It is thus doubtful that it was Irish English influence that drove the change towards first-person will. Irish English does not seem to be unusual in this respect, however, for Dollinger’s (2008) Canadian data suggests a similar development in the early nineteenth century which may indicate that this was a more general trend, at least in colonial Englishes. However, usage in Irish English changed in the nineteenth century by the 1880s, will accounted for over 80% of Irish English tokens. Cross-varietal comparison with similar letter data from other colonial Englishes of the period – US English (Kytö 1990, 1991) and Canadian English (Dollinger 2008) – and with north-west English English (Dollinger 2008) shows very similar cross-varietal distribution of first-person shall and will. In eighteenth-century Irish English, shall did indeed predominate, being used at a rate of over 70%. The change patterns geographically, socially, and stylistically (depending on the intimacy of the relationship between letter-writer and recipient). The letter data reveals a pattern similar to that found in the literary data of the CIE: use of shall/will in Ireland underwent rapid change between 17. Over this period, Ireland not only became English-speaking, but the spread of rudimentary literacy meant that members of lower social strata began to write letters that can be used as linguistic evidence of Irish English. Other major developments in the period include Union with Great Britain (1800), Catholic Emancipation (1829), the establishment of the National School system in the 1830s, the Great Famine of the 40s, and an increasing swell of mass emigration from the 1810s onwards. The study sheds light on the development of first-person shall/will usage in Ireland over an important century that covers the main period of language shift from Irish to English, effectively creating new communities of English-speakers in Ireland. The main body of our study examines shall/will usage in CORIECOR (a Corpus of Irish English Correspondence), using personal letters from 1761-90, the 1830s, and the 1880s. And our own pilot study using the literary (mainly drama) Corpus of Irish English (Hickey 2003) suggests that the present-day Irish English usage witnessed by ICE-Ireland has emerged only since the nineteenth century. However, a study of newspaper data by Facchinetti (2000) suggests there was no difference between Irish and British usage in the nineteenth century. The only empirical study of shall/will in Irish English to date (Kallen & Kirk 2001), based on ICE-Ireland and making comparisons with ICE-GB, certainly shows a sharp contrast between Irish and British English along precisely the lines of normative accounts. Shift towards will with first-person subjects in North American Englishes, and more recently also in British English, has been attributed to the influence of Irish immigrants. That rule makes a distinction between shall with first-person subjects and will with all other grammatical persons. Normative grammarians from Webster to Alford and Gowers have claimed that even educated Irish users of English were incapable of using shall and will correctly according to the rule formulated, possibly on the basis of actual south-eastern British English usage, in the early seventeenth century.
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