Exploring Two Northern Irish Accents

A little foray into two Northern Irish accents, because I thought it would be interesting to talk through the research process - I'm glad to have finally looked at Northern Irish accents a little bit, and I hope I have more excuses to do so in future!
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[@simonroper9218]

I'm very sorry for not acknowledging the Derry/Londonderry terminology disagreement. Hopefully my disclaimer at the start made it clear that I was not trying to get across any political message with this video, and my failure to mention this was a result of absent-mindedness and not malice.

[@diabl2master]

You're too good Simon ❤

[@EVO6-]

Derry sits grand with me Simon You've already got Jerry Adams in the video so the kinds of people that get upset over the use of Derry weren't going to be happy regardless

[@GraemeMarkNI]

@@EVO6- 😂

[@baerlauchstal]

It's complicated, right? I mean, it's the Apprentice Boys of Derry, for example, meaning surely that even people who call it Londonderry *sometimes* call it Derry. (I had a chat recently that touched on this with a couple of Undertones, if that's not too name-droppy.) Language is so loaded in NI that it's hard for anyone from anywhere else to be entirely sure-footed around it. In particular, it's easy to appear to be taking sides without meaning to; I'm sure I've done that in the past. I would hope we all get cut a bit of slack!

[@user-on2ys9jr6t]

No matter what you say about politics/history half of Northern Ireland will be raging at you. Our region is a minefield of symbols and shibboleths largely unknown to outsiders. I see at 1:15 you attempted to be neutral with a diplomatic disclaimer, but heads up, that reads as you support northern Ireland being in the UK and oppose Irish unification. Obviously not your intention but that's how that sounds. The Irish half of Northern Ireland call Derry, Derry. And the british half call it Londonderry. On the news they call it Derry/Londonderry and this has led to the city being called stroke city as a joke. Fair play to you for trying and don't worry about offending people here. You are literally damned if you do and damned if you don't with us.

[@DaveOBrien]

As someone who grew up in Ireland when you could only hear Gerry Adams dubbed by a voice actor, hearing him speak in sync with the video is like watching a kung-fu movie in the original Chinese: That's not what I remember him sounding like!

[@dixgun]

👍

[@shane7647]

That is definitely the authentic Gerry Adams voice in that video too.

[@t_ylr]

Idk why but I just love the way northern Irish ppl pronounce the "ow":dipthong in words like now, flour, hour, etc. It's a little different but it makes me think of the French word oeil. It sparks joy lol

[@GraemeMarkNI]

To me flour is "flarr" :D

[@FeedsNoSliesMusic]

I used to have a colleague from Belfast, and I used to ape the way he said "clouds" because it falls out the mouth so satisfyingly. Something like: /kɫɔʉdz/

[@t_ylr]

@@GraemeMarkNI After doing some research I'm guessing you have more a Belfast accent and i was thinking of a Derry accent. Is that right?

[@AttilatheNun-xv6kc]

@t_ylr: When they leave the hice and they're ite and abite, ire after ire...

[@FinnMobber]

If you do any more Northern Irish stuff in future I'd love to see a video of your level of detail about the Ulster Scots language/dialect

[@westernhemlock]

Seconding this!

[@diabl2master]

Agree

[@mattparker9726]

OOOH yeah tracing that back would be cool.

[@lovingdevotions]

"Ulster Scots" is a myth invented by the Brits

[@user-on2ys9jr6t]

Literally everyone in NI will say at least some Ulster Scots words every day.

[@ocomaing]

Derry is a small city but fifteen minutes out he road, you have very different accents, which we might term as 'country.' An incredibile amount of variety for such a small island country.

[@davidjames3787]

That difference applies in many parts of England too. I live in Carlisle. If I were to visit a farm four miles down the road the accent I'd hear would be markedly different. As part of my job I once visited an elderly farmer some seven miles away. I had to concentrate to understand the lady.

[@antorseax9492]

I'd call it 'culchie', personally.

[@ocomaing]

@@antorseax9492 Cul tire in Irish means the back country

[@screachogreilige1553]

@@antorseax9492 alright, townie

[@cob141]

It's always astounding to me the amount of linguistic diversity throughout Ireland and Britain. Here in Australia the accents are virtually homogeneous across the country, I would have expected the isolated colonies to have diverged more in the way they spoke.

[@shane7647]

As someone from Derry, I have been waiting on you to do a Northern Irish video for ages. You did a fantastic job here. Could look at a North Coast of Northern Ireland accent next and on the other side, the Tyrone accent. Would also be fascinated what your views on Ulster Scots are. Is it a language or a dialect etc? Fantastic as always.

[@helenamcginty4920]

My grandad was from Achill Island in Co Mayo. It is just south of Donegal. The accent there is so soft. He spoke Gaelic as well as English. I think that , like Welsh , that lends a different music to their English.

[@fnansjy456]

Funcat they used to speak two dialects of irish spoken on the island one the Native connacht Irish and and the other ulster irish spoken by refugees and their decendant from ulster.

[@ocomaing]

From Derry here, we actually pronounce 'face' as 'fiss' and 'place' as pliss; McGee is just trying to make British people understand her

[@solidus784]

and car as cyar lol

[@charlesbukowski9836]

Can you tell if a person is Protestant with just accent? Even if they do not let on any information?

[@db7356]

@@charlesbukowski9836 Not from derry but from somewhere else in NI, and i’d say more often than catholics, protestants have accents closer to standard english (protestants have historically been more educated and richer) but it’s mostly unreliable as it comes down to the individual these days regardless of religion tbh

[@simonroper9218]

Thank you for this - it's something that I as a non-northern-Irish person wouldn't have picked up on! Next time I'll try to find more examples to make sure I've covered things properly (or just run my examples by more knowledgeable people).

[@nerdymcg2]

​​@@charlesbukowski9836 One way you call tell is how they pronounce the letter 'H'. Catholics tend to say pronounce it like 'Haytch' and protestants tend to say 'Ee-yitch'. Also, people who grew up Irish-speaking, or near Irish-speaking areas might speak Hiberno-English. For example, in Irish 'th' sounds like 'h'. So applying this to English, the word 'thanks' is said like 'hanks'.

[@IrishRover79]

As someone born and bred in Belfast, I can confirm you’re right about the ay sound in words like ‘cessation’ versus ‘day.’ This is one of the biggest differences with RP and most other English accents. The pronunciation depends completely on whether the sound is at the very end of the word (with no final consonant) or somewhere in the middle of the word.

[@GraemeMarkNI]

I’m from NI “so I am”. I hear huge variety in our accents that other people maybe don’t notice… in my accent from Ballymena there’s this weird divergence of the face vowel where a “snake” is a “sneck” (with a long “e”), but a “face” is a “fee-iss” similar to the accents you discussed. Seems to depend on whatever letter comes after it… a “tree-in” leaves from a “steshun” 🤷🏻‍♂️ Also "now" and "hour" have different vowels. I can spend an "arr" in a "parr sharr" if I'm especially dirty ;) As for accent continuums, I hear NI as being closer to Scottish than Republic of Ireland. The colonisers of Ulster were Scottish. P.S. Yes coot rhymes with put, and lost sometimes has to trap vowel, but I wouldn’t associate that with Derry; more with Belfast: careful “donie” burn “yoursell” the tea’s “hat.” But that’s a very broad accent I wouldn’t expect to hear from an author or politician.

[@Rick_Cleland]

Your Channel looks good, so it does. I just subscribed, so I did.

[@che_guevara67]

really enjoyed this..im from dublin and id love you to do one on the many different dublin accents lol...i also niticed the orange and green dots hehe..nice touch mo chara...

[@letusplay2296]

I think it makes a lot of sense to treat it as a dialect continuum, as someone from the west of the country the Donegal dialect sounds quite similar to the dialects of Derry and Belfast

[@sisi2484]

the coast of donegal accent is kinda different to say Letterkenny even

[@mullerreus145]

Only some, west Donegal and places west of letterkenny in general will have a much softer accent and almost sound deeper where the closer you get to Derry the harsher and more dense it gets. West donegal accents from my experience can be very close in orthodox “Kings English” pronunciation with a veneer over it. You’ll also find a lot of “Tis’” in vocabulary as a word in itself as if you were reading Shakespeare among other quite a lot of other old “proper” English vocabulary that I can’t list off the top of my head. Then on top of that the word order of the sentences will often be almost a literal copy of Irish (which itself has a unique dialect in Donegal).

[@animatechap5176]

​@@mullerreus145 my granny is from the very north of Donegal in Inishowen and she has the softest accent, its so different to the Derry accent

[@mullerreus145]

@@animatechap5176 On the west or east side? Usually the best of the land was given to planters and hence the harsher accent, around St. Johnstone can have a sort of mix in my experience as well, then again we're a big country so there's always a lot of little pockets of unique accents

[@animatechap5176]

@@mullerreus145 a little village called Ballyliffin, apparently her mother had an even softer accent, but the younger generations have harsher accents now too

[@ironagemaiden]

Excellent video, looking forward to the sequels!

[@adamread3540]

Northern Irish English speaker here, about 30 miles from Derry. My accent is pretty standard with not too many regional features, but I can say you were pretty much there with this. Just a few things from my (admittedly limited) experience: - The “north” and “force” vowels are different in more conservative dialects, but the difference is rather slight. The “north” vowel is slightly more open than the “force” vowel - Regarding “put” and “goose”, these have noticeably different qualities in my accent. The “goose” vowel is a high central rounded vowel as you have shown, whereas the “put” vowel more closely resembles a mid central rounded vowel, possibly even a schwa in rapid speech - Most settlers to Northern Ireland came from Northern England and Scotland, so it may perhaps be a bit more accurate to use them rather than London dialects. There were still plenty of southern English people who came though, and I admit I’m not too skilled in this aspect, but it may be something to consider Also, the very rural dialects of ulster are really something to behold, being pretty much unintelligible to a lot of first-time listeners to it. The palatalisation of velar stops is very present, “r” sounds are often tapped (or even, rather rarely, slightly trilled), and the vowel sounds are so different from the sort of standard “BBC” northern Irish accent, it’s quite incredible. There’s a comedian called Mark McCarney from around Omagh, not too far from Derry, and his accent is very representative of this very rural accent if you want to check it out. Warning though, he’s rather vulgar! Overall, very good job on describing the accent; it’s rather rare to see someone analyse the dialect in so much detail, and very welcome at that!

[@drts6955]

Was hitching in Donegal and was first time I met other Irish people I simply couldn't understand. Impressive

[@GrandmasterFerg]

Just came across your channel, what a great body of work! I hope you delve into the diverse accents of the rest of Ireland

[@corriecrawford2917]

My undergrad thesis was the vowels of Ulster English. I measured the formant frequencies of 5 vowels. The vowels of Northern Irish English are fascinating!

[@stevetravis9480]

Saying "how now brown cow" is the biggest challenge to English trying to replicate pronunciation.

[@onebeingeverybody7772]

I am so happy I came across your channel. many years ago I uploaded the only two videos I've put up here and for whatever reason I named one of them. blue collar australian accent. I'm sure you could shed light on why we can hardly speak haha

[@DashDrones]

Amazing work, I live between Dublin and Belfast and found this intriguing.

[@authormichellefranklin]

Ah, Hiberno-English, my beloved

[@barrylyons9296]

There is a good reason that's it a continuum :) I love your videos. I'm fascinated by accents.

[@Onward_and_Rword]

YEESSS love to see u doing a bit of Irish stuff

[@Bildgesmythe]

Thanks again for your channel.

[@Ethan54136]

So no nine hour version then? Jokes. Another great vid, cheers from Wisconsin!

[@JohnTraceyMusic]

Just discovered your channel by chance, Simon, and glad I did! I'm from Belfast and speak Irish and English. My KZbin presence is mainly music (and you can hear my accent in several of my videos), but my academic background is Irish dialectology. Really enjoyed this phonetic exploration, you're on the money with the vast majority of your conclusions. I was especially impressed to hear you mention Hickey, and the palatalisation of velar consonants as having come from the Irish language! Maith thú féin. That's a bit of a social marker in Belfast nowadays actually - conservative Belfast English doesn't feature this particular palatalisation for whatever reason (as you correctly mentioned about Adams' English), so if a speaker does have it, it's a telltale sign that they're from outside of Belfast/have a more rural background. Looking forward to more videos!

[@WilliamFord972]

Oh, man, then you should DEFINITELY watch his video on speaking with an Anglo-Saxon.

[@elanaberry2671]

Hi Simon, I really enjoyed listening to this and showing my Irish descent but English born and bred husband. My son, who has a speech and language found your video on London accents from the 16th to 21st century entertaining and he chuckled at how he pronounces some words like they do in 1706. Would you ever consider doing the evolution of the Aussie accent? I’d love to know which point in time it had changed the the accent we know today. Probably would be a very short video, starting from the English accent, as the country isn’t very old!

[@VulcanTrekkie45]

I'd love to see your take on American accents after this. Especially well known regional accents to show they aren't in fact dying but rather changing.

[@nicosmind3]

Ive been subscribed to this channel for ages, so how am i only spotting this video now???

[@tedrussell3679]

American recently returned from NI. This is fascinating - keep it up!

[@JackHeywood]

Great video! - Rather than distingushing "Northern Irish" accents from "Republic of Ireland" accents, I think it would make more sense to consider Ulster as opposed to the other three provinces of Ireland, since that is the linguistic community in which these accents developed. It would also be interesting to learn more about how protestant accents have been influenced by Scottish accents in north-east Ulster in particular. I've heard it said that Belfasters can tell apart Catholic from Protestant by accent alone, even within the same city. I mention this only for having been rebuked in the past for incorrectly indentifying someone from Donegal as having a 'Northern Irish' accent!

[@corriecrawford2917]

That's what I did 25 years ago... There's research on the vowels of Ulster English, but not much!

[@user-on2ys9jr6t]

Yeah northern ireland is a political abstraction with no bearing on language

[@DaveHuxtableLanguages]

I was about to make a similar comment: the border hasn’t been there long enough and is too porous to have a linguistic impact.

[@ekmad]

It's the better distinction. My Grandfather was a proud Ulsterman despite being born in Co. Cavan. Would never call it "Northern Ireland", always Ulster.

[@brianboru7684]

Yes, Scots Presbyterians settled in Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan too. Ulster dialects of the Irish language were spoken all the nine counties, also in Louth now in Leinster, Oriel dialect of Irish Gaelic closer to East Ulster than Connacht.

[@db7356]

(Source: I’ve been self studying linguistics for 5 years and I’m a speaker of northern irish english from the edge of greater Belfast) I’d say that my put vowel is generally [ʏ] and that my vowel for goose is generally [ʉ], however I’d say that these changes in the following seemingly random conditions; The goose set can be pronounced the same as the put set when the WORD is unstressed in a sentence, like a quick command such as “Look at the moon” /lʏk ɐɾə mʏn/. But then I say the name Luke as /lʉk/ and “no, it’s the *moon*” (it’s not the sun) would have /mʉn/. Also, I don’t have the trap-bath type like split so palm-trap-bath all have the same vowel of [a] but I do have a cot-caught merger (which the vast majority of speakers under 40 have) though the exact quality varies on the speaker imo As for the other vowels my accent is a lot more “modern” (closer to a more “standard” english but innovative in different ways eg a real-reel-rail merger), but I’m not familiar enough with transcription to analyse it fully (and I also don’t fully have the northern irish intonation which may affect things idk) I also think the scottish vowel length system might be coming into play, especially considering the ulster plantation where a lot of scottish ( and english ) planters went to ulster in the 1600s but I’m unsure as I’m not that familiar with it.

[@macroverbumsciolist]

Hello from Belfast! I'm not super linguistically knowledgeable, but found it interesting that you happened to pick one of the less nasal Belfast accents; Derry accents like Lisa's are quite nasal and often this is true of Belfast too, but Adams is from the West of the city, where it's not rare to find a voice speaking more "from the throat" so to speak, which really affects his idiolect. Though even for him I doubt "lost" and "last" would rhyme ;) Definitely found the dipthong chat very interesting as that's for me the most prominent feature of local accents. If you were to return to this topic I'd be interested if you could find someone from Tyrone/Fermanagh to study - accents from these more rural counties of NI tend to have some different features despite being relatively near by. Thanks for the video!

[@LeavinMyTown]

Beautiful! As someone with immediate Northern Irish family it's great to hear you discuss the range of dialects. One thing that really fascinates me is that, certainly within Belfast to my knowledge, there are pronounciation differences between Nationalist and Loyalist communities even within a similar geographic area (though I am not enough of a linguist to be able to describe these differences beyond the 'haitch/'aitch' distinction) On a less sectarian note, I'm really intrigued by any substrate influences on HIberno-English from the Irish language. Beyond expressions and sentence constructions ('so it's yerself' and so on), I have noticed for instance heavy palatalisation on voiceless velar plosives in a much wider range of circumstances than in my dialects ('cat' will sound like 'kyat' for instance). I'm curious to see if anyone else could shed some light on it. You can hear it around 22:09 when Lisa McGee says "characters"

[@anchuisneoir3973]

01:16 "I don't mean to imply, OF COURSE, .....that Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are IN ANY WAY the same country... At least the lad said Derry,

[@Sean-sn9ld]

"An Chuisneoir" savage 😂

[@saoirsedeltufo7436]

Worth noting that whilst the British colonised Ireland and there was some noble settlement, the plantations (essentially ethnic cleansing in the north) was broadly using lowland Scots and some northern English people as settlers, so these accents are more likely to have an impact on accents in the north than, say, London Also I'd recommend you check out some Donegal accents - some are pretty close to Derry, because it's not the artificial border that changes the accents!

[@SandalwoodBros]

I like these UK/Ireland accent and dialect videos. The other day I was listening to a video about Norfolk dialect and thought to myself that it sounded a little like Olivia Colman... and sure enough, when I looked her up, she is from Norwich. Would also love if you covered Yorkshire dialect some day as well!

[@katiemarshall8033]

Oh it’s interesting to look at this academically! Previously my best way of describing my own accent was ‘the vowels are shortened into almost oblivion’

[@taricaya201]

Very interesting video. Being from Northern Ireland it's interesting to hear the language being broken down and analysed like this. I'm only at around 17 minutes at the moment where you make the comparison with 'house' and 'haus' in German. It's interesting to hear you mention this, but I think a comparison with the Dutch 'huis' is worth looking at too. I spent a while dabbling in Dutch last year and was really surprised to notice the similarities in pronunciation with NI English

[@skeptic781]

Thanks for making this. Proud to be half Northern Irish

[@vivebabeuf1917]

From the perspective of someone whos gone down the rabbit hole in researching 17-18th century colonial English and the sound changes that took place in US English it's interesting to see some evidence of a possible version of the LOT-BATH-PALM merger present as you get the FATHER-BOTHER merger (LOT-PALM) in the US. BATH words taking the TRAP vowel in most accents, though you get a centering dipthong in east coast cities philly/nyc etc. Also I think partially palatalized k,g was a feature of old southern US accents too.

[@PeterPeadar]

Good content! Would it make more sense to discuss Hiberno-English by the island's regions or provinces? Leinster, Ulster, Munster and Connaught ? Rather than by the island's political division. That would parallel the Irish language dialects, which follow, roughly, those provinces.

[@last_night_in_my_garden]

Good idea PP O'Connor - that might be a useful way to start untangling the skein. If Simon hasn't been put off by the enormity of that task...!

[@Urlocallordandsavior]

Will you cover the Newfoundland/Tidewater accents at some point? Maybe even Appalachian English? I've also got a playlist of early American dialects between 1807 and 1932, feel free to get inspiration from it.

[@dayalasingh5853]

This was a really interesting video, English socio Linguistics is fascinating and I actually recently got an RA job look at the features of the English of the Punjabi community in my city amongst native English speakers. We currently have some interesting theories like monophthongizing the /eɪ/ and /oʊ/, th stopping to dental stops (something in common with Irish English) and less yod dropping, something that is on the rise in Canada. It's interesting to see the kinds of substrate features that Irish has happening in real time.

[@faithlesshound5621]

Modern England provides a lot of opportunities for that sort of participant observation of language change in action: there are large communities of Punjabi, Mirpuri, Sylheti, Gujarati and Cantonese speakers, and there used to be lots of Anglo-Romani, Yiddish, Cypriot Greek and Italian speakers. Their children's speech would also be worthy of study. One problem for a researcher is that most people can switch code, so an educated person from outside their community might well be treated to their "Sunday Speech" and not their everyday talk.

[@dayalasingh5853]

@@faithlesshound5621 that's actually why we're getting research assistants from the respective communities (like me)

[@pat7785]

Simon, I'm wondering if you might make a video about Canadian accents in the future. It's something that I'm very interested in and I'm trying hard to understand it's differences from American English.

[@jony4real]

I'm from Alberta, and grew up thinking that Canadian English was the same as American English. Then I decided to get into English dialects, and, oh my god, there are so many differences! The trap vowel is centralized ... everybody knows about the raised price vowel ... I have a monophthongal goat vowel, but I only use it when I'm talking to my family ... man, linguistics is awesome, I love it.

[@WilliamFord972]

Most of the time, you won’t hear a difference between northern US accents and Canadian (at least southern?) accents _except_ in words like “about” (US: a-baut; CAN: a-boot) or “sorry” (US: sah-ree; CAN: sor-ee).

[@ocomaing]

square- skwerr, nurse- nurse!

[@hecklepig]

I have often wondered if the introduction of Scottish immigration to subdue Irish catholic rebellion by the English, especially into northern Ireland, had an affect upon the Irish accent in the north.

[@Allan_son]

One of the major accents in NI is called Ulster Scots, Sometimes it is called Ullans, which i suspect means Ulster Lowlands. Essentially it is a local variation of Scots.

[@saoirsedeltufo7436]

@@Allan_son It's a language (well, a dialect of Scots), not an accent

[@alastairward2774]

That's a heck of a tangle to try and get politics into things.

[@aduantas]

even inside these places there's significant class variation, and some ethnic differences

[@DynamixWarePro]

There is a big difference between some accents in Northern Ireland. North east Antrim and the north east of County Down accents and dialects were heavily influenced by Scottish settlers in the 1600s onward. This lead to Ulster Scots dialect becoming common and the accents in parts of north east Antrim being different than in other parts of Northern Ireland and you can still hear it in the dialects and see it in place names. I live in County Down and my grandads family on my mums side spoke Ulster Scots as did his ancestors. I learned it from them and I have books written about and by some of my ancestors and relatives of my grandad which were written in Ulster Scots. I read that at one point in the past, in the Ards Peninsula, especially Donaghadee area, there wasn't much difference between peoples accents there and those of the west coast of Scotland, especially Ayrshire and at the time Robert Burns came to Donaghadee, people were able to understand him and talk to him. Some of my ancestors originally came from Galloway and Ayrshire in the 1600s to Ulster.

[@user-uk7zr4xr7g]

26:34 this explanation of the shift makes sense!

[@elkyop6809]

The different realizations of the PRICE vowel are similar to those of my own dialect and throughout Canada. I don't doubt that this could be a coincidence but it's neat to see parallel developments

[@swagmund_freud6669]

I'm from Alberta in Canada, and I've noticed a lot of accent features here are reminiscent of those in Ireland, including supposedly "Canadian" raising, which of course happens sometimes in Ireland, the way coda /r/ affects certain vowels (for example "our" being pronounced as /ar/), and the deletion of voiced fricatives like /v/ and /ð/, such as "over" becoming "o'er', "weather" becoming "wea'er", etc. I've heard Irish people do all three in videos, Irish music, and movies, especially older generations or in older videos, which is interesting since I associate a lot of these changes with younger people here in Canada.

[@Korva_Avia]

Derry is my family's hometown ❤

[@iainmagill4350]

You should look at an East Antrim accent, it's a fairly distinct accent with a lot of Scots influence

[@WreckItRolfe]

I have made a legetemete and peaceful request for cheddar cheese and pineapple on a steck!

[@fuckdefed]

Harry Enfield or Paul Whitehouse in one of their comedy programmes IIRC?

[@saram5659]

I loved Derry Girls and their accent, but Lisa McGee left Derry after highschool I believe and even lived in London for quite some time, so I'm not surprised that her accent sounds much more like Londen / tv English than the those of the characters in the show. I definitely needed subtitles to understand that, while she sounds very clear here. (I'm not a native English speaker, so for me there is no neutral accent in English, I just here it's different from each other.)

[@saram5659]

I liked the documentary "Young Plato" (clips on youtube), set in Belfast, and how they pronounce 'Line' and 'Fine' almost like we do in Dutch! (We spell it Lijn and Fijn, but same meaning.) The i is pronounced like the Italian "Lei" (she). I don't know other languages myself with this vowel.

[@user-uk7zr4xr7g]

24:36 your pronunciation of 'last' and 'lost' sounds nearly identical to me, differentiating only in vowel length with the 'last' being longer

[@JK-pi6ji]

Hi Simon, i've been recently watching derry girls, and prior to that some anime.. and what struck me was just how humorless all the japanese or korean films and animes i've seen have been. For us czechs humor is a part of life, and no joke is too dark and you can pretty much say what you like.. i mean, it can't hurt to be able to laugh at oneself.. when i've visited england as a school trip, this cultural aspect have been very similar, the lady at whose home we stayed, would curse at traffic without much hindrance or laugh with us :)) i wonder what makes british people this way? :) and vice versa, why are some nations so devoid of humor? thanks

[@mesechabe]

Simon, how do these videos relate to your academic work? In other words do they feed into written assignments, such as your dissertation, or lecture notes for an undergraduate class that you are teaching? do you receive academic credit for them? Whatever the case you work- or play - very hard.

[@AClockWorkKelly1]

I would truly love to see you cover more about ireland. And i wonder if your linguistic interests would be piqued by Gaeilge and its influence on hiberno English

[@MCKevin289]

Interesting thing about Irish English is that it many times preserves aspects of the Irish language.

[@mullerreus145]

The word order flows like wine in full dialogue, it’s why reading Joyce and Co. Is so satisfying because we speak (well us rural Ulster/Connaught/Munster lot) in almost a sing-song tone, I’d almost go as far as call it comparable to something like dactylic hexameter.

[@canturgan]

Stephen Rea used to voice Gerry Adams during the ban. He is from Belfast.

[@paulthomas8262]

The word "situation" is a good example of how stress works, vowels combine and consonants work at least in Derry, Donegal and Tyrone. It is not really like sit-u-a-chun, more merged like sitchayshan or si'chayshan

[@paulthomas8262]

The might stress SI or SIT or not depending on speed but it is continuous.

[@last_night_in_my_garden]

Good luck to you, Simon! Every county in Ireland has its own accent, and different accents between the towns and countryside. And then in the Republic there is a common protestant (specifically Church of Ireland) accent, but upper class Catholics often talk in that way too. My father, an old fashioned prod, would call a gas mask a "garse massk". A friend who was born in Cork city in the 1950s and lived there all his life, said that until the late 1980s he could tell by the accent which STREET in the city someone came from. As a warning I should add that to people in the Republic, for an English person to imitate their (or any Irish person's) accent to their face even in (ignorant or innocent) fun is considered a real insult. I don't know if this is also true of the six counties.

[@troobninge6064]

I kind of want to see this done for a very advanced accent (like maybe Atlanta, but idk if it would be much resources to check with after)

[@diabl2master]

Curious about the [j] with a tail in IPA - does it capture the somewhat rounding of the lips in that sound? (In your IPA transcription of a common Northern Irish pronunciation of the "cow" vowel)

[@bacicinvatteneaca]

"I don't believe in triphthongs" - 🗿

[@maguire2themoon]

interesting that you mentioned the different meaning depending on how a word is pronounced - in high school, my friends and I sort of invented a difference in meaning depending on how we pronounced "smoke" - smoke (oʊ) meant smoking cigarettes, whereas smoke (ioʊ) meant we were smoking the green stuff. (I'm not trained at all in the IPA alphabet, but that's the best approximation I can find)

[@Armadeus]

if you want another good derry accent, look no further than brooke scullion who represented ireland last year at eurovision. it's brilliant

[@longdogman]

could you make a video on the difference between AAVE dialects? it's really hard to find stuff about it online. the only one i can tell apart is memphis aave because it pronounces the cluster /ju:/ with some kind of [ɹ] like sound, and merges NURSE with SQUARE and sometimes a three way merger of NURSE, SQUARE, and NEAR pronounced ɚ.

[@sisi2484]

There is big differences in accents within the six northern counties ... even betwixt the socalled ulster scots and the north irish nationalist/catholic communitys accents..also between towns and counties

[@LeavinMyTown]

Even within the one city, and I'm pretty sure there are differences in accent between communities in the same area (ie: Different communities on either side of Shankill Road will have subtly different accents, though my phonological skills aren't good enough to describe the difference)

[@DunaFornVideo]

Please do the Republic of Ireland too if you can!

[@TheWiseSalmon]

I'm from Belfast and I definitely do not have the trap/bath split. The vowels in trap, bath, father and palm are all [a ~ æ]. I don't think my accent even has the [ɑ] vowel (except for before r like in the word "car"). I think this would be fairly typical for middle class accents from Belfast and all across Northern Ireland, but things can get a bit more complicated with working class Belfast accents.

[@wintersnowowen2254]

This is an interesting video. As a Northern Irish person I think it would’ve been good for you to cover a wider range of accents. We do have a lot of variety in accents in Northern Ireland, aside from the two you have focused on: 1. Mid Ulster - this is the standard Northern Irish accent. It doesn’t have that harsh nasally, aggressive sound. 2. Southern Northern Ireland - their accent is more of a southern & northern hybrid waning between the two regions as the person with the accent talks. 3. Ulster Scots - this is a broader version of the mid Ulster accent with a strong Scottish influence. A lot of older people have this accent, some would find it hard to interpret. Re political comments, some say that there is no such thing as a Northern Ireland accent. As a Northern Irish person I have found that most ROI accents are notably different to those of the NI, aside from Donegal. A lot of slang and words that are used in the south, just don’t apply here, as an example, the word “jacks” is used to describe a bathroom, I have never heard that used here. I wouldn’t group the southern Ulster counties in with our accent. I think it would be great if those in Great Britain and further a field wouldn’t stereotype us as having that aggressive angry sounding accent. Most of us don’t sound like that in any way.

[@Sean-sn9ld]

Most of this went over my head , but very interesting nonetheless

[@j.s.c.4355]

Lisa McGee almost sounds American with a bit of northern Midwest diphthongs.

[@stevelknievel4183]

You may have been fumbling through this but it was very enjoyable nonetheless.

[@stiofanmacamhalghaidhau765]

looking forward to your 18-video series on the accents of dublin XD growing up in dublin suburbs, I could tell which suburb someone was from even though those suburbs might be 1-2 miles apart... and with growth of the city and changing demographics, the entire structure has shifted, with young female speakers leading the change (not uncommon) with a clear influence from the US... and even that is in the middle of an ongoing shift - its changed noticably in the last 10 years alone. you mention the age difference between Jerry and Lisa (there's a couple of decades between the clips to start with) but there's also clear gendered distinctions in several Irish accents as well (the Dublin example above, but another I've seen is also some aspects of younger female accent in and around Clonmel and periphery versus their male peers. as regards the jorray odoms clip you were using, it was public speaking, and being used to make strong points with a lot of emotional weight in them, and this I would guess helps shift or vary some of the pronunciations a little more obviously for emphasis. been waiting for you to do Irish accents for flippin years now so thanks for doing this. very interested to see what locations you actually choose for remaining samples. dublin, galway, cork and...? kerry? limerick? waterford? cavan? sligo?

[@faithlesshound5621]

You mention something which may reduce the value of recordings of trained public speakers (politicians, priests and actors) as evidence for ordinary people's speech, namely that they used to be taught how to make their voices heard in an auditorium without the use of amplification. That's something that we hear in most recordings of Adolf Hitler, who studied Bühnendeutsch (stage German) with an actor. He was taught to aspirate voiceless consonants heavily, voice those that were normally unvoiced, pronounce vowels that were normally elided, roll his "r"s and so on. Kraftwerk did this in "Roboter." Ordinary people who did not have such training used to be expected to at least attempt to speak RP when addressing their betters, and might do so when faced with a microphone. Most of us can "code switch" enough to achieve that if we want to.

[@stiofanmacamhalghaidhau765]

@@faithlesshound5621 yep it is a question worth pausing over. someone else on here commented that Lisa had subtly shifted her accent because she was conscious the audience would mainly be from outside NI. small details like that are going to be present in many 'I know I'm being recorded' and 'I know I'm performing' scenarios. I work as a trainer/ presenter. I know my voices and what they do, and deliberately shift them in response to, or to change, the 'vibe in the room'. however, one regular part of that is ensuring my enunciation is clear, which inevitably changes my accent by smoothing off some 'colour'... except when I'm presenting in person to a small group in my home city (Dublin) where my accent gets a little more pronounced, not less. saying that, audio clips from vox pop or similar sources these days are far more likely to be 'authentic' than they might have been 30 or 50 years ago simply because familiarity with speaking to a lens or a mic is vastly greater. It can go both ways, and at least thinking about that, when and why, may go a long way in avoiding taking someone's 'presentation voice' or 'mic voice' (or 'tik tok voice') as a fair reflection of their everyday accent. either way, hopefully Simon can use some 'ordinary folk' clips in subsequent videos, though I'm just enjoying the analysis of irish accents from a non-Irish perspective (usually attention goes to english and US examples)

[@marcasdebarun6879]

Can't add too much to what you've said as someone from the ROI with shamefully little knowledge of the details of Northern Ireland English, but the one thing that struck me was that Gerry Adams' STRUT vowel in particular sounds much closer to /ʊ/ to my ears, especially in 'one', 'another' and 'republicans'. It could be because I don't have the cut-put split and I otherwise have no other rounded back vowels to compare it to, but I'd be interested to see exactly what a spectrogram would say about the quality of the vowel. That said, I'm looking forward to the next videos on Irish English, hopefully you might take a look at Dublin accents, maybe compare a Northside speaker vs Southside, as that's probably the starkest difference in accents in the smallest area (Dublin city) in the whole country.

[@bacicinvatteneaca]

I've noticed that some Australian accents sound surprisingly close to Northern Irish. I wonder if there's a direct connection or it's just "convergent evolution" on some surface level features

[@Tomster197]

Would love to see you do a video on Scots if you're interested! Might be worth reaching out to Dr Michael Dempster

[@Matt-ve4ue]

Very interesting video, even in Belfast alone there are tons of accents, there is even a north, east, south and west belfast accent. There is also a posh accent that pronounces vowels (vao-els) the same as Southern English- thats always the sign of a middle to upper class person. A lot of the rugby grammar schools/tv presenters speak like this. Jamie Dornan has a typical well spoken south belfast grammar school accent. Carl Frampton has a typical inner city North Belfast/East Belfast accent but this has become less strong over the years. Then theres this new sort of mumble accent which has been in existence since the 2000s mostly from the west and the north - totally different from gerry adams who has a well spoken, articulate, educated west belfast accent

[@wintersnowowen2254]

As a non Belfast NI I find Gerry Adams’ accent to be aggressive.

[@midtskogen]

Interesting. English is not my native language (I spent a few months in Dublin in the mid 1990's though), but I find the Belfast accent easy to identify based on the diphthongs and intonation. The Derry (a politically sensitive name...) accent in this video I wouldn't have guessed to be from Northern Ireland but rather regard as pretty generic eastern Ireland accent. If I were to guess Irish accents, I think I would bin them into Belfast, generic Irish/Dublin/east, Cork, and for anything different I couldn't recognise I would simply guess Galway, but there surely must be many varieties. Looking forward to see what the rest of your 6 points will be.

[@quain5063]

Yea same with a lot of people here - Ulster English would save you the trouble of getting into the NI issue. Good video and nice transcriptions nonetheless!

[@swagmund_freud6669]

I'm Canadian and seem to share several features with Irish accents. The merger of the /ɪ/ vowel with the /ə/ vowel, though it is not exactly the quality of northern Irish speakers, more similar to the /ɪ/ vowel than the /ə/ vowel, is present. So I'd say "Br*i*tish" and "governm*e*nt" with the same vowel quality. Of course, the raising of the PRICE vowel as well, though I don't raise the HOUSE vowel really much at all, it's either [æu] or a monophthong [æː]. To me, Conservative Northern Irish people sound a lot like rural New Brunswickers or Nova Scotians.

[@fuckdefed]

I can’t say I’ve really noticed how the word ‘putt’ in a Northern Irish accent could sound like ‘pot’ in an English one but it still seems to me that most people from there would either say it approximately the same way that most people in England say ‘putt’ or in the same way that we would say ‘put’. They famously say ‘now’ as something like ‘nigh’ or ‘noy’ but let’s not forget that some of them say it like ‘no’ like many people in the Republic do. Also some people do say ‘caught’ like ‘cart’ (if said in a non-rhotic way) more like most of the rest of Ireland than most of England and Scotland. One last thing is that as well as ‘a’ sounding like ‘o’, ‘o’ can sometimes sound like ‘a’ to my (British) ears - “I have not” could become “Ay hahv nat”. An excellent analysis but you need more than two speakers to properly analyse all the variations!

[@8ace02]

When all you want is talking about linguistics…. and politics constantly get into your way…😆 Well done, however!! Having Adams shouting consonants & vowels rather angrily, and at the same time being scrutinised linguistically, does bear some comical moments, however.

[@alastairward2774]

It got a bit surreal, I was glad for the switch to a softer Derry accent.

[@marymcnutt8555]

Please note that those of us from Donegal live in the Republic of Ireland yet we speak with Northern Hiberno English

[@colbylejeune]

My native Louisiana English has contrastive nasal vowels, on the phonetic level at least-e.g. hit vs hint [hɪʔ] vs [hɪ~ʔ]

[@user-uk7zr4xr7g]

How do you decide which IPA symbol to use in your transcription? Doesn't it require researching formant values?

[@colinmorrison5119]

Revisiting this video months later - Hickey's description of the Fleece vowel as a monothong would be correct for most of NI, but not the two urban accents you highlighted.

[@ocomaing]

The nasalization is from the Irish language that Lisa's ancestors would have spoken and that we have retained in speech. Irish is very nasal

[@colinmorrison5119]

Put rhyming with Coot is region dependent - in Belfast, yes, in some rural regions, no. My father, a farmer from Fermanagh, would have rhymed Put with Tut, and Coot with Flute. Last doesn't rhyme with Lost for me, but might in a strong Belfast accent. I tried matching them to IPA but honestly couldn't tell. I'd be happy to provide high quality recordings, I have a voiceover setup.

[@daithimcbuan5235]

Ask a Scot and a Northern Irish person to say "How now, brown cow". Scot: "Hu nu, brun ku". NI: "Hoi noi, broin koi".

[@leifjohansson5508]

I say "Hur nu, brun ko"

[@stevetravis9480]

I'm not a native of Northern Ireland / 6 Counties, but to my ear there's a difference between unionist and nationalist Belfast accents.

[@DS-ib8ih]

i wonder if ulster english and scots have had any sort of influence on the traditional “southern” american accents given how a small but significant percentage of people there seem to identify as “scotch-irish” ie having some ulster scottish ancestry, especially in the appalachians

[@ocomaing]

bath/trap/last are the same vowel. lost is 'lawst'

[@Alexanderrayman]

Doing a phonetic analysis is sooo time consuming. Did you try to use a sound editor such as Audacity to slow the speach down? I found it quite useful to give myself the time to hear how a phoneme is being realised by a speaker.

[@simonroper9218]

I used Praat to do exactly that :) It makes it easy to select a particular time window and just play it over and over again, and it can also often work out the formant frequencies for you (although it's good to double check, as it sometimes struggles with vowels where the lowest formants are close together).

[@corablunt-zy2be]

Your a true inspiration and thank you for making them video's I'm a pagan from england

[@smorrow]

Wouldn't be long gettin frostbit

[@user-sp4if8vc8t]

Thanks for your phonology vdo, İ'm analyzing about human's sounds. 🙏🏻🙏🏻