Urban English in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines English as spoken in three main urban centres of Northern Ireland—Belfast, Derry, and Coleraine. The description and analysis of Belfast English begins with the nineteenth-century commentaries on vocabulary in the city, before moving forward to the social network studies carried out by James and Lesley Milroy in the 1970s and early 1980s. The insights of these seminal studies are discussed, including what they tell us about English in Northern Ireland as a whole. English in Derry contrasts with Belfast in a number of ways, not least in how it reacts to influence from the larger city and how some small but not insignificant differences in language use align along ethnic lines, correlating with Catholic or Protestant usage. English in Coleraine is also considered as an urban centre in which key linguistic variables, like (t), vary in their gender-specific realizations.