mass media keep dialects alive or kill them off?”) or to a “media effects” agenda (“Do the mass media influence the course of language change?”)’ (Coupland 2009: 297). Instead, it is possible to see the media as holding a mirror up to society and to examine language in film as evidence of art imitating life rather than vice versa. Thus, rather than exploring to what extent the media shape Irish English (hereafter IE), this chapter will instead examine to what degree the media reflect vernacular usage.