Overheard in Dublin (2005 to the present)

In summer 2007, the book Overheard hi Dublin (Kelly & Kelly, 2007) reached first place on the Irish paperback nonfiction bestseller list. The books by Edgeworth and Joyce were also “nonfiction” and were also filled with overheard anecdotes about Irish speakers of English. But Kelly and Kelly’s book used a different method for collecting stories—asking website visitors to report what they overheard. The website, established in 2005, is a collaborative blog with the same name as the book (www.overheardindublin.com). The website asks visitors: “Overhear anything funny, interesting, unusual in Dublin?? Tell us what you’ve heard!” Anyone can post a story by supplying a title, message, location, and name. (As of summer 2020, however, the website seems to have turned into something else.) The 2007 book collects anecdotes that were posted on the website up to that point. A Twitter account linked to the website was established in 2011 (@OverheardDublin), and this appeared to average about a dozen posts per day. We will explore the affordances of new media technologies like this in more detail in the next two chapters.

In the following, we present two examples from Overheard in Dublin that Moore analyzes. The first one is from the website, and the second one is from the book. In the first, “Anonymous” describes an interaction they overheard on the bus ride to “college”:

Segment 11: A skanger youngwan

Awful sore it is! title

On the 78A to college the other morning a skanger youngwan frame gets on at James’s with a crutch and bandaged knee. She sits beside me at the back and her mate sits up the front, turns around and says

“jayziz jacintehhhh dat looks terrible sore!” quote

Jacintehhhh goes frame

“yer i’ is ... . Like bleedin artrootis or sumtin.” quote

Awful affliction that artrootis .... coda

Overheard by Anonymous, provenance

78A to ballyer

Posted on Monday, 26th November 2007.

In this excerpt, “Anonymous” reports “Irish accent” in a way that has many parallels with Edgeworth and Joyce. The report uses framing speech, quoted speech, and a coda. It includes the familiar double roles, with Anonymous first as an overhearer of the event and then as the reporter of that event. In compliance with the submission guidelines on the website, the report also includes an explicit title (“Awful sore it is!”) as well as a closing summary of the reporter’s name, location, and date posted.

In the narrated event, Anonymous describes a “skanger” (a derogatory term for lower-class Dubliners) “youngwan” (woman) and her “mate” and links them to a location, “James’s” (an area of lower-class housing in the inner city). These evaluative indexicals voice the two characters as lower-class Dubliners. Anonymous positions themself as part of a different group, as a “college” student. One of the lower-class women sits in (perhaps) uncomfortable physical proximity to Anonymous (“She sits beside me”). Anonymous uses quoted speech to convey the type of pronunciation overheard: “jayziz” for “Jesus,” “jacintehhhh” for “Jacintha,” “dat” for “that,” “artrootis” for “arthritis.” As in Joyce, the nonstandard pronunciation of the vowel in “tea” as “tay” is also found here in the pronunciation of the vowel in “Jesus” as “jayziz.” In addition, “th” becomes “t” or “d,” and “ay” becomes “oo.” These are all phonological variations that index lower-class Irish ways of pronouncing English.

As in the earlier excerpt Joyce reported about Tom and Mick, Anonymous also incorporates a quote from a character into their own utterances, in both the frame (“Jacintehhhh goes”) and the coda (“Awful affliction that artrootis ...”). The speech that was just quoted and attributed to the characters (“Jacintehhhh” and “artrootis”) is blended into the narrating voice. Anonymous clearly uses these quotations to ridicule the “skanger youngwan” and her “mate.” The exaggerated pronunciation of “Jacintehhhh” is almost surely unsympathetic, and the sarcasm of “awful affliction” together with the exaggerated pronunciation of “artrootis” clearly mock the speaker. In the coda, the narrator directly addresses readers and invites them to align with the narrator in laughing at the mistakes of the lower-class Irish speakers of English.

Figure 4.10 represents the narrating and narrated events. In the narrating event. Anonymous writes for readers of the blog. The post both projects an interaction that involves alignment with the reader in laughing at the speech errors and makes possible subsequent acts of reading. The narrated event includes Anonymous, the overhearer of the interaction, and two characters, the “skanger youngwan” and her “mate.” The “skanger youngwan” and “mate” are depicted as speaking very differently than Anonymous. Through reported speech that includes many nonstandard spellings to evoke the nonstandard pronunciation, Anonymous portrays their speech errors (along with their ignorance about medical conditions). Note the similarity between this discursive interaction and those described by Edgeworth (Figures 4.7 and 4.8) and Joyce (Figure 4.9). In all cases, we have respectable speakers who notice speech errors by lower-class Irish people.

This case differs from the excerpts selected by Edgeworth and Joyce, however, in depicting only one type of narrated character other than the author. There is no “judge and jury” for a “haymaker,” no “Englishman” for a “Paddy,” no “young gentleman” for an “old gentleman,” and no “Tom” for a “Mick.” In this case, the overhearer of this story becomes the contrastive figure. Anonymous, a “college” student, positions themself against the “skanger youngwan” and her “mate.” As we have said, the narrating event in this case also returns to the

FIGURE 4.10 Skanger youngwan.

simpler type of social action found in Edgeworth’s examples: Anonymous simply laughs at the lower-class Irish speakers of English without any sympathy for them or reservations about their critics.

Our last example is taken from the Overheard in Dublin (2007) book. Like Edgeworth, it reports a bull.

Segment 12: Two elderly ladies

Overheard two elderly ladies on the no. 2 bus discussing the frame drug problem in Dublin:

Mary:

Jaysus, Josie, aren’t them drugs terrible?’ quote

Josie: FRAME

‘Mary, if it wasn’t for the Valium. I’d be on drugs meself’ quote

(Kelly & Kelly, 2007, p. 22)

Here, another anonymous reporter describes an interaction overheard on a Dublin bus. As with all the other excerpts, this report includes framing speech and reported speech, and it positions the author as both overhearer and reporter. Anonymous depicts “two elderly ladies,” Mary and Josie. The instances of nonstandard pronunciation (“Jaysus” and “meself”) voice them as lower-class Irish speakers of a low-status variety of English. The pronunciation of the vowel in “Jesus” as “Jaysus” echoes not only the previous excerpt (which included “jayziz”) but also Joyce’s story in which “tea” was pronounced as “tay.” This story also contains an Irish bull, because Josie does not recognize that Valium is a drug. This echoes events reported by Edgeworth in which lower-class Irish speakers make similar humorous mistakes. As in the previous excerpt about the skanger, the narrated event does not contain a separate character, beyond the overhearer, who contrasts with the lower-class Irish characters. Anonymous fills the role of a presumably respectable speaker, enlisting the reader to join them in laughing at the Irish speaker’s mistake.

Table 4.7 represents our cross-event analysis of “Irish accent” across the examples from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. The narrated events all portray Irish people making errors while speaking English, contrasting those who speak with an “Irish accent” and those who recognize it. The contrasting figures are sometimes characters in the stories, as in the story of Paddy and the Englishman, and sometimes the overhearers themselves, as in the case of the skanger and the Anonymous reporter. The authors report these narrated events using a consistent structure, organized into framing speech and reported speech, with a narrator who reports an event they have overheard. These parallelisms provide strong evidence that the events participate in a common pathway despite their historical distance from one another.

Because many other events participate in this pathway and have a similar structure, any given event need not be elaborated in order to be understood as

TABLE 4.7 Final cross-event analysis of Irish accent

	Six linked events from 1802, 1910, and 2007 Narrated events: Certain Irish speakers of English speak incorrectly, and more respectable speakers notice these errors
	haymaker, judge, Englishman, gentleman, Tipperary, skanger, elderly, anonymous Reported speech: “widow,” laughter, “[echo] will answer,” “tay,” “foine,” “Jayziz,” “drug”
	Systematic two-part organization: lower-class Irish speakers make errors; respectable speakers notice them Overhearer becomes reporter
	Lower-class Irish accent is nonstandard, humorous, sometimes even repulsive Certain Irish speakers of English are ignorant, poor, uneducated, humorous
	Reporters display and laugh at Irish speakers Portrayals of “Irish accent” help identify internal others—initially Irish contrasted to English, then social class differences among Irish

a lampooning of lower-class Irish speech. These events and others like them provide cross-event context for each other, allowing hearers to recognize the structure and interpret the voicing, positioning, and social action even in short instances that might themselves contain very limited information. All narrators recognize “Irish accent” when they hear it, and they construe it as nonstandard, ignorant, humorous, and perhaps even repulsive. The authors invite readers to align with them in making fun of these speakers. Moore argues that the extensive pathway of many such events, across three centuries, has established an Irish “accent culture.” This way of portraying Irish speech encourages Irish people themselves to view their own language use in terms created by English colonialism, from an overhearer’s perspective. This disparages their compatriots and encourages some of them to create distinctions between themselves and “accented” others within their own community.