Drifting towards Ambiguity: A Closer Look at Palatalisation in L2 Irish

This article focuses on palatalisation in the Irish spoken by Dublin-based bilinguals for whom English is their first language. All informants had a good knowledge of both Irish and English; however, Irish was their second language, used less frequently in everyday communication. Most Dubliners start learning Irish at school; only a few informants had the opportunity to speak it at home, but even then the language was not used outside class on a regular basis. The study showed that most deviations in the distribution of palatalised and non-palatalised consonants in the speech of Dublin bilinguals were of the palatalisation absence type. Such deviations were especially frequent next to back and mid-back vowels. On the other hand, a palatalised consonant was often pronounced instead of a non-palatalised one next to a front vowel. Previous research suggests that these tendencies also apply in weak positions (Snesareva 2014a; 2014b). Consequently, even though in traditional Irish dialects palatalisation is not position-bound, in the speech of Dublin bilinguals there is correlation between the palatalisation of a consonant and the quality of its neighbouring vowel. However, such consonant distribution was not encountered in all contexts: even those informants whose speech had deviations used palatalisation properly in some contexts. This means that position-bound use of palatalisation is still a tendency rather than an entrenched feature of Dublin Irish.