Language Interference in the English Used in Ireland

Abstract

Interference between two languages is quite frequent in language contact situations. Ireland has been a territory in which different linguistic substrata have coexisted and influenced each other throughout all her history. In the Late Modern English period, as it is nowadays, two languages were spoken in the island, Irish and English. This circumstance caused a linguistic interference in the spoken and written use of English in Ireland. The passive voice will be the grammatical vehicle used in this study to see any possible interference between both Irish and English. Therefore, this circumstance will be analysed using a corpus of texts written by authors of each territory during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These texts belong to two scientific disciplines, Mathematics and History, Which, presumably, will provide us with a broad view of the linguistic phenomenon under analysis. Aspects such as the most frequent type of verbs used in the passive voice, the presence of auxiliaries or modals, or the by-phrase agent will be considered. All these grammatical features will be explored according to the variables of discipline and geographical provenance of writers in order to reach an accurate conclusion about linguistic interference.