Intonation of Western Irish Accents

The intonation of a western Irish accent is actually very similar to a southern Irish accent - I like to think of western Irish intonation as "Southern Irish Light."

---the photo is from one of my trips to Ireland for dialect recordings. The pub was purely for business reasons...

Here's a transcript of the video:

Hey, Jim Johnson for Accent Help here, and I want to talk a little bit about the intonation for many of the accents of the Republic of Ireland.

Now it tends to be a bit different than when you get into Dublin. When you get into that far northeast part of the Republic of Ireland, you have a little bit of a different intonation for many speakers there that is a little bit more like the accents of Northern Ireland where you get this thing that tends to... has a tendency to go up at the end of things where you have a little bit of a lift for a Dublin speaker where it tends to go up at the end.

When you get outside of that and you go south and west, and you just go to the other parts of Ireland, what you tend to get is something very similar to the intonation that most Americans have, so very very similar in that most Americans, most Americans have an intonation something along this line where it's a little bit of a rainbow. It's a rainbow with a big old crash at the end. This is what tends to happen in American speech. You'll get this sort of bounce in the rainbow, but in the end it just crashes and burns. In fact, we go right through the gold at the end of the rainbow, and we dig to the center of the earth sometimes. That's what I like to call the American Clunk.

So what you tend to get in most of Ireland is you get something very similar to that but it doesn't tend to have that full-on clunk, so instead with an Irish accent, you tend to get something along this line. When you get to the Republic of Ireland for most speakers, what you'll tend to get in most of the Republic of Ireland is this sort of rainbow intonation.

Now sometimes when you get more to someone who's got more of an old school or very rural sort of sound then they start to get on the verge of becoming that that Lucky Charms sort of thing, right. So the Lucky Charms is very much going over that rainbow. Well, in general it doesn't tend to do that. It's actually much more of something along this line where you get a slight, very much like american speech, where you get this slight tendency in that direction.

Now you do still get variations just like Americans can have something that goes up, so for an Irish person, you could get something that goes up as well, so you can have those variations, but the primary intonation (that I have made such a mess of here) but that primary intonation is this slight sort of buoyant launch that happens, that happens usually on operative words.

This is true with most accents. With most accents when you look at an operative word, that's where the intonation pattern comes out the most, and with most Irish accents - I won't necessarily say the most in numbers because there's such high population in and around Dublin - but most of the rest of the Republic of Ireland, sans the far north stuff like Donegal, which is much more of an intonation like Northern Ireland. But most of it, you get something along the line of where you get a slight sort of buoyancy that happens when you have an operative word like that, and it'll tend to have a slightly downward energy without giving in fully to the American Clunk not that full-on crash that Americans do.

So that is incredibly similar to the American intonation that is generally used. And again you get variations on this, but this is the major pattern that I hear from speakers from Cork and I hear from speakers from Limerick and Kerry and Galway and various parts of heading towards the south and the west of Ireland.

If you'd like info more on this Southwest Irish accent, you can look for those materials and many others at accenthelp.com.