It has long been recognised that many English words (such as slew, smidgeon, smithereens, galore, whiskey and slogan) emerged from Irish, and so it was astonishing that the recently-published New Oxford Dictionary included very little Hiberno-English.
Even Andrew Dalby's excellent new Dictionary of Languages, a reference on more than 400 languages and language groups, gives Hiberno-English only a paragraph.
Not that I'm campaigning for status for Hiberno-English from the EU Office of Minority Languages, as has that mythical beast of Ullans, or Ulster Scots. (Representing that bizarre tongue, a speaker on the Talkback show on Radio Ulster recently managed to translate the Women's Coalition as the Wee'nfolks Clique.) But there is no doubt the version of the Queen's English (itself a vast, partially standardised creole) spoken throughout the island is deeply contaminated by Irish.
Hiberno-English has all the regional dialects, accents, inflections, euphemisms, turns of phrase; humour and bitterness; history and landscape one could wish for. It's a mindset which comes with the territory and even those who have barely the cupla focal, often have a mellifluous vocabulary of mar dheas, plamas, or miadh (bad luck).
Lecturer in Hiberno-English, Terence Dolan, Professor of Old and Middle English at UCD has now produced the curious Dictionary of Hiberno-English, which relies heavily on written sources; the immortal chestnuts of Yeats, Joyce and O'Casey; and contemporary writers such as Seamus Heaney, Frank McCourt, Maeve Binchy and Roddy Doyle.
He sees Hiberno-English as conservative in that it maintains usages from early Modern English, when the Tudor conquest and the plantation began the long, slow enforcement of the new tongue. By the Famine, roughly half the eight million population spoke only Irish - but this was precisely the sector most decimated by starvation, disease and emigration.
Middle and early Modern English (MoE) forms linger on in Hiberno-English agricultural words such as beestings (the first milk from a cow after calving) or graip (a digging fork). Same goes for cog (to cheat at an exam), bowsie (a quarrelsome drunkard), or "to make a hames of" something - from the awkward, old, wooden collar-pieces for a horse.
You get the feeling from the book that Dolan spent a lot of time in the Kerry Gaeltacht, and much of this Irish percolates into the macaronic, Trom agus Eadrom-like use of Irish loanwords such as raim eis, cogar mogar (intrigue), raispin (a miser) and piteog (an effeminiate man), pluc (a fat cheek, as in "she has fine rosy plucs"), etc.
Some phrases are easy to spot in translation: "on the pig's back" (from ar mhuin na muice); or constructions such as "to let on" (from ligim orm, I pretend). Meanwhile, the loanword process, Dolan points out, goes both ways, with crack, which crept in from early Modern English, when it meant "loud conversation, bragging talk". Apparently, it was only recently reintroduced into Hiberno-English, and even Irish (craic), in the mistaken belief it is Irish for high-spirited entertainment.
And Dolan doesn't fight shy of taboo words, used with such gusto in Hiberno-English; everything from the informative entry on blackguards to his jaunt through the F word. He breezily demonstrates the HE pronunciation of faeces as in ["]a crock of shite["]; while in an extended entry under hoor, he notes how the word has transmuted from its pejorative, gender-specific literal meaning to something approaching affection (["]ah, he's a dacent hoor["]).
Gratifyingly, there are quite a few Corkisms such as "gutty" (defined softly as an unpleasant person) or "flah", as in the immortal punchline, "Sher don't I flah ye and buy ye chips?" Dublin gets a fair look-in with words such as mot, shaping (aggressive showing off) and game ball and there are many familiar to me from my Wexford-born grandmother - glare, the white of an egg; pegging or throwing, stones; groodles, the dregs of soup.
Sadly, many pungent Ulsterisms such as mucker, shkitter or slabber don't make it to Dolan's book, although there are occasional flashes, all the way from Shinnner (Sinn Fein folk) back to "I'd as lief (gladly) do this as anything else". Nonetheless, Dolan has produced an interesting opener on an enormous subject at a time when, thanks to more affordable travel, press, radio and TV, the rich, regional variations of Hiberno-English are now fading fast - quare yoke and all as it once was.
A Dictionary of Hiberno-English by Terence Dolan is published by Gill & Macmillan, price £25