The Sociolinguistics of Language Use in Ireland

While the study of Irish English (IrE) on the phonological, grammatical and lexical levels is long established (cf. Hickey 2011: 13–14), the study of variation in language use in IrE is a recent endeavour (cf. Vaughan and Clancy 2011: 47). IrE is not exceptional as a variety in this regard, dialectological research in general having long concentrated on synchronic variation at the level of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. In pragmatic research too, variation in language use according to macrosocial factors, such as region, age, socio-economic class, ethnicity — and gender to a lesser extent — have been largely neglected. However, in recent years variational pragmatics has emerged as a research field, making intra-lingual pragmatic variation according to these five macrosocial factors the focus of systematic analysis (cf. Schneider and Barron 2008; Barron and Schneider 2009; Holmes 2010: 449; Schneider 2010; Placencia 2011; Barron 2014, forthcoming). This research field propagates intra-lingual pragmatic research adopting the methodological principles of empiricity, comparability and contrastivity (cf. Schneider 2010; Barron 2014). In other words, research should be contrastive between varieties and use comparable data since it is only such data that can highlight the similarities and differences between varieties on any level.