THE ANGLO-IRISH LANGUAGE 



{A consideration of Dr. P. W. Joyce's hook 

 "English as we Syeak it in Ireland ") 



It would be as easy to coax the stars out of the sky 

 into your hat as to catch the heart of a language and 

 put it in a phrase-book. Ireland has two languages ; 

 one of them is her own by birthright ; the second of 

 them is believed to be English, which is a fallacy; 

 it is a fabric built by Irish architects with English 

 bricks, quite unlike anything of English construc- 

 tion. The Anglo-Irish dialect is a passably good 

 name for it, even though it implies an unseemly 

 equality between artist and material, but it is some- 

 thing more than a dialect, more than an affair of 

 pidgin English, bad spelling, provincialisms, and 

 preposterous grammar; it is a tongue, pliant and 

 subtle, expressing with every breath the mind of its 

 makers. When at its richest, in the mouths of the 

 older peasants, it owes most to Shakespearean England 

 — not in amount, but in quality. These old, quiet 

 people, fading now from us like twilight, with their 

 hearts full of undisturbed impressions, and their 

 memories clear and warm like mellowed engravings, 

 still use some of tlie English that came to Ireland 

 with Spenser, with Raleigh, with the Cromwellians, 

 the men who spoke the speech of Jolm Bunyan, who 

 came, as Macaulay has said, with tlic praises of God 

 in their mouths and a two-edged sword in their 

 hands. 



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