"If I actually talked like that, I'd pull a gun on myself": accent, avoidance, and moral panic in Irish English.

"If I actually talked like that, I'd pull a gun on myself": accent, avoidance, and moral panic in Irish English. Introduction Drawing upon some of the materials gathered in the course of abroader study (1) of "the politics of accent" in contemporaryIrish English, I bring attention here to an ongoing moral panic oflanguage in Irish society, centering on a new and fashionable accent ofIrish English. This new accent, usually termed "D4" (after thepostal code of a mostly well-to-do part of south Dublin), has beenexplained by observers and commentators in the Irish media as a way foryounger, newly affluent speakers to "hive off" from themasses, by avoiding pronunciations seen as emblematic either ofworking-class Dublin identity or of rural Irish provincialism. As I will show, the "D4" phenomenon construed morebroadly--the phonological emblems, the identities they summon forth, andthe moral panic evidenced in plentiful media commentary--is in factdetermined by two distinct levels of phonological avoidance."D4" as "an accent" is a kind of negative creation,a set of pronunciations or emblematic sound segments that gesture awayfrom (and dissociate the speaker from) certain other already emblematicsound segments, specifically those that identify and delineate twohighly salient groups of Irish Others: lower-class Dubliners (Skangersor sometimes, Knackers), and rural, backward Irish people (Culchies).The pronunciations--really, shibboleths--that are identified with"D4" are pronunciations that are (negatively) oriented tospecific other kinds of actually existing pronunciations; hence,"first-order" avoidance (itself an unavoidably"second-order" indexical phenomenon; Silverstein 2003). And yet this avoidance-driven "accent" has itself becomestigmatized--imbued with strong indexicality--and has become worthy ofavoidance in its own right, as the quotation from an online commentthread in my title is meant to suggest; hence, a "secondorder" of avoidance. "D4" is an accent that no one inIreland would claim as their own. As an ideological construct in anIrish sociolinguistic imaginary, then, "D4" is alreadyexplicitly denaturalized: it has no community of "nativespeakers," only people who are pretending to be something theyaren't; not authentically linked to any particular place, itspreads across the countryside like an infectious disease; above all, ithas no connection to a shared Irish past--it was only invented recently,during the economic boom years of the "Celtic Tiger" economy.The "D4 accent" is then itself an emblem, and a creature, ofthat recent and short-lived period of Irish affluence--but even beforethe economic collapse that began in 2008 and now threatens the veryfuture of the Irish state, it had already become stigmatized, an objectof disparagement, and the people who spoke this way had become hatefigures (O'Toole 2009). By the time of writing (late 2010), the"D4" accent itself may have become "endangered." Indeed, all of the material discussed here was collected during thelast years of "boom," and already the very sounds of"D4" were eliciting strong reactions, documented fulsomelybelow. I will try to use this material to expand the discussion oflinguistic avoidance beyond "taboo" words and expressions toaddress what the editors call "discursive anxiety about, andavoidance of, diffuse and multiply realizable semioticconfigurations," in two ways. First, by attending to the phenomenon of strong indexicality in asignaling realm beyond the limits of surface-segmentable denotationalform--principally that of phonetics/phonology (and suprasegmentals ofpitch, prosody, and intonation)--one can ask how such non-referentialindexes as those of "accent" become the vehicles of strongindexicality, and what kinds of containment strategies are available toprotect speakers from their corrosive effects. To answer this questionrequires attention to achievements of what Bakhtin (1981 [1934-1935])termed "voicing," most obviously in the widespread practice ofimitating (other people's) accents. Second, by examining the implications of moving, or transducing, anindexically risky utterance of "accented" Irish English speechfrom the spoken or oral/aural channel into a written or, more precisely,a text-artifactual one, one can ask whether such movement from thespoken into the written channel--employing various graphical means(quotation marks, italics, deviant spellings, or all three) to demarcatethe boundary between framing (reporting) speech and framed (reported)speech--helps to reduce the danger emanating from stigmatizedpronunciations, and if so, how does it do this, and for whom? Is theresomething about writing as a medium--and/or about written text-artifactsas communicative forms--that helps to distance the reader from the"aural" stigma of these accents? Does writing perform ananalogous function--at the level of communicative modality--to thatwhich reported speech achieves at the level of the calibration ofpragmatic indexes to their contexts of occurrence (cf. Jaffe and Walton2000)? Indeed, the material to be discussed here consists not of actual"D4" speech recorded under "naturalistic"conditions; rather, it consists of imitations--usually, directquotations--of "D4" speech, most of them rendered in print (oron screen). This paper, then, examines the D4 accent as a phenomenon ofreport--literally, in the case of newspaper and internet commentary.Like Standard American English as analyzed by Silverstein (1987),"D4" is undeniably "there" as an ideologicalconstruct, even if it is very hard to pin down with any degree ofempirical certainty (as the next section will show). The present paperis thus both a reflection on and an example of the practices of reportedspeech that it discusses. The moral panic surrounding "D4" would seem to present acase in which the unavoidable interdiscursivity of all reportedspeech--whether written or oral/aural--becomes a moral, political, andaesthetic threat to the integrity of the speaker qua reporter. Thematerial on the "D4" accent discussed here--dating mostly fromthe 1990s through 2008--reveals that an Irish "identitycrisis" in language, heavily informed by widening disparities ofclass, was well underway long before the economic crisis hit home(O'Toole 2009). The contemporary moral panic surrounding the "D4" accentin Irish English, as I show in the conclusion, is rooted in a longhistory of (at best) ambivalence towards the English language itself inIreland, both at the level of explicit folk ideology and on the part ofState and non-State institutions (in this respect, the present paperinvites comparison with the paper by Susan Frekko in this issue). Aglance at the much fuller literature of English dialectology elsewherein the archipelago (in England, Wales, and Scotland) reveals thepresence elsewhere of similar double-binds of accent-focused anxiety; asa phenomenon of report and as the focus of moral panic, "D4"finds echoes in other parts of Europe, as a brief comparison withso-called "Rinkeby Swedish" (Stroud 2004) shows. And yet, asOscar Wilde knew, there is something irreducibly Irish about theavoidance of Irishness. The "D4" phenomenon construed in itssocial and cultural context, then, is as much a "structure offeeling" (Williams 1977) as an example of sociolinguisticchange-in-progress. These broader issues are given brief mention in theconclusion. "D4" in the Sociolinguistic Imagination The one account to date of the D4 phenomenon by a linguist (Hickey2007 and refs. therein) has treated it as yet another instance oflinguistic change in-progress governed by system requirements (e.g.,maximization of contrast, minimization of homophony)in an autonomousphonological system. "Anyone over 40 in present-day Ireland cannot fail to havenoticed that the pronunciation of English has changed markedly,"writes the linguist Raymond Hickey in a memoiristic account of hisstudies of Irish English aimed at a general reader; "It]he changeswhich have taken place all emanate from Dublin and have been picked upwith great enthusiasm by certain sections of the population"(Hickey 2005c:42): A new jet set has arisen and the people working in informationtechnology have reached levels of wealth which the Irish previouslycould only have dreamed of. The new generation of Irish aresophisticated, urbane, international in their outlook and definitely donot want to be associated with what they see as a backward Irish way oflife. In Dublin the trendy people do not want to be associated withlower-class Dubliners and avoid the local accent like the plague. Inorder to dissociate themselves from others, speakers often change theirspeech to make it even less like that of those they wish to distancethem[selves] from. That is the origin of the new pronunciation ofEnglish in Ireland. Fashionable Dubliners developed new modes of speechwhich were diametrically opposed to those of the locals. (Hickey2005c:42-43; emphasis added) In a valuable series of technical descriptive works, Hickey hasdivided the varieties of Dublin English (DE) into two main categorieswhich he calls local and non-local; within the non-local category aretwo varieties dubbed Mainstream and New (or Fashionable) DE--this lastbeing more or less equivalent to what we term "D4" in thispaper (Table 1 below):Table 1. Dublin English varieties, according to Hickey (e.g.,2007:354)1. local Dublin English2. non-local Dublin Englisha) Mainstream Dublin Englishb) New Dublin English The most salient points of phonetic contrast between what Hickeycalls "Local Dublin English" (popularly known as a "Dubaccent") and "New," "advanced," or"fashionable Dublin English" (aka "D4") consist inthe handling of vowels and diphthongs, of certain consonantarticulations, especially in the dental and alveolar area, and in thedegree or pervasiveness of lenition of [t] in certain environments. The most obvious vowel contrasts are treated by Hickey under therubric of what he calls the 'Dublin vowel shift;' this shift,he asserts, "started about twenty years ago (mid 1980s) and hascontinued to move along a recognizable trajectory. In essence, thechange involves a retraction of diphthongs with a low or back startingpoint and a raising of back vowels" (Hickey 2007:355). Below inTable 2 is a highly compressed summary of Hickey's description ofsome of these typical vowel contrasts. Table 3 summarizes Hickey's analysis of phonological contrastsin the highly salient area of so-called th- ("tee-haitch")sounds. "The acoustic sensitivity of the Irish to the shift fromdental to alveolar," Hickey opines, "derives not least fromthe merger that can result from it. To Irish ears the retraction of thedental stops to an alveolar position is immediately noticeable andstigmatized because it is typical of low-prestige speech" (Hickey2007:353). [TABLE 4 OMITTED] Hickey's account of the basic phonetic values involved in D4is adequate for descriptive purposes--see Table 4 for a comparison ofthe vowel space of "older mainstream" and "new"Dublin English (modeled on Labor 1966); indeed, his recent work is theonly attempt to describe recent changes in Dublin English in thescholarly literature to date (Hickey 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2003, 2005a,2005b, 2005c, 2007). His commitment to seeing these as normal processesof linguistic change-in-progress in autonomous phonological systems,however, poses problems for his analysis. Take, for example, the categories "Local DE,""Mainstream DE," and "New DE" themselves: in hisanalysis, these are treated as if they were more or less self-contained,autonomous linguistic varieties, each with its own set of phonologicalfeatures, subject to normal processes of linguistic change--and yet hisdefinitions of them seem to be based on putative facts about speakersrather than phonological systems. The speakers of the Local DE are"those who use the historically continuous vernacular in thecapital"; these are people "[who] show the strongestidentification with traditional Dublin life of which the local accent isvery much a part" (Hickey 2007:354). Speakers of non-Local DE, bycontrast, "do not identify with what they see as a narrow andrestricted local culture." He further subdivides this group into a"mainstream" and "new" (or "fashionable")non-local varieties. It is this latter "new" variety whosespeakers most "clearly reject ... a continuing association withlow-prestige Dublin" (Hickey 2007:354): These are the"D4s." Supraregonal or nonlocal varieties arise, according to Hickey, outof what he calls 'dissociation.' 'Dissociation' forHickey is the opposite of accommodation; it is "reactive in nature,i.e., it implies that there is a variety or set of varieties withfeatures intuitively recognizable to others in contact with it, and thatthese other speakers develop strategies to distance themselveslinguistically from the group(s) showing distinctive features"(Hickey 2000a:303). Dissociation often results in what Hickey callssupraregionalization, "an historical process whereby varieties of alanguage lose specifically local features and becomes less regionallybound." While 'dissociation' seems to be something thatspeakers do, supraregionalization seems to be something that happens tolinguistic varieties (see, e.g., Hickey 2003:351). Hickey's analysis seems to grant an active and agentive roleto speaker consciousness with one hand, only to take it back with theother. As a type of normal sociolinguistic change, supraregionalizationis "actuated" by "a consciousness of the provinciality ofone's own language and the presence of more mainstreamvarieties" (Hickey 2003:351); but once so actuated, it proceedsmechanistically through the normal phases of propagation and terminationin the speech community, and during these phases, speakers function aspassive and unconscious "carriers" in the wave-like spread ofa chain-shift or other regular (exceptionless) phonological change. As to the "social motivations" of these sound changes,Hickey's account of the dramatic changes in Irish society since the1980s is sketched in rather lightly. Describing Dublin as "atypical location for language change" given increases in populationduring the postwar period in the 20th century and "an economic boomin the last fifteen years or so," he reasons that "theincrease in wealth and international position has meant that many youngpeople aspire to an urban sophistication which is divorced from stronglylocal Dublin life" (Hickey 2000a:310-311). This formulation somehowmanages both to keep the sociodemographic processes driving languagechange perfectly Separate from the linguistic practices that bring thechange about, and to suggest that the relationship between them is acommonsense affair ("... has meant that ..."). But Hickey's account of a linguistic change motivated by"the desire of speakers to hive themselves off from vernacularforms of a variety spoken in their immediate surroundings" (Hickey2000a:310) simply restates the problem in a different register. In fact, the phonological "voice" of "D4" isdefined by distinctive and emblematic sound segments--see the chartsabove--that are themselves "negative" creations, set inopposition to, and in avoidance of, certain other already emblematicsound segments, specifically those that identify and delineate twogroups of Irish Others: lower-class Dubliners, and the rural Irish.Debate rages on in the newspapers and in the Irish media as to whether"the D4 accent" looks to America or England for phonologicalinspiration (or to Australia, or to the American TV sitcom Friends);even though they can't agree on what "D4" is an imitationof, all seem to agree that it is an imitation--that it is, in fact,"imitation" as opposed to "real" or authentic. It isno one's "native" accent--it is always"put-on"--and by the same token, there is no one in Irelandtoday who would identify "D4" as the way they themselvesspeak. The English language, then, becomes a site for the expression ofa particular kind of split subjectivity in Ireland, a society where theprimary linguistic emblem of national belonging is still Irish (Gaelic),and English is generally regarded, when it is regarded at all, as a toolof convenience as well as colonialism. "D4": Moral Panic in Print The "D4" phenomenon in Irish English has not escaped thenotice of journalists, commentators, and casual observers. It isinteresting to observe the emphasis that commentators in print andonline place on the very sounds of "D4," and the strongresponses that these sounds elicit. In the materials examined here,these range from laughter, to disdain, to pity, to disgust, to a parodyof homicidal rage. Journalists at socially conservative national newspapers like theIrish Independent and the Sunday Independent (known locally as the Indoand the Sindo, respectively) have been all too ready to employ thewell-worn journalistic trope of language endangerment in their effortsto hold the "D4" accent up to ridicule and disdain. "Ifour accents are integral to who we are then Ireland is suffering acollective identity crisis," warns the Irish Independent in anarticle that ran under the headline "It's just like so the endof Irish accents" (Power 2005): "Across the country, peopleare abandoning their regional lilts and embracing that flatquasi-American inflection colloquially known as the Dublin 4 accent,according to language experts. As a result, the traditional Irishbrogue--and its many variations--may be in mortal danger." Thestory is one of many in which newfound economic prosperity is linked ina direct and unmediated fashion to a rejection (especially by the young)of "Irishness" in English speech--though the exact nature ofthis linkage, or why such a connection should be necessary or natural,is no clearer here than it was in Hickey's account."Encouraged by the economic transformation of the past decade toshun all that is provincial and idiosyncratically Irish, an entiregeneration is tripping over itself to embrace a way of speaking itperceives to be modern, progressive, and fashionable," Power'sarticle begins, citing as an authority the compiler of the popularDictionary of Hiberno-English (Dolan 1994). The new accent "isbeing adopted as a badge of progressiveness, an explicit rejection ofprovincial 'backwardness'" (Power 2005). "How can wesave our regional accents?" the article asks. "By encouragingthe young to have greater pride in where they come from" (Power2005). Another Indo commentator deployed the always robust diseasemetaphor: "Having originated in South County Dublin, Dort-speak hasspread like an out-of-control Winter vomiting bug" (Bielenberg2008). In the contagion narrative, women are the main culprits--and thefunction that these journalistic texts may be performing in articulatinga felt need to police young women's (moral panic-inducing) behaviordeserves its own treatment. Women also have weaknesses, the (female)reporter points out: It does seem to be a female phenomenon.... I came across countlesswomen in college who had only lived in Dublin a wet weekend and yetspoke in anything but those regional tones with which they were broughtup. However, their true colours emerged when they were drunk--no longerdid they possess the capabilities to control and purposely alter theircolloquial drawl. (Byrne 2007) Above and beyond the rather obvious gender discourse, the passageraises fundamental questions about concepts of Irish personhood and theplace in them of values of authenticity: the women revert to their localaccents when drunk, suggesting a link between 'diminishedcapacity' and a true Irish self (in vino veritas, or at least,sociolinguistic authenticity; cf. Coupland 2000, 2003). The article is typical of many others in my large collection,insofar as it lays the blame for "the nationwide proliferation ofthis D4 accent" on "the Celtic Tiger and the economictransformation over the past decade, which has made us shirk all that isboth characteristically and stereotypically Irish," and morespecifically on "the cosmopolitan, sophisticated Sex and the Citylifestyle that Dublin now provides" (Byrne 2007). It concludes byexhorting readers of the 5indo to "lament the decline of the ruralaccent because, with more young country folk explicitly rejecting theirroots and opting to speak in the most contrived andear-numbingly-irritating accent, it's becoming endangered, whileDortspeak is fast becoming the language of the nation" (Byrne2007). Note the emphasis on "ear-numbing irritation." Already inthe early 1990s, "the Dublin 4 accent" was being described inthe pages of the Indo as "aurally offensive," an "utterly(and they use that word often) affected and unnatural noise"(Looney 1991). It is important to notice the way that journalists--and thesubeditors who write headlines--cannot seem to resist the urge to"lapse into" the very accent they are purportedly denouncing,so that in the act of denouncing it they end up recirculating tokens ofit. Consider the following headlines (examples could be multiplied): Do you fancy a 'point' at the 'boor'? ItaO'Kelly puts the accent on how we judge people by the way theyspeak (O'Kelley 1991) Why you no longer have to worry about your accent ... unless, ofcourse, ur stull using thut drudful 'Dublin Fur Dort Loin'drone (Fottrell 2001) Dortspeak is here to stay--in a rindabite sort of way (Anderson2004) It's just like so the end of Irish accents. Across the countrypeople are abandoning their old-fashioned regional lilts and brogues fora modern D4 quasi-American twang created by TV (Power 2005) Country cousins, don't give up your lovely lilt to, loike,tawk Dortspeak (Byrne 2007) Janey Mac! Irish-English is Banjaxed, so it is ... Dort-speak iskilling off our distinctive accents and expressions, a UCD professorsaid this week (Bielenberg 2008) "A Horribly Sharp Attack of the Senses": D4 Online Internet message boards in heavy use among Irish universitystudents provide an avalanche of representations, rationalizations, anddenunciations of "D4." One commenter on a boards.ie discussionthread entitled D4 accent--does it bother you? (initiated July 4, 2008at 15:10) (3) weighs in within the first two minutes of thethread's existence to say, "I despise it, it's justfeckin awful" ('Alanstrainor,' at 15:12); a few minuteslater, another ('DaBreno,' at 15:21) observes: Sure you cant help it if its what you grew up with it but the amount of people who in a short space of time modify their own accents to speak like this is brutal. I know a few fellow native Mayo people who went D4 in a matter of months. Turns my stomach. Tis more of a mindset than an accent. Any accent that is acquired "in a matter of months" couldnot possibly be authentic, by this reasoning (cf. Coupland 2003). Nor,one might add, would its acquisition be a further example of"linguistic change-in-progress" governed by the structuraldynamics of an autonomous phonological system. 'Jimbo' (at19:13) relates a similar anecdote--but style-shifting into"D4" in an evaluative coda: I know someone who moved to Dublin a while back and has now magically picked up a strong D4 accent. The only thing that gives her away though is, when she's drunk, she forgets herself and starts talking in a Cork accent again. Very cringeworthy, loike. To the earlier poster ('DaBreno') who had complained ofhis "fellow native Mayo people" adopting D4 accents,'thebiggestjim' responds (at 23:14) with an anecdote of hisown: I have seen this Phenomenon also, it cracks me up. A mate of mine has two different accents and lingo for different occasions. His Mayo accent for when he is with his common country friends, and his D4 accent when he is with his D4 lady. He has been caught out a few times whilst in the company of both. He even started calling himself Mike instead of his usual Mick. This D4 accent makes me laugh more than boiling my blood but then again I don't have to listen to it every day thank God. A later contributor to the same thread ('Maz,' onFebruary 21, 2008 at 12:27 p.m.) calls "the D4/American"accent "THE most irritating accent I have ever heard"--andproduces a token via direct quotation: I'm a culchie, I dont try to hide the fact but girls from here coming home at the weekends with the "O.M.G, wall I was like totally roight" statements make me soooo frickin mad Other contributors offer up sociological explanations of the"D4" phenomenon. According to another poster('upmeath,' on 6 May 2005 at 18:39), it was in the mid 1990sthat "the quarantine on the artificial accent front wasdestroyed": all these idiots all over leinster whose daddys got jobs in intel, hewlett packard, nec, etc ... suddenly had the money to get a bus to dublin in the mid 1990s, then they had the money to go to grafton street, and the quarantine on the artificial accent front was destroyed, it IS artificial. nobody spoke like that in dublin 30 years ago, did they? "d4ishness should die," 'upmeath'concludes--and no sooner than s/he does so, shifts into "D4":"it's a state-of-mind, it's a disease, and the real upperclass of the country should just shun it or we'll soon havecorkonians and galwegians giving it loads too, roysh?" Notice: theadmonition to "the real upper class" is to avoid (shun) the D4accent, so that no one will confuse them with the Culchies (from Corkand Galway) who have "put it on." Phonological avoidance has akind of infinite generative capacity. Many comments explicitly connect the artificiality of the"D4" accent directly to its very sounds; one example is thefollowing (from 'MonkeyTennis' at 23:13): "the thing mostpeople find annoying about it is that its just fake. No one naturallytalks like that. It grates on my ears." In another discussion onanother board (on the topic "That new D4 accent"), (4)'superfrank' (on June 6, 2007 at 16:51) writes:"It's really infuriating to hear. I had a girlfriend with onebefore and it wrecked my head. It's a horribly sharp attack of thesenses." A YouTube clip entitled D4 (5) that masquerades as a bitof "found" documentary footage stages the spectaculardestruction of the much despised D4s. Filmed at Sandymount Strand (inDublin 4), the short film presents a parodic re-enactment of the 9/11attacks, only this time a small plane crashes into the twin smokestacksof the Poolbeg Generating Station (known locally as Pigeon House; thetwin smoke-stacks with their distinctive white and red bands are amongthe tallest structures in Ireland, and are visible from all overDublin). The camera follows four D4 girls out onto the strand as the attacktakes place. As the twin smokestacks become engulfed in smoke and flamesbehind them, the girls blithely carry on taking snapshots of themselves,only occasionally taking notice of what is going on. "Ohmigod[[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]]!" says one, "this isBaghdad, it's like that movie Crash [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE INASCII]]!" ('Baghdad' is rhyming slang for'mad'). Another asks: "Is Obama attacking?" One ofthe girls ignores the attack, busy texting on her mobile phone; at onepoint she holds the phone out and addresses one of the others: "Ijust heard you gave Fintan a shawshank in the Wesley TK Maxx!" (6)To this affront her interlocutor responds, "Sara, you mudslut!" Sara responds with "Whatever!" and the camerastays on her as she stands there petulantly chewing bubblegum. Aspinning metal object can be seen in the distance, flying rapidlythrough the air from the smokestacks toward her; just as she has blown alarge bubble with her bubblegum, she is suddenly and very graphicallydecapitated by the flying metal object. Blood spatters the camera lens.Her headless body collapses onto Sandymount Strand. Male voices can beheard in the distance yelling "Oh my God!" in D4 accents, andthen we see both of the twin smokestacks collapse. This is a very accomplished piece of work (its producer is agraduate of the Irish Film Institute). (7) Since it was posted on April4, 2008, the film has been viewed 11,072 times (as of August 30, 2009),and has generated 93 comments, a sampling from which appears below--herewe observe again the same set of recurring elements noted above:identifications of "D4" as "a disease;" an emphasison the sound of the accent as in itself painful to the ears; expressionsof (misogynistic) rage and aggression directed at its speakers (up toand including homicide and/or suicide); and, of course, ventriloquationsof the accent using the established conventions of deviant spellings.Some apply the disease metaphor: DuMbGuM (1 year ago) D4 ... it's a disease ... lolz. Others ironically subvert or erase the framing of the film asfiction: catsmokinpot (1 year ago) I'm glad those sluts are dead, those accents alone made me want to go postal on their asses. Others emphasize phonological/auditory pain: kerpenguin (11 months ago) Hahaha ... oh yes--this is excellent. Their accents hurt my ears. Luckily, "D4" is no one's "native" accent: PinkiLilli (11 months ago) If i actually talked like that, l'd pull on a gun on myself. Others prove that class rage is no respecter of the boundarybetween reporting--or imitating--speech, and reported or imitatedspeech: happymondaze (7 months ago) Class vid, well made but even when its imitating dublin 4 people it still makes my blood boil, they are truly the scum of ireland, give me a council estate anyday over them types Many others simply adopt a "D4" voice: Rabnll (1 year ago) EW MOI GAWSH LOIKE TOTAL ACE MOVIE pacificspotted (10 months ago) funny! althay seriously goys oy faynd that a bit offensive roysh? In one comment, a reporting voice written as if in a relatively"neutral" accent frames a quotation rich in"accented" speech; the reporting voice returns after thequotation to produce an evaluative 'coda' (here, hahaha) whichinvites readers to align themselves collusively with the reporter in astance of bemusement (or worse) towards the quoted material, and the(kinds of) speakers who animate it (Moore 2007, n.d.): ciaranburke5 (1 year ago) I love the way thers a d4 watchin this ryt now saying: "OH moy gowd loike those gurls souynd rodiculous!! haw haw I hate d-foyrs!" hahaha The comment from 'ciaranburke5' also makes anothervitally important point about the place of "D4"--and of"D4s"--in a contemporary Dublin-centric social imaginary: the"D4s" in the reported speech are shown disparaging the"D4" accent, in the "D4" accent, unbeknownst tothemselves. Conclusion Needless to say, the Irish do not enjoy an exclusive franchise onlinguistic self-loathing. Labor famously described New York City as"a great sink of negative prestige" where New Yorkers'views of their own English were concerned (Labor 1966:499). "Thedominant theme in subjective evaluation of speech by New Yorkers,"he wrote, "is a profound linguistic insecurity" (Labov1966:500). He concluded that "the term 'linguisticself-hatred' is not too extreme to apply to the situation whichemerges from the interviews" (Labov 1966:489). (8) Closer to Ireland, one can observe double-binds of accent anxietysimilar to those described above. Macaulay observes that "it wouldbe possible to present a fairly impressive picture of 'linguisticself-hatred' in Glasgow" (Macaulay 1975:153). Macaulay'sinterviewees routinely distinguished between a general Glasgow accent ofwhich they generally approved, and what they called a 'broad'one, linked to working-class identities, which one university lecturerdescribed as "'the ugliest accent one can encounter, but thatis partly because it is associated with the unwashed and theviolent'" (Macaulay 1975:154). And yet Macaulay notes that,"it would have been difficult if not impossible to use the methodof Labov's Index of Linguistic Insecurity" to analyze theGlasgow data, "because the notion of 'correctness' inpronunciation is explicitly problematic in Glasgow, as in most ofScotland, on account of nationalistic feelings" (Macaulay1975:152). Many of Macaulay's findings for Glasgow are echoed inWatt's (2002) more recent study of Tyneside English. Linguisticinsecurity is rampant, and yet "many Tynesiders view RP [ReceivedPronunciation] very negatively: resentment against any perceived form of'southern hegemony' and 'centralized aggression'pervades Tyneside society" (Watt 2002:55). One commentator wondersif Tyneside English "may be at greater risk from its ownimage" than from external forces, insofar as it is seen as"indelibly linked to 'working-class status' and with it'a traditional/reactionary life-style'" (Watt 2002: 55).(9) Watt acknowledges the shortcomings of the variationist approachwhen he remarks that "standard interpretations" of his data"might invoke the system-internal forces ... that governcoordinated movements of vowels in chain shifts. However," Wattcontinues, "certain problems attend the assumption that theprogress of vowel changes is dictated more by the requirements of anautonomous vowel system than by the communicative and social needs ofspeakers" (Watt 2002:56). And yet the intensity of linguistic self-loathing in places likeGlasgow and Tyneside, and the indexical "strength" seen toemanate from certain "accented" forms of English speech, neverquite reaches the levels seen above in public discourse about"D4" in Ireland. This is, perhaps, not surprising when oneconsiders the somewhat unusual position of the English language itselfin an Irish history of oppositional self-fashioning. Indeed, the contemporary discourse of moral panic surrounding"D4" reproduces many of the tropes used by Irish culturalnationalists from the mid-19th century to Independence indenouncing--and attempting to contain, if not to extirpate from Irishsoil--the English language itself. The charter document of modern Irish cultural nationalism is anessay by Douglas Hyde, the founder of the Gaelic League and the firstPresident of the Republic, entitled "On the Necessity for theDe-Anglicisation of Ireland" (Hyde 1991 [1892], see Crowley2005:128-163). The aim of Hyde's intervention was "to show thefolly of neglecting what is Irish, and hastening to adopt, pell-mell andindiscriminatingly, everything that is English, simply because it isEnglish." The Anglophone Irishman, according to Hyde, would findhimself in "a most anomalous position, imitating England and yetapparently hating it" (Hyde 1991 [1892]). Hyde and his colleagues in the Gaelic League saw the growth of theEnglish language in Ireland as the spread of a disease: "aninternal cancer that is eating away at the heart and soul ofIreland," according to the reformer Agnes O'Farrelly(1874-1951; quoted in Crowley 2005:148-149). George Russell (AE),Crowley notes, "cited the perils of Anglicization, which wereleading to 'moral leprosy' and 'racialdegradation'" (Crowley 2005:156, of. French 2009). Contemporary media discourses about D4 echo these earlierdiscourses of moral panic almost point-by-point; the only difference isthat now it is a particular (new, and inherently "artificial")accent of English that is the target of anxiety, rather than thelanguage as a whole. The journalist's blundering image of "ageneration tripping over itself to embrace a way of speaking itperceives to be modern, progressive, and fashionable" (Power 2005),for example, more than faintly echoes Hyde's Anglophone Irishmen"adopting pell-mell and indiscriminately everything that isEnglish, because it is English." And yet this is not a story of plus ca change ... The "D4accent" emerged in a period when Irish society was undergoingwrenching and fundamental economic and sociodemographic change. In the1980s, the recession-plagued Republic of Ireland had the highest netout-migration rate in the EU. By 2002, it had a booming economy and thehighest net in-migration rate in the EU, with refugees andasylum-seekers accounting for about ten percent of the roughly 250,000people who came to live in the Republic between 1996 and 2002 (Cronin2005:10). A study carried out in January-February 2006 identified 167languages currently in use in Ireland, but noted that "somewhere inexcess of 200 is probably a more accurate figure" (Gallagher 2006,O'Brien 2006). And so the Republic--and especially Dublin--becamethe site of what Blommaert (2010) calls linguistic"superdiversity" during the "boom" years of theCeltic Tiger, long before the economic collapse. In this respect, the moral panic surrounding "D4" incontemporary Ireland finds a more interesting parallel in Sweden than inthe British Isles. Christopher Stroud (2004) describes the moral panicthat arose around a "new" linguistic entity called"Rinkeby Swedish" (RS), which he defines as "a potential,imagined, 'pan-immigrant' variety of Swedish'"though he opines that it is better described as a concept that"ostensibly refers to some recurring and pervasive linguisticcharacteristics of the Swedish spoken by immigrants" (Stroud2004:197), than as an actually existing dialect or linguistic variety.(10) Like my preceding discussion of "D4," Stroud'sdiscussion focuses on "public accounts of Rinkeby Swedish, that is,talk around and about the notion in public discourse," and hisargument is that RS "offers a powerful metaphor for how SwedishSelf and ethnic Other are represented and contested, which allows it tobe used ideologically and by proxy, in debates on governance, power, andinter-ethnic conflict" (Stroud 2004:197, all emphases in original). Stroud concludes that "RS comprises a powerful and subtlemeans for the exclusion and stigmatization of migrants in Swedish publicspaces, at the same time that the significance of speaking Swedish isresymbolized" (Stroud 2004:197). Stroud's analysis of hismaterial is intended to show "how different practices of speakingSwedish become tied to values and attitudes in ways that positionspeakers of RS as particular types of people" (2004:197). More than this, RS "was, initially ... highly stigmatized inthe sense that it was perceived as a ghettoized form of immigrantSwedish, an outcome of a lack of exposure to sufficiently rich networksof native (monolingual) speakers, and something to be avoided at allcosts by native Swedes.... Many in the concerned public have warned ofthe almost contagious nature of such speech practices, and the danger ofincorporating RS into ethnic Swedish households" (Stroud 2004:199). So many of the themes associated with "D4" are here; andyet there are obvious differences. In the popular media, which alwayspurports to ventriloquate the popular imagination, Rinkeby Swedishoriginates in ghettoized communities of poorly integrated immigrants whohave had "inadequate exposure to Swedish social networks";from there it spreads via contagion to native Swedish young people whoadopt it as a badge of urban "cool" and negative prestige. "D4" originates in communities of rich but deracinatedIrish people in the leafy enclaves of South Dublin, and spreads fromthere to native Irish young people from Roscommon or Cork, who adopt itas a badge of the positive prestige associated with urban and suburbanDublin, and "the Sex and the City lifestyle" on offer there.(This image of Dublin, of course, is itself rooted in some decades ofinternal "immigration" from the Irish countryside and ruralhamlets to the major urban centers.) The moral panic of D4 is in no way explicitly about immigrants; butthe sudden and pervasive presence of large numbers of ethno-racial andlinguistic Others in Irish society forms an essential part of thecontext in which mere phonology could be freighted with such contentious(and deep-rooted) meanings. "D4" as an accent and as a"state of mind" became the object of public moral outrage atthe same time that Irish society was being transformed by a suddeneconomic boom, coupled with a sudden influx of migrants from within andbeyond the EU--a period when Enda Kenny, the leader of the largestopposition party (Fine Gael), felt it necessary to assert that Irelandwas a "Celtic, Christian society." The speakers of D4 are notthe immigrants who "refuse to integrate," but their mirrorimage: they are the "native Irish" who actively dissociatethemselves from their congeners, co-nationals, and kin--people whosevery existence is the symptom of an Irish society dis-integrating fromwithin. Even before the current economic collapse, the "D4accent" was seen as an emblem of the worst excesses (to use thenewspaper phrase) of the "Celtic Tiger" period, and itsspeakers ("D4 people") were often portrayed as hate figures. No doubt about it: some Irish people became very rich during the"Celtic Tiger" period and especially during the propertyboom--Irish house prices doubled between 2000 and 2006; bank lending forconstruction increased by 1,730 percent between 1999 and 2007--but otherpeople did not (O'Toole 2009). Bear in mind that this is a smallsociety (population 4 million)in which everybody either knows, or knowssomeone who knows, everybody. Today, after the bank guarantees and bailouts, the budget deficitrepresents 32 percent of Irish GDP, and 300,000 newly-built houses sitempty in over 600 "ghost estates" (O'Toole 2009). Somepeople who made for tunes have lost them; others who had no fortunes tolose are losing more as government "austerity" programs hitthe most vulnerable first. The Trinity College Dublin economist Morgan Kelly has predictedcorrectly every wrenching twist and turn of the Irish economic crisis,and until recently has been rewarded with schoolyard sneers from thegoverning Fianna Fail party (he is now rewarded mostly with officialsilence). (11) In the Irish Times of Monday November 8, 2010 Kellyconfesses that when I wrote in The Irish Times last May showing how thebank guarantee would lead to national insolvency, I did not expect thefinancial collapse to be anywhere near as swift or as deep as has nowoccurred. During September, the Irish Republic quietly ceased to existas an autonomous fiscal entity, and became a ward of the EuropeanCentral Bank. (Kelly 2010) Here is what Kelly sees for the future of Ireland: As ordinary people start to realize that this thing is not onlyhappening, it is happening to them, we can see anxiety giving way to thefirst upwellings of an inchoate rage and despair that will transformIrish politics along the lines of the Tea Party in America. Within fiveyears, both Civil War parties are likely to have been brushed aside by ahard right, anti-Europe, anti-Traveller party that, inconceivable as itnow seems, will leave us nostalgic for the, usually, harmless buffooneryof Biffo, Inda, and their chums. (Kelly 2010) (12) As class divisions harden and economic misery spreads, furtherresearch into the fate of the "D4 accent" will become moreurgent, more revelatory, and more dangerous. REFERENCES Anderson, Nicola. 2004. "Dortspeak is here to stay--in arindabite sort of way." Irish Independent, Nov 1. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981 [1934-1935]. "Discourse in theNovel." In M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. 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Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. Hyde, Douglas. 1991 [1892]. "On the necessity forde-Anglicising Ireland." In Seamus Deane, ed. The Field DayAnthology of Irish Writing, vol. 2, 527-533. Derry: Field DayPublications. Jaffe, Alexandra, and Shana Walton. 2000. "The voices peopleread: Orthography and the representation of non-standard speech."Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(4):561-587. Kallen, Jeffrey. 1988. "The English language in Ireland."International Journal of the Sociology of Language 70:127-142. --. 1997. "Irish English: context and contacts." In J.Kallen, ed. Focus on Ireland, 1-33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kelly, Morgan. 2010. "If you thought the bank bailout was bad,wait until the mortgage defaults hit home." Irish Times, Nov 8. Labov, W. 1966a. The Social Stratification of English in New YorkCity. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Lillo, Antonio. 2004. "Exploring rhyming slang inIreland." English World-Wide 25(2):273285. Looney, Fiona. 1991. "It ain't what you say, according toFiona Looney, but the way that you say it. Open trap can closedoors." Irish Independent, March 28. Lucy, John A., ed. 1993. Reflexive Language: Reported Speech andMetapragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macaulay, Ronald K. S. 1975. "Negative prestige, linguisticinsecurity, and linguistic self-hatred." Lingua 36:147-161. Moore, Robert E. 2007. "Images of Irish English in theformation of Irish publics, 1600-present." Irish Journal ofAnthropology 10(1): 18-29. --. n.d. "Mediatization and personhood in Irish English."In Asif Agha, ed. Mediatization as Cultural Form. O'Brien, Carl. 2006. "From Acholi to Zulu, Ireland a landof over 167 languages." Irish Times, March 25. O'Kelly, Ita. 1991. "Do you fancy a 'point' atthe 'boor'? Ita O'Kelly puts the accent on how we judgepeople by the way they speak. How you can set the right tone."Irish Independent, May 15. O'Toole, Fintan. 2009. Ship of Fools: How Corruption andStupidity Killed the Celtic Tiger. London: Faber. Power, Ed. 2005. "It's just like so the end of Irishaccents. Across the country people are abandoning their old-fashionedregional lilts and brogues for a modern D4 quasi-American twang createdby TV." Irish Independent, March 24. Silverstein, Michael. 1987. Monoglot 'Standard' inAmerica. Standardization and metaphors of linguistic hegemony. Chicago:Working Papers and Proceedings of the Center for Psychosocial Studies,no. 13. [Reprinted 1996 in D. Brenneis and R.K.S. Macaulay (eds.), TheMatrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology. Boulder, CO:Westview Press, pp. 284-306.] --. 2003. "Indexical order and the dialectics ofsociolinguistic life." Language & Communication 23:193-229. Stroud, Christopher. 2004. "Rinkeby Swedish and semilingualismin language ideological debates: A Bourdieuean perspective."Journal of Sociolingustics 8(2):196-214. Watt, Dominic. 2002. "'I don't speak with a Geordieaccent, I speak, like, the Northern accent:' Contact-inducedleveling in the Tyneside vowel system." Journal of Sociolinguistics6(1):44-63. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Fontana. Robert Moore University of Pennsylvania ENDNOTES (1) Research reported here was supported in 2007-2008 by DublinCity University's University Designated Research Centre (UDRC) viaan award to Professor Michael Cronin (Centre for Translation and TextualStudies) for a study of "The Politics of Accent in ContemporaryIrish Society." My gratitude to DCU and to Professor Cronin isrecorded here. Asif Agha, Steve Coleman, Colin Coulter, Michael Cronin,Luke Fleming, Judith Irvine, Willa Murphy, and Michael Silverstein areall thanked for their comments on this and/or earlier presentations ofthis material. The comments of two anonymous referees were extremelyhelpful. (2) Table 5.13, "Comparative vowel values of local, mainstreamand new Dublin English" (Hickey 2007: 357), with MOUTH data added(from Hickey 2007:329)]. (3) boards. ie. 2008-2009. Discussion thread: "D4 Accent--doesit bother you?" Initiated 7 April 2008 at 3.10 pro; most recentpost as of July 8, 2009 was on Feb 6, 2009 at 3:07 p.m. Original post by<stevoman>, 244 replies; 11,061 views. Accessed fromhttp://www.boards.ie/bulletin/showthread.php?t=2055270613 on August 9,2009. (4) foot.ie. 2007-2008. Discussion thread: "That new D4accent." Initiated 6 June 2007 at 9:15 a.m., last post on 13 March2008 at 4:59 p.m. Original post by <OwlsFan>, 41 replies. Accessedfrom http://foot.ie/forums/showthread.php?t=62532 on August 9, 2009. (5) Accessed from http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-jU0ZhKHTUo onAugust 9, 2009. (6) Shawshank is rhyming slang for 'wank'; TK Maxx is alow-end clothing retailer, here serving as rhyming slang for'jacks,' a colloquial term for a public toilet; Wesley isshort for The Old Wesley Rugby Club, a legendary Dublin 4 dancehall forteenagers; see Lillo 2004 for a discussion of Irish rhyming slang. (7) Accessed from http://www.youtube.com/user/Lukiebaggs on August9, 2009. (8) Labov's Index of Linguistic Insecurity was based on hisinformants' evaluations of 18 different words that can bepronounced in two different ways; subjects were asked to identify whichpronunciation s/he thinks is "correct," and whichpronunciation s/he "actually uses" (Labov 1966:476). AsMacaulay observes, "the most obvious problem is to know what therespondents understood by 'correct'" noting that"the two pronunciations of a number of them (e.g., tomato, vase,aunt, tune, new) could be taken as representing a contrast betweenBritish and American English" (Macaulay 1975:148). (9) The emblematic Geordie utterance is "The English divventwant we and the Scots winna have we" (Watt 2002:54)--andWart's Tyneside consultants readily offered up "evaluationssuch as 'if you were about to undergo brain surgery and met thesurgeon beforehand you would be horrified to hear him speaking in abroad Geordie dialect'" (from a Tyneside student; Watt2002:55); another opined that "'Geordie sounds like ordinaryEnglish spoken backwards'" (Watt 2002:55). (10) Though Rinkeby Swedish, like D4, can be characterized:"Rinkeby Swedish refers to an emergent variety of Swedish thatsupposedly originated in the borough of Rinkeby in NorthernStockholm.... RS is characterized by: a specific'foreign-sounding' phonology; lexical items borrowed from manydifferent languages; productive hybrid morphologies; and a typologicallyunmarked or simplified syntax and morphology in relation to standardSwedish" (Stroud 2004:199). (11) It was Morgan Kelly that the then Taoiseach (Prime Minister)Bertie Ahem had in mind on July 4th, 2007 when he ventured off-script totell the audience at the biennial conference of Ireland's largesttrade union that "Sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning isa lost opportunity. I don't know how people who engage in thatdon't commit suicide." He apologized later the same day:"That was a bad choice of words if I said it that way," hesaid. "I'm very involved with the suicide action groups,apologies if I said it that way. I was just using it as an example ofpeople who are always against things" (Edwards 2007). (12) The two "Civil War parties" are Fianna Fail andFianna Gael, the governing party for most of the Republic's historypost-1937, and the main opposition party, respectively;'Biffo' is a nickname for the current (November 2010)Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, and a disaparagement of his home County (anacronym: Big Ignorant Fucker From Offaly); 'Inda' is anickname for Enda Kenny, the leader of Fianna Gael (an imitation of hisCo Mayo accent).Table 2. Salient vowel contrasts in "local," "mainstream" and "new"Dublin English (after Hickey 2005b, 2007)2 Supraregional varieties Local DE ["Dub"] Mainstream DE New DE ["D4"]lexical setsPRICE [ei] [ai] [ai]CHOICE [ail [ail [ci], [oi]THOUGHT [a] [a:] [c:], [o:]GOAT [[??]c] [o[??]] [e[??]]MOUTH [a[??]] [[ee[??]] [[??][??]]Table 3. Alveolar stops vs dental fricatives (after Hickey 2005b,2007) "Supraregional" varieties Local DE ["Dub"] Mainstream DE New DE ["D4"]THINKER [tinke] [tigkee] [[??]inke]TINKER [tigke] [tingke] [tinke]BREATHE [bri:d] [bri:d] [bri:[??]]BREED [bri:d] [bri:d] [bri:d]