October 19, 2022
Last month I spent a while cat-sitting for friends in the Burren in the west of Ireland. The Burren is one of my favourite places, a thinly populated area in County Clare renowned for its botanical, geological, and archaeological richness.
The late cartographer Tim Robinson described it as ‘a vast memorial to bygone cultures’; I would extend that beyond human cultures for reasons that will become clear. Robinson’s meticulous map of the Burren was among those I took exploring from my base in Corofin village.
This post is more of a photo/geography/archaeology post than a language one, but it does include notes on place names.
The name Corofin comes from Irish Cora Finne ‘white ford’, or ‘weir of the white (water)’ as translated by Deirdre and Laurence Flanagan in their book Irish Place Names. The same root may be familiar from the fair-haired Fionn Mac Cumhaill of Irish legend.

The white water is the River Fergus, which flows past Corofin and links the two lakes that bracket the village. Its riverbank enjoys constant activity from herons, swans, and other wildlife. This arched stone bridge across it was built in 1790 and is a protected structure:
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Ireland, naming, nature, personal, photography | Tagged: animals, archaeology, Burren, Cahercommaun, cats, Corofin, County Clare, dolmen, geography, geology, history, Ireland, Irish, Irish books, karst, Killinaboy, Kilnaboy, Leamaneh Castle, Lough Avalla, Mullaghmore, naming, nature, nature photography, Parknabinnia, photography, place names, portal tomb, Poulnabrone, prehistory, round tower, sheela-na-gig, travel, wedge tomb |
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Posted by Stan Carey
December 15, 2020
Last month I mentioned my new essay on Irish English dialect, ‘Wasn’t It Herself Told Me?’, commissioned for the winter 2020 edition of the literary magazine The Stinging Fly.
If you didn’t get a copy of the Stinging Fly and want to read more of this material, you can now do so at the Irish Times website, which has published an abridged version of the essay. (I did the abridging myself, but some of the italics got lost in transit.)
Because the new Stinging Fly is a Galway special, the essay looks in particular at the Galway dialect, though this does not differ hugely from Irish English more broadly. The excerpt below elaborates on that point, using geography as an analogy:
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dialect, Hiberno-English, Ireland, language, linguistics, personal, writing | Tagged: after perfect, dialect, Eilís Dillon, Galway, Galway 2020, geography, grammar, Hiberno-English, Ireland, Irish English, Irish Times, Irish writing, language, linguistics, personal, Stinging Fly, writing |
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Posted by Stan Carey
November 23, 2020
I have an essay on Irish English dialect in the latest Stinging Fly (winter 2020–21). The issue, just out, centres on Galway – the city, the county, the state of mind – to tie in with its status as European Capital of Culture this year.
The Stinging Fly is an Irish literary magazine on the go since 1997 and a book publisher since 2005. You can order its publications from the website or, depending on where you are, from your local bookshop.
My essay looks at Galway dialect, though its features are not that different (or different mainly in degree) from southern Irish English in general. The grammar, vocabulary, idiom, and phonology of Irish English are all considered from my vantage point on the Atlantic coast.
I also discuss dialect more broadly, because people new to language studies are often unsure just what it means – linguistically, politically, performatively.

cover art by Maeve Curtis; design by Catherine Gaffney
An excerpt:
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dialect, Hiberno-English, Ireland, language, linguistics, personal, writing | Tagged: dialect, Eilís Dillon, Galway, Galway 2020, geography, Hiberno-English, Ireland, Irish English, isogloss, language, linguistics, personal, pronunciation, scone, Stinging Fly, writing |
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Posted by Stan Carey
April 2, 2019
Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel has an engrossing chapter on the evolution of writing as a communication technology. It includes a brief account of the development of a syllabary – a set of written characters that represent syllables – for the Cherokee language. The syllabary looks like this:

Original Cherokee syllabary, via Wikipedia
Some of the signs (or ‘syllabograms’) will look familiar, others like variations of familiar shapes. But any similarity to the Roman, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets is misleading. For example, in a nice demonstration of the arbitrariness of the sign, the first three, R, D, W, encode the sounds e, a, la. So what’s going on?
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books, language, language history, linguistics, literature, writing | Tagged: American history, books, Cherokee, Cherokee syllabary, geography, Guns Germs and Steel, history, Jared Diamond, language, language history, linguistics, literature, reading, Sequoyah, syllabary, writing, writing systems |
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Posted by Stan Carey
August 19, 2018
Last weekend, driving to the Burren in County Clare (just south of Galway, where I live, and an endlessly interesting place to explore), a friend and I picked up the relevant Ordinance Survey map to get a better sense of the terrain.
Maps are a reliable source of pleasure, firing the imagination as we pore over their flattened geography, their special codes and symbols. Digital maps are ubiquitous now, but I still love to use paper maps when the opportunity arises.

View of Co. Clare from Mullaghmore (‘Great Summit’ or ‘Big Summit’)
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film, Ireland, naming, personal, photography | Tagged: Burren, Cape Fear, County Clare, film history, filmmaking, films, geography, Gregory Peck, hiking, hillwalking, history, Ireland, Irish history, Kilmacduagh, landscape, maps, Martin Scorsese, monastery, movies, Mullaghmore, naming, personal, photography, round tower, ruins, The Burren, thriller, travel |
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Posted by Stan Carey
December 11, 2014
A couple of days ago I tweeted this:
Below is the image included in the tweet, in case it doesn’t appear above. It’s from a recent poll by UK research firm YouGov in which 2018 people in Britain were asked how attractive or unattractive they found 12 accents in Britain and Ireland. In this post I want to address the poll and some of the responses to it.
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dialect, Hiberno-English, language, speech | Tagged: accent diversity, accents, Britain, British accents, dialects, geography, Hiberno-English, Ireland, Irish accents, Irish English, politics of language, pronunciation, Received Pronunciation, sociolinguistics, Southern Irish English, speech, surveys, YouGov |
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Posted by Stan Carey
July 19, 2013
Photos, for a change. Last weekend three old friends and I climbed Croagh Patrick, a mountain in County Mayo in the mid-west of Ireland. (Croagh is an anglicisation of cruach, Irish for stack.)
The Reek, as it’s also known, has a cone-shaped peak that dominates the surrounding skyline. You can see it in the distance here on the road to Westport town, our home base for the day.

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Ireland, nature, photography, stories | Tagged: climbing, County Mayo, Croagh Patrick, geography, hill walking, holy mountain, Ireland, Irish history, mountaineering, mountains, nature, nature photography, outdoors, photography, Saint Patrick, stories, walking |
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Posted by Stan Carey