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.
29 Comments | 
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
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.
17 Comments | 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 | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
I’ve been stop-starting my way happily through Celtic Fairy Tales and More Celtic Fairy Tales, two late-19thC collections by the great Australian folklorist Joseph Jacobs, combined in a plump Senate paperback and handsomely illustrated by John D. Batten:
9 Comments | books, language, language history, literature, science, stories | Tagged: books, Celtic folklore, culture, ethnolinguistics, Europe, European history, fairy tales, folklore, genetics, geography, history, Ireland, Joseph Jacobs, language, language history, literature, mythology, research, Royal Society, science, Scotland, stories | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
