Epenthesis in Contact Irish English Spoken in the Connemara Gaeltacht
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35903/teanga.v13i.10858Keywords:
Contact Irish English, sociophonetics, Connemara Gaeltacht, epenthesis, prosodic contoursAbstract
Varieties of ‘Contact Irish English’ (CIE), i.e. English spoken by native Irish speakers, are often thought to display significant phonological influence from Irish (Hickey, 1986, 2007; Ó hÚrdail, 1997). However, modern systematic acoustic descriptions of CIE speech data are scarce, relative to other Irish English (IrE) varieties. This study investigates a phonological phenomenon often attributed to an Irish influence, that of epenthesis in words with liquid+sonorant coda clusters (LSCCs) e.g., in film [ˈfɪləm], in CIE spoken in the Connemara Gaeltacht, an Irish speaking region in the west of Ireland. We examine (i) the extent of LSCC epenthesis and effects of sociolinguistic factors and (ii) whether prosodic contours for epenthesized words are realized similarly to other disyllabic words in Connemara English. 314 LSCC token from sentences produced by 12 L1-Irish bilinguals and 12 English monolinguals were acoustically analysed using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2023) and IViE prosodic annotation (Grabe et al., 1998). Statistical findings indicate significantly higher epenthesis rates among bilinguals, with age, Language Profile Score (LPS) and cluster type affecting variation. Prosodically, epenthetic tokens predominantly portray low target tones L*_% (54%), particularly among women, irrespective of age. These results do not align with previous findings for prosodic realization of disyllabic words in Connemara English (Théveniaut & Herment, 2023). By providing empirical evidence, this study enhances our understanding of CIE phonology as well as the role of language contact in shaping phonetic and prosodic variation in bilingual communities.
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