Aidan Doyle
University College Cork
Monday December 3, 2018 3:30pm
Room 1050 Jenkins Nanovic Hall
In this talk, Professor Aidan Doyle of University College Cork will take up the controversial subject of the language shift from Irish to English in 19th-century Ireland. He will argue that far from being a sudden and cataclysmic event, the change was well under way before 1800 and reflected the increasingly bilingual nature of Irish society at the time. His approach will be sociolinguistic rather than purely historical, with the idea that the same mechanisms are at work in modern multilingual communities as in 19th-century Ireland.