"You're a bit of all right, aren't you?" says Hamm hopefully to Clov in one of the more overtly sexual moments of Beckett's play Endgame, only to receive the melancholy reply: "A smithereen." The extremely English "bit of all right" is counterbalanced, or rather, shattered into multiple fragments by the Hiberno-English "smithereen".
"Smithereen" is one of many words whose mixed, indefinable status - it is not, in fact, of Irish origin - forms one of the main themes of Prof Terence Dolan's A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, published recently by Gill and Macmillan at £25. Naturally, a large number of the entries are words which have come straight from Irish into English as spoken in Ireland, with scarcely any change of meaning: "flahoolagh", "maryah", "plamas" are fairly widely used examples. These words appear to have been transferred, rather than others, because they conveyed a richness and nuance of meaning which any equivalent English word did not seem to carry. "Omadhawn" conveys resonances that words such as "fool" and "idiot" don't quite manage, while "maryah" plumbs depths of scepticism and disillusionment that nothing in English seems to reach. Joyce's great statement: "Gob, flahoolagh entertainment, don't be talking", is almost entirely in Hiberno-English, from "gob", the shortened form of "begob", (itself a corruption of "by God") to "don't be talking", an almost untranslatable phrase, again conveying the persistent motif of scepticism.
Irish substratum
The main difference between Standard and Hiberno-English, then, is the Irish language substratum underlying it, both in terms of vocabulary and in terms of grammar and syntax: "I'm after eating my tea", for instance, being a literal translation of "Ta me tar eis mo the a ithe". The word "tea" in that example, by the way, is itself a Hiberno-English term, referring to what is still in many parts of Ireland the main evening meal. (More than one translator of Joyce has come to grief over it.) The Irish element alone would suffice to give English as used in Ireland a very distinctive colouring.
However, this is far from being the full story. Hiberno-English also incorporates elements from earlier forms of English which have disappeared from the modern language or remain only as dialect variants. An example would be to "barrack", meaning to brag or boast, whose origins are in English dialect, but whose use now seems to be confined to Northern Ireland. Another one, used by Seamus Heaney, is "bleb", meaning as noun a blister, and as verb to bubble and swell up. The preservation of these forms in a conservative society, while they gradually faded out in the more rapidly changing country of origin, contributes in large measure to the uniqueness of Hiberno-English.
Variety and richness
Terence Dolan, professor of Old and Middle English at UCD, had long been struck by the variety and richness of the Irish use of English. As a teacher in an Irish university, he was particularly well placed to notice the many differences in usage and idiom among the students from all parts of the island. His wide reading in Anglo-Irish literature also contributed to his sense of the uniqueness of this linguistic material. Having taken on the immense task of codifying this richness between the covers of a book, he began by establishing a network of informants around Ireland, whence he derived many local expressions and idioms. He also availed of printed sources, particularly contemporary Irish writing. His dictionary aims to be the record of a living language (covering such standards as "the crack" and "your man"), still evolving, still changing; it is in no sense the mausoleum of a dead one.
And while the dictionary does lay claim to accuracy, it does not pretend to completeness. Of its nature it is a work that is infinitely expandable; even since its publication some weeks ago, many more terms have been coming in.
Nor is it at all a standardising or universalising work; by definition, that is not possible. One of the main features of Hiberno-English is its localism, the fact that many works and phrases are found only in certain parts of Ireland, and are entirely unknown in others. It might almost be possible to speak of dialects of Hiberno-English, although the language is not quite as stratified as that. It is unlikely that "pludan", meaning a small pool left by the rain, is used much outside Kerry, but it has its valid place in a work such as this. The question of localisms brings up the issue of the status of Hiberno-English: is it a language of its own? Not quite. Is it a dialect of English? Terence Dolan does not like to describe it thus, feeling that a discourse which possesses its own principles of grammar and syntax, one, as he says, that is "so strong and rich", is something more than a dialect of another language. This difficulty of definition, which might at first appear as a weakness, is, as with the literature, in fact a source of enormous strength, making of Hiberno-English a flexible, accommodating medium, open to all kinds of influences (some perhaps as yet undreamt) and reducible to none.
Standard English
Prof Dolan's parents were from place called Coppenagh in Co Cavan. He was brought up in London and studied and taught at The Queen's College, Oxford, before coming to UCD. He is himself a Standard English speaker, which helps him to make necessary decisions on what is or is not a Hiberno-English word or expression. His motivation for this project was a determination to produce what he calls a "distillation of the wonderful speech" of the people of Ireland. Sadly, what might be called the main indigenous languages of Ireland - Irish and, perhaps more problematically, Ulster-Scots - are at least to some extent perceived as the badges of opposing forces on the island. (My comment, not his, and not one with which he would necessarily agree.) What Terence Dolan does feel, though, and feels with an infectious passion, is that Hiberno-English is the common - and priceless - heritage of all the people of Ireland - to whom, very appropriately, his Dictionary is dedicated.