Limerick Co Limerick Female Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Limerick Co Limerick Female Conversation

Conversation

So we’re actually all from Limerick. I grew up in Limerick in Ireland. I have lived outside of Limerick for two months of my life, and I lived in Germany. And that was only in two thousand and nineteen. So my accent is very much a country Limerick accent, and that’s where I got it. And yeah, all of my family are from Limerick. And if we go back a little bit, I think on my dad’s side, my great grandparents, there might be some relations who are English. But that’s quite far back in our history. And yeah, pretty much everyone else is from Limerick. Yeah, so not too much history there. Okay, so I’ve actually just finished my degree in UL, so that’s the University of Limerick here. And I studied German, linguistics, and TESOL, so teaching English, and that’s what I do at the moment, I teach English. And that’s why I stayed in Limerick because of the University here. I didn’t want to go to another university. I do like Limerick, I think. It’s a small town in the sense that everyone… it’s… in any county in Ireland, it’s like a community. People are quite friendly to each other. You know other people. People will say hi to you on the street, even if they don’t know you. It’s just very community focused. And I did go to Dublin for a few weeks as well. I had a job there, and it’s just not the same in Dublin. People don’t really… they don’t really say good morning. They just kind of… They’re all in a rush up there, going places. Dublin is the capital. Whereas down in Limerick, it’s more, everyone’s a little bit slower, talking to each other, getting to know each other. And the city itself is quite small. We have one kind of high street, I suppose. But we don’t… we’re not like a typical European city in that we’re not very built up. It’s quite close to how it was built years ago. And the culture is pretty much the same. It’s all community based. And yeah, the buildings themselves, we don’t have skyscrapers or anything like that. It’s all the historical buildings that were built maybe fifty, sixty years ago. They’re all the same. 

So the city accent, the city center accent is quite nasally. If you actually wanted to look up an example of that, the Rubberbandits. They’re from Limerick, and they are a great example of the Limerick inner city accent. You’ll notice if anybody looks it up that I speak very differently to them. I can’t even put on the accent. It’s… to me it’s very strange. And it can be hard to understand, even for me, and I’m from Limerick. But no one in my family has that accent, but I… people in my school had that accent and yeah, it’s just very nasally. And that’s the only way I can really describe it. And if you do have a chance to look at the Rubberbandits, they have a lot of YouTube videos, and one of them has a podcast, so then you’d be able to hear the accent there as well.

Male: Do you feel like you hear a big difference generationally? Like older versus younger speakers from Limerick?

Oh, that’s an interesting question. I think now with the younger generations, there is a difference. For example, my boyfriend’s brother, he speaks with a slight American accent, because of YouTube videos. And he… and his friends also speak with a slight American accent now as well, because of YouTube, TikTok, things like that, they’re hearing American accents all the time. And it’s quite interesting to listen to him sometimes. And he’ll say words, like he’ll talk about vacation, even though Irish people don’t use the word vacation. But he’s heard it before, so he thinks that’s the word we all use. So with that generation, so kind of like under tens, they… there is a difference there. Whereas with my grandparents, I wouldn’t hear a difference in the way we speak or an accent change. I think it’s the same. Yeah, I think it would be the same. It’s interesting. The American accent’s gonna take over.

Male: I’m sorry.

It’s not you, it’s okay. There would be a difference in the accent, especially if you’re from kind of a farming background. There is actually a difference in the accent. And another YouTube channel to look at is… Oh no, I can picture them, and I can’t think of their name. I can send it to you afterwards. I can’t remember. But you can hear the difference in the accent. It’s more kind of… it’s kind of fast paced and they’re not… some people don’t pronounce all the letters in the words. And it’s kind of trying to get out the words as fast as possible. And unfortunately, I don’t know… I don’t remember the linguistic terms for it anymore. Since I graduated, it’s just gone out of my head. But there is… there definitely is a difference, and I would hear the difference as well. And my accent is actually, it’s quite different to other people in Limerick, because they would mainly have kind of a nasally sound when they’re speaking. But I just don’t. I don’t know why I don’t, but I don’t. I think because my parents don’t speak like that so I suppose I never picked it up.

Male: And your family has a farm?

No, no, not my family, no. But if… So I grew up with people like in my school who would have had farms in their families. It’s quite common, because my school was in the countryside, so we got a lot of different children there. And yeah, they would speak a little bit differently than the rest of us. And not really sure why or how or maybe it’s from maybe meeting other farmers from other parts of Ireland, and they would’ve grown up like meeting those people. That could be it. An accent that... an Irish accent that’s very hard to understand is the Kerry accent. I think it’s the hardest accent to understand. And sometimes if you hear a Limerick person speaking it’s… who grew up in the countryside in a farm, it’s kind of like they’re mixing between a Limerick accent and a Kerry accent. I don’t know why, but that’s… to me that’s how it sounds.

Limerick City Co Limerick Female Reading

Reading

The Rainbow Passage

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Limerick City Co Limerick Female Conversation

Conversation

I’m from Limerick City originally, but I live in Galway, so my accent has kind of flat. We get a lot of people in from all over Galway, so there’s a lot of accents there as well. I’m a hairdresser, so we get people in from the Aran Islands, and that would be kind of a hard accent to understand sometimes, because those people are fluent in Irish. So they’d be fluent in Gaelic. We came from Galway. We’re down in Killarney just for the night. Came down on a trip away. He just finished his degree in college so congratulations to him. Yeah, I work near a hospital. We get a lot of people in. I work near a university as well, so we get a lot of people in there from college as well. Yeah, you’d know straightaway when somebody’s from Dublin. Yeah, definitely. And even people in Dublin know straightaway when you’re not from Dublin. So. And even Dublin City itself has a lot of different accents within it. And you can kinda tell, even where in Dublin where they’re from within the city as well. So yeah. Limerick, yeah, there’s good nightlife in Limerick if you like going out. There’s cool bars. Dolan’s is a good pub to check out. They have live music there every night. They do a bit of traditional Irish music and as well as alternative music. So I definitely recommend checkin’ that out. King John’s Castle is always cool to see. It’s medieval castle right in the city. It’s good for shopping, good for food. Yeah.