Is There Hiberno-English on Them? Hiberno-English in Modern Irish Literature: The Use of Dialect in Joyce, O’Brien, Shaw and Friel by Gisela Zingg

Reviewed by: Is There Hiberno-English on Them? Hiberno-English in Modern Irish Literature: The Use of Dialect in Joyce, O’Brien, Shaw and Friel by Gisela Zingg Cóilín Owens (bio) Is There Hiberno-English on Them? Hiberno-English in Modern Irish Literature: The Use of Dialect in Joyce, O’Brien, Shaw and Friel, by Gisela Zingg. Bern: Peter Lang, 2013. 322pp. $98.95 paper. The Hiberno-English dialect descends principally from the engagement of the language of British monarchs with the spoken Gaelic of their Irish subjects. Some fossilized Elizabethan usages and inflections attest to the long courtship that preceded the formal nineteenth-century betrothal. That other suitors—Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman—had pressed previous suits can be discerned in a few additional slim detriti. The linguistic traces of the long succession of colonial settlers in Ireland are corroborated by genealogical and topographic records: the Viking Doyle and Limerick, the Anglo-Norman Joyce and Beauparc. The lexicon, grammar, and phonetic features of Hiberno-English exhibit this descent in necessarily more recherché forms and have been the subjects of considerable recent professional work.1 The Irish language has been well served by a comprehensive dictionary, now available electronically.2 By contrast with the Canadian, Indian, and Northern Irish dialects of English, Hiberno-English still lacks a comparable standard reference work. Several of the lexicographers cited in endnote 1 have produced estimable solo efforts, but each of them is based on a limited premise—that Hiberno-English words derive from Irish Gaelic, selective regions, or slang. The student and scholar of Irish writing in English would benefit from a comprehensive record produced by the collaborative effort of competent contributors working systematically through written records and living oral resources. Such a reference work (preferably web-based and amenable to addition and emendation) would eliminate much repetition and error. It would obviate the impulse to yet again serve up so much of what is familiar but available in these disparate dictionaries. An authoritative and comprehensive dictionary would facilitate an annotated edition of Flann O’Brien’s newspaper columns, help emend Don Gifford’s annotations through Ulysses,3 and obviate most of the corpora in the work under review here. This book is both an introduction to the linguistic dimension of Irish studies and an original effort to combine it with literary analysis. The study is confined to selected works of the four Irish writers indicated in the title: respectively, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Flann O’Brien’s The Best of Myles and The Poor Mouth, George Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, and Brian Friel’s Translations.4 In these respects, Gisela Zingg’s study is a worthy, if overly, ambitious project. It is undertaken with admirable zest and application; one-third [End Page 538] of its three hundred pages provides a detailed corpus of lexical items, morphological forms, and phonetic instances derived from a perusal of each text. For readers of this journal, the most useful contributions are the section on the syntactic and morphological features of Hiberno-English (46–64) and the listings from Ulysses in the appended corpus (215–44). Of similar value is the assemblage of dialectal features of Flann O’Brien’s humorous newspaper columns published in The Best of Myles (245–76). Exemplifications of Hiberno-English’s various prepositional and idiomatic usages help clarify the social, political, and cultural status and aspirations of the users. The thesis of this book holds that the manner in which each of the four writers handles the Hiberno-English dialect reveals his position on the question of national identity. The author is, of course, on safe and familiar ground in identifying their central concerns and differences: Joyce’s Continentalist dissent from the literary revival; O’Brien’s insider’s quarrel with the management of the language revival; Shaw’s attack on the stage Irishman and his counterparts; and Friel’s ambivalence about the processes of cultural and linguistic imperialism. The author does well in distinguishing between versions of Hiberno-English found in these authors but is less successful in developing the literary and cultural implications. She tends to regard usages as intentional—this argument is questionable, at...

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