Recent developments

The major instance of language change in present-day Ireland is undoubtedly the shift in pronunciation of Dublin English. To understand the workings of this shift one must realize that in the course of the 1980s and 1990s the city of Dublin, as the capital of the Republic of Ireland, underwent an unprecedented expansion in population size and in relative prosperity with a great increase in international connections to and from the metropolis. The immigrants to the city, who arrived there chiefly to avail of the job opportunities resulting from the economic boom, formed a group of socially mobile, weak-tie speakers and their section of the city’s population has been a key locus for language change. The change which arose in the last two decades of the 20^th century was reactive in nature: fashionable speakers began to move away in their speech from their perception of popular Dublin English, a classic case of dissociation in an urban setting.