100% natural upspeak

TheLastStraw: It's always refreshing to hear teenagers criticising the youth of today.

It saves us older people from having to do it, and leaves us more time to worry about things such as the hair growing out of our ears. But I have to take gentle issue with Conor Behan, aged 17 from Co Carlow, who in the Teen Times column of The Irish Times a while back decried the popularity among his peers of "upspeak" ("Leave Upspeak to the, like, Americans").

Conor is not the first to attribute this global phenomenon to US TV programmes such as Friends and Sex and the City. He's not the first to complain about the way upspeak turns a simple statement such as (his example) "Yesterday I stubbed my toe - it was really painful" into a series of questions: "Yesterday? I stubbed my toe? It was really painful?" But I suggest he's wrong when he says this "irritating and baffling Americanism . . . perverts our natural accent".

In the south-Border area I come from, where our accents are 100 per cent natural, we've been using upspeak for decades - long before television. We don't go so far as to claim we invented the phenomenon, mainly because there's no prospect of making money out of it. But in the area around my native Carrickmacross in Co Monaghan, stretching north and east to include the satellite towns of Castleblayney, Crossmaglen, and Dundalk, we talk in little but upspeak.

We do this by using the word "hi" (or even "high") at the end of our sentences, for no apparent reason. This is upspeak in every sense. And yes, the effect is to turn statements into implied questions, so that the example already cited becomes, in the Border region: "Yesterday I stubbed my toe, hi(?) It was really painful, hi(?)"

Outsiders have sometimes poked fun at us (Queston: What does Santa Claus say in Dundalk? Anwer: "Ho Ho Ho, Hi(?)") But it seems to me that the hi-habit derives from our painful shyness and from a need for constant reassurance: the very same qualities that make upspeak so popular among teenagers. So insecure are we in the south-east Ulster counties that we not only use the "hi" word to turn statements into questions, we even use it in sentences that are questions already - "Are you going to the Oasis, hi(?)" - in case the listener misses the question mark and just ignores us.

Of course, the "hi" thing may be part of a wider Irish phenomenon of putting words at the end of sentences for no apparent reason. Most Irish people will be familiar with the sarcastic, end-of-sentence deployment of "now", for instance. The effect can occasionally be chilling, as when a man casually mentions to his wife that he's "having the lads around later for a few beers and a game of cards", and she replies: "Oh, are you now?" She doesn't mean "now" as in "immediately". And neither does he. In fact, he's already made it clear that the lads will be coming around "later". But for some reason, the combination of the stressed verb, followed by the deceptively innocuous end-of-sentence adverb, will be enough to convey to him that the lads-around-for-drinks plan needs revision.

It's all about nuance, which is why foreign visitors are often baffled by the way we in Ireland speak. The very same word and word-position can have dramatically different meanings here, as in the following example. WB Yeats: "I will arise and go now." (Non-sarcastic) Mrs WB Yeats: "Oh will you now?" (Sarcastic).

Another illustration of our habit of putting words at the end of sentences that would appear complete without them is "but", as in: "You can't park there, but." Arguably a form of upspeak, this is common in Donegal and other parts of Ulster and, probably through Irish emigration, in places such as Queens in New York. And unlike "hi", the end-of-sentence "but" is well recognised by linguists. In fact, while researching this topic, I came across what looked like an interesting article on the end-of-sentence "but" in the online Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. According to the abstract, it was from a paper entitled The Influence of Semantic and Syntactic Context Constraints on Lexical Selection by Van den Brink and Hagoort, J. Unfortunately you needed a subscription to read the full article, so I didn't bother. Sorry if I raised readers' hopes there.

I could mention the famous Co Kerry habit of answering questions with questions, but I won't. My general point is that upspeak is not necessarily an irritating Americanism, or an Americism at all. It may even be as Irish as Halloween. I'm not saying that people from south-east Ulster exported it to the US and that now the Yanks are selling it back to us at a mark-up. I'm just saying it's a possibility, hi(?).