I want to remark that I carried out the field study in 2007 and I have not been able to revise the thesis substantially or to include all relevant recent research because of health reasons. Furthermore, I want to apologise to all those researchers who have published in the past years for not having considered their certainly insightful and promising surveys. I had the choice not to publish my results at all or to publish them with the shortcomings in up-to-date-ness present in this publication. (Katrin Sell)

Dissertation, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, 2017

The dissertation explores and describes variation and change in the variety of Irish English as found in the Corpus of Spoken Galway English. The thesis covers major linguistic fields such as phonetics and phonology and morphosyntax and has two overall objectives. The first aim is to support, falsify or qualify previous findings and claims about Irish English prior to 2015 by contrasting them with urban dialect data collected in 2007. Secondly, this thesis aims to generate insights into processes of language variation and change in progress. Based on an in-depth analysis of selected features using statistical logit models, inter alia, to enable statements about the significance of different social and linguistic variables, tentative suggestions are made about the future of urban Galway English.
To obtain the corpus data, 35 speakers, 19 males and 16 females of different cohorts, raised in Galway City and living there in 2007 were interviewed. Judgment sampling with partly ethnographic aspects was the method of choice in order to obtain a rather balanced sample in terms of age, gender and socio-economic background. The data for this corpus have been collected, transcribed and analysed by the author. In total, the corpus consists of 315,654 words. 134,950 words were uttered by female speakers, the males contributed 180,704 words. For some features, subsets of the corpus were used. The following questions could be answered by analysing data from the Corpus of Spoken Galway English: Are there any tendencies to be detected in the development of Irish English? Which traditional Irish English features are still found in Galway English? Do any features investigated qualify for identity markers according to the data analysis?
Selected features of Galway English are analysed in detail, such as schwa epenthesis and the raising of low velar vowels in the field of phonology. In the domain of morpho-syntax and syntax, singular concord with existential THERE is scrutinized, and use of the AFTER-perfect is discussed with a brief look at other perfect markers in Irish English. An overview of further prominent phonological and morpho-syntactic features of Irish English is given towards the end of the dissertation, illustrated by examples from the Corpus of Spoken Galway English.