Scholars and students of the English of Ireland are already in the debt of Richard Wall; previous to this important book he has given us An Anglo-Irish Dialect Glossary for Joyce's Works and A Dictionary and Glossary for the Irish Literary Revival.
This present work is an extension of this corpus. The author has felt impelled to explore the vocabulary of Irish literature in English since its beginnings about 400 years ago, to the present; his earliest illustrative quotation is one from Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland (c. 1596), and the latest from works published last year.
The English of Ireland is not monolithic and its various forms are discussed in Professor Wall's introduction, as well as the perennial academic debate about what to call the various interwoven strands of Irish English. In the body of the work Anglo-Irish, the rural language whose vocabulary is based on Irish and English, and which was thought comical and gross until Lady Gregory, Synge, Hyde, Yeats, Somerville and Ross and others, considered it a stimulating creation and a worthwhile achievement, lies here together with the other strands in this most complex linguistic weave: what I call Hiberno-English, a legacy of the English planters of the 17th century which has given us our more urban and standard variety in the south, and, in Ulster, influenced in places by Irish, Scots Gaelic or Scots, the rich and conservative urban and rural language of that province; and lastly a purer Ulster Scots, still thriving in places, and closer to Alan Ramsay than to Burns or Hogg.
Dr Wall's reason for expanding his already extensive work on Irish dialects is that many foreign critics and editors underestimate the extent and implication of the difference between Irish English and British Standard English, and in doing so, misunderstand and misinterpret texts.
He also felt the need for a comprehensive dictionary because dialect English appears in varying degrees in the works of all four of our Nobel laureates; and because more and more of our writers are tending to be less afraid of what Heaney called the "cultural anxiety" induced by the use of dialect, an anxiety John Hewitt had put behind him in 1948: "There are things/which need such names to draw them to the lights . . . a deep world emerging into sight."
The use of dialect, however, poses great problems for the lexicographer, and one of the greatest of these is spelling. The difficulty of a rapprochement between English orthography and Irish phonetic structure is exemplified in the word alilu; found in a vast number of texts from Richard Head's play of 1663 Hic et Uhique to Benedict Kiely's story A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly, it has 21 forms in this book.
Three hundred and forty pages of words and their variants; defined, and given an etymology and a rhetorical function; given, too, a local habitation and a location in our literature - this is a splendid work by any standard.
A word of praise, too, for publisher Colin Smythe for his continued support for what the author of our greatest dialect poem called the "lyric and themodious soft anglo iris of the vals".
Diarmaid ╙ Muirithe is an academic and an Irish Times columnist