Linguistic identity and the study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the making

This paper builds on the findings from a larger research project that analyses written data extracted from a corpus of emigrant letters. This preliminary study is an exploration of the Irish Emigration Database (IED), an electronic word-searchable collection of primary source documents on Irish emigration to North America (USA and Canada) in the 18th and 19th centuries. The IED contains a variety of original material including emigrant letters, newspaper articles, shipping advertisements, shipping news, passenger lists, official government reports, family papers, births, deaths and marriages and extracts from books and periodicals. The paper focuses specifically on the sections dealing with transcriptions of Emigrant Letters sent home and Letters to Irish Emigrants abroad, from which CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence, is developed. Our study is intended as a first step towards an empirical diachronic account of an important period for the formation of Irish English. A close look at the ocurrence in the corpus of some features such as the use of the progressive form (e.g. I am reading) and the uses of will vs. shall reveals that these features were already part of what is known as Irish English nowadays. Our study covers the period from the early eighteenth century to 1840, a timespan that stretches from the beginning to the middle of the main period of language shift from Irish to English.