Sources of Belfast English

The English spoken in Belfast is an amalgam of features which come from the two main English communities in Ulster with independent traits only found in the capital city. The following is a list of features which can be clearly attributed to one of the two main English-language sources in Ulster (Milroy 1981: 25–26).

The sociolinguistic developments in Belfast English, which were described in ground-breaking studies by James and Lesley Milroy in terms of social networks in the 1970s and early 1980s, are outside the scope of the present study, for appropriate references, consult the relevant section of Hickey (2002).

Mention should also be made of the distinct intonational patterns in northern Irish English. In her study, Rahilly (1997) notes a general predominance of rises in intonation in Belfast which contrast explicitly with falls in the south of Britain. Indeed the high numbers of rising nuclei and level tails in tone sequences are regarded as typical of the Anglo-Irish group of dialects rather than the British group. Rahilly concludes that the primary cue to prominence in Belfast is a high pitch, but with much less movement than with nuclei in Received Pronunciation.