ИСТИНА

Being the largest city in Ireland and a melting pot of different people, Dublin has developed its own variety of English which, albeit non-homogeneous, is well-recognised and identified both by Dubliners themselves and the rest of Irish people. However, English is not the only language spoken in the city as there seems to be a growing group of Irish-speaking Dubliners who, having learnt it in schools and universities, became fluent enough to use the language and even teach it to their children. This variety of Irish is often contrasted to the traditional dialects of Gaeltacht speakers and is considered to be an instance of insufficient language competence, the speakers’ pronunciation being heavily influenced by their first language. Even though this attitude is still prevalent in the society, from a scientific point of view Dublin Irish deserves to be treated as a variety in its own right. In order to study Dublin Irish pronunciation the author conducted a field study in November last year during which thirty-six bilinguals were interviewed. All informants had English as their first language yet were also fluent in Irish, i.e. able to keep up the conversation and produce monologues on common subjects without resorting to English. The interviews, being primarily designed to collect phonetic data, provided interesting sociolinguistic information as well. In this talk I would like to put phonetics aside and focus on Dubliners’ attitude towards both languages and the challenges they experienced when trying to keep their Irish alive.