As part of the 2004 EU expansion, the UK and Ireland allowed immediate, unrestricted labour market access to citizens of new member states such as Poland and Lithuania. The economic boom in Ireland also attracted large numbers of Chinese students pursuing third level qualifications during the same period. While the majority of variationist sociolinguistic analyses focus on the speech of native speakers, the acquisition of variation by non-native speakers has also been gaining ground (Howard, Mougeon and Dewaele 2013). This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the acquisition of Irish English by Chinese, Lithuanian and Polish migrants, ranging in age from 12 to 49, and residing in cities within two distinct dialect areas in the North of Ireland (Armagh) and the Republic of Ireland (Dublin). There has been no research to date that comparatively examines language acquisition by non-native speakers on both sides of the Irish border, despite the similarity of their recent migratory patterns.
This paper specifically investigates the acquisition of discourse ‘like’, which has been shown to pattern idiosyncratically within Irish English (Corrigan 2010; Kallen 2013; Schweinberger, 2015; Siemund, Maier and Schweinberger, 2009) and also across other varieties of English (e.g. D'Arcy, 2005; Tagliamonte et al. 2005), particularly as regards its variable syntactic position: clause-initial (1a), vs. clause-medial (1b) vs. clause-final (1c). For comparative purposes, native speakers are included in the analyses and a variety of intra- and extra-linguistic constraints are investigated.
(1a) Like, these days they can travel back and forth and s- see for themselves but still (Agnieszka, Dublin)
(1b) They wear like socks and like sandals and like long dresses and they smell (Polly, Armagh).
(1c) It’s weird, it’s really weird like (Elzbieta, Armagh)
Key research questions are: (i) What are the native speaker constraints on ‘like’ across the different dialect zones?; (ii) Do non-native speakers replicate or re-allocate the constraints on ‘like’ by native speakers?; (iii) To what extent are typically significant factors in Second Language Acquisition, such as age of arrival, proficiency in English, or length of residence, playing a role in the acquisition of variation?
