When I watch interviews with Irish people, it seems that they tend to pronounce words that begin with "th" as if the the "t" and "h" were each pronounced rather than the sound native English speakers would make. Thus when say they "things" it sounds mostly like "tings"

But In my PDF of "Teach yourself Irish", words that start with "th" tend to be pronounced as if they "t" was not there.

"Thánamair" sounds something like "Hawn-ah-mer"

Any insights into this would be great. Guh raibh maith agat!!

Whatever about their ability to speak Irish, all Irish people (other than, maybe, some naturalised citizens) are native speakers of English. Most Americans and Canadians, when speaking English, pronounce rhotic "r" in postvocalic position, but we wouldn't say that they do this "rather than the sound native English speakers would make".



Not quite. It sounds to you like "tings", because you (I am guessing) didn't grow up speaking a dialect of English which does this. Irish people can distinguish very easily between these two sounds because they are distinct phonemes which they're used to hearing. If they sound the same to you, it is because they are very close phonemes, one of which isn't used in your own accent or dialect.



Irish is a different language to English. Of course it uses letter combinations in different ways.

Americans and Canadians speak dialects of English that can be traced back to English settlers. Irish English, at least in its original most Hiberno- form, was just poorly learned English. Pronouncing three as tree is just poor English - and stems from the fact there weren't good resources including CDs to learn from in 19th century Ireland. While it is true that later generations of Irishmen grew up speaking this poor English, that doesn't make it an equivalent of American English. Peadar Ua Laoghaire mentions poor English spoken natively by Irishmen in Mo Sgéal Féin - in the passage where he says: na daoine is lú ciall in Éirinn, na daoine gan Bhéarla gan Ghaelainn. And he discusses the "do be" thing for "be" in a habitual sentence. He of course argues that children brought up speaking Hiberno-English should not have been insulted by the inspector, as their parents and teachers were doing their best.

You could compare it to Indian English, where Indians sound like they're saying Ganada instead of Canada. In fact, I don't think they are saying Ganada; they're using a non-aspirated k. Indian languages do have unaspirated k's (romanised as k) and aspirated k's (romanised as kh), and so this is a distinction they could have got had their textbooks and resources highlighted it in the 19th century. And although Indian English appears L2 (second-language), I believe there are some Indians who speak Indian English as their main language and may be L1 speakers of this poorly pronounced variety of English.

It should be pointed out that Hiberno-English is not as strong as it once was. Parts of Ireland are under heavy influence from UK/US TV, for example, and is not the case that every Irishman will say three as tree. Maybe Ade can tell us her impression of the proportion using that pronunciation? And what parts of the country? And whether it is declining? Over the next century, some distinctly Irish features of Irish English will decline further.

It should also be pointed out that parts of Ireland have been English speaking since the early Middle Ages, including Wexford and maybe parts of Dublin, Kinsale and a few other places. So Hiberno-English is a mix between poor learning, Gaelic influences, some 19th century features and maybe even some older features that reflect English as spoken for 700 years or more by English settlers in parts of Ireland.

I'm not sure from this whether or not you're suggesting that Irish people are not native speakers of English. Regardless of how English was learned 6 -10 generations ago across most of Ireland, all people who grow up in Ireland speaking English at home, learning it from English speaking parents, are native speakers of it. As are Indians who learn Indian varieties of English as their primary language. Whether or not you consider this "poorly pronounced" is a matter of your own personal opinion, and I'm happy to leave you with it.



Actually I think your impression would be better here. As I was suggesting above, Irish people don't have any problem hearing a difference between Irish speakers pronouncing "t" versus "th", even if they sound the same to you. You, presumably, do clearly hear a distinction between the Irish alveo-dental "th" and the Anglo-American dental "th", though this is not as obvious to me. I perceive the two sounds being the same thing unless really concentrating on it, in a similar way to how I suspect you perceive the Irish "th" and "t" sounding the same.



This particular feature, alveo-dental "th" probably comes from Old or Middle Irish, possibly via Anglo-Norman English.

What you seem to be almost saying is that ‘th’ in Irish is pronounced as if the ‘t’ does not exist, and that ‘th’ in Hiberno-English is pronounced as if the ‘h’ does not exist. Such a guideline would end up being true most of the time, even if this isn’t really what’s going on.

In reality, ‘th’ does not represent a ‘t’ sound followed by a ‘h’ sound in either Irish or English. Instead (in both languages), ‘th’ should be treated as a digraph i.e. two adjoining letters that represents a single sound. In both languages, the letter h is used merely to indicate a shift in the pronunciation of the preceding consonant from how that consonant is normally pronounced to a related sound. In that sense, it is similar to the use of diacritics in some languages (e.g. the síneadh fada in Irish) to alter the pronunciation of a letter. In fact, in Irish in the past, a dot over the consonant (the ponc séimhithe) has been used instead of the letter ‘h’ after the consonant.

The use of the letter ‘h’ to alter the pronunciation of a consonant dates back to Classical Latin, when the digraphs ph, th and ch were used to represent aspirated consonants in words borrowed from Greek. Latin didn’t have letters to represent these consonant sounds and so the letter of the nearest (unaspirated) sound in Latin was used, followed by the letter h, since it was perceived that these borrowed consonants had a h-like quality. Later, when the Latin alphabet was used to write other European languages, the letter h was sometimes similarly used after consonant letters to represent sounds for which no letter existed in the Latin alphabet. So for example, English has th, sh, ch, wh.

In standard English, hard t (e.g. in ‘tin’) is pronounced as an alveolar plosive, whereas soft t (e.g in ‘thin’) is pronounced as a dental fricative. So, there are two points of distinction between the two sounds. (Note with plosives, there is a complete blockage, followed by release, of the airstream, whereas with fricatives the airstream is not completely blocked, in that some air leaks through. Hence, fricatives can be sustained but plosives cannot.)

In Irish, a h after a consonant indicates that the consonant is lenited (aka softened). In the case of plosives, the lenition of a plosive originally meant that the plosive was transformed into the corresponding fricative. Therefore ‘th’ in Irish was ironically pronounced either the same or at least very close to how ‘th’ is pronounced in standard English, apart from the fact that there were two versions – a slender (palatalised) version and broad (velarised) version. However, these two th sounds disappeared in the 13th century, with both evolving in the ‘h’ sound in modern Irish. This transformation into a h sound can be seen as an ultra-softening, in that the consonant sound almost disappears (since the h sound is a very faint sound). The fact that the letter h in ‘th’ is used to indicate that the preceding t is lenited and that it also just so happens that the lenited t ends up being pronounced as a h in Modern Irish is just a coincidence.

(Btw, It’s not entirely true that th is always pronounced as h. At the very least, in south Mayo, slender th is pronounced as if slender ch. This can be heard in the speech of youtuber Patchy https://www.youtube.com/@patchy642. This parallels the practice of slender dh being pronounced as if slender gh, and broad dh being pronounced as if broad gh – at least word-initially. So his pronunciation of slender ‘th’ is arguably more conservative.)

Also, to understand the pronunciation of ‘th’ in Hiberno-English, you first have to divide the country into two overall accent zones – a Northern zone corresponding roughly to the province of Ulster and a Sothern zone, corresponding roughly to the provinces of Munster, Connacht and Leinster. These two parts of the country became anglicised in two different ways. English was mainly introduced into Ulster by colonists from southern Scotland and England (although mostly Scottish) in the 17th century. Irish people in Ulster generally learned English from direct contact with the colonists. On the other hand, colonists were very few in number in the rest of the country and so Irish people in the Southern zone typically learned English at a remove from native English speakers, for instance in a second hand or third hand manner that was filtered through Irish speakers. The result is that Southern Hiberno-English has some features (e.g. grammar, pronunciation) originating from the Irish language (although arguably not that many) whereas Northern Hiberno-English tends not to have. There is a sharp accent divide between the two parts of the country, where the Northern accent can be perceived as being midway between a Southern accent and a Scottish accent or even slightly closer to a Scottish accent. As far as I can tell, the divide is defined by a narrow band (possibly as little as 10 miles wide) that runs from the Leitrim coast in the West to a point immediately south of the town of Dundalk on the east coast. As you transition through this band, there is quite a dramatic change in accent.

Anyway, in Northern Hiberno-English, soft t and soft d are pronounced the same as they generally are in England or the USA. Whereas, in Southern Hiberno-English, the dominant situation is for soft t to be pronounced as if hard t, and for soft d to be pronounced as if hard d. So in the Southern area, ‘thin’ and ‘tin’ are generally pronounced the same; and ‘then’ and ‘den’ are generally pronounced the same. This is often explained as being due to the fact that the English soft t and soft d phonemes do not exist in Modern Irish and so Irish people struggled to pronounce these sounds. However, this is only part of the explanation since the English hard t and hard d phonemes don’t exist in Irish either.

But Caoilte, aren't there some southern Irish people who have dental fricatives? It is always said that D4 in Dublin is under more English influence. I don't think it is 100% of people in the RoI who pronounce thin as tin. Is that right? Or what is the actual situation? After all, all Irish people watch the BBC and US TV and there are large numbers of English people with a semi-US pronunciation in their English from watching US TV.

In Dublin at least there are broadly two accents/dialects/however you want to classify these - inner city and wider Dublin.
As a note, the inner city accent isn't geographically contained to the inner city, you get it all across the county.

The accents work as follows:
The inner city accent replaces the dental fricative th sounds and swaps them for dental 'd's instead. It also uses tapped r's and final t more or less drops out.
The wider Dublin accent uses the English 'th' dental fricative (both voiced and unvoiced), d's and t's are not generally dental but alveolar instead, and r is rhotic, there is no dark L (or at least nothing close to what I'd head from Americans) - this is more or less my native accent.
I also recently realised that I maybe do some non-standard things - for example my intervocalic t's at pace are a fricative most of the time, unless I'm talking exceptionally fast and make a d out of them - e.g. butter = budder (American style I suppose).
The D4 accent is a bit of a caricature but it's real and is far more Americanised - I hear an increasing amount of question-like intonation etc.

As a further note, th is widely heard as th in the republic, but rurally and outside of Dublin, I think it would be fair to say that you'd come across the dental t more often.

Thank you. Very interesting. I can't stand the Uptalk intonation, whether by Americans or by those who imitate them. I remember when I worked in London there were some workers there who insisted on doing that.

You’re right. Some people in Southern Ireland do use dental fricatives. I would say this chiefly consists of people who speak with a middle-class Dublin accent.

Broadly speaking, there are two Dublin accents; (a) the traditional Dublin accent, sometimes simply referred to as the Dublin accent (i.e. without qualification), which is typically associated with the working class and (b) the middle-class Dublin accent. I’ve sometimes heard them being referred to as the Northside and Southside accents respectively – however I think this is quite simplistic, since the working-class accent can be heard on the south side and the middle-class accent can be heard on the north side. There are also sub-strains within each accent. It’s quite a peculiar situation to have two very different accents spoken in the one area and I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the country where people from working -class and middle-class backgrounds speak so radically different from each other.

This middle-class accent is a fairly recent development, possibly little more than three generations old. I imagine that the seeds of this accent were sown after the foundation of the Irish state, with it becoming more influential due to its adoption by the state broadcaster, RTE, which is located in the postal district of Dublin 4 - hence it is sometimes referred to as the Dublin 4 or D4 accent. This accent did not develop organically but seems to have begun as a conscious effort by some middle-class Dublin residents to disassociate themselves from the common mass of Dubliners. In its original undiluted form at least, it seems to have been intended as an Irish version of the English Home Counties or RP accent, but with the notable distinction of being rhotic. However, if you remove the rhoticity, there seems to be very little separating it from an English RP accent.

I speculate that it might have developed in parallel with the growth of the Irish civil service after independence. After the foundation of the state, lots of non-Dubliners moved to Dublin to take up roles in the civil service. Maybe they felt an air of superiority with their plush state jobs (at a time when most people were very poor), and so didn’t want their children sounding like Dubliners, with the result that they sent their children to schools where this new accent would be fostered.

This accent has been especially favoured by RTE, with the majority of its more prominent broadcasters being drawn from a middle-class Dublin background e.g. Miriam O’Callaghan, Pat Kenny, Ryan Tubridy. (Foreigners listening to RTE with the intention of hearing what an Irish accent sounds like would end up with a distorted impression of how most Irish people speak.) Bob Geldof also has this accent. Unusually, there are some people who grew up outside of Dublin but who essentially have this accent e.g. Mary Robinson (from Mayo), John Banville (writer from Wexford), Holly Cairns (politician from Cork – although I think her parents are English).

Nowadays, most Dublin people with this accent were simply born into it, rather than having consciously acquired it. And I think, most middle-class Dubliners don’t speak with as strong an accent as the likes of Miriam O’Callaghan. There are milder versions of it that tend towards an average Southern Irish accent or that tend towards the traditional Dublin accent. In fact, I think there now is a continuum between the traditional Dublin accent and the middle-class Dublin accent.

There are also some strains of the middle-class Dublin accent that have a slight American influence, which I think is a more recent development. For instance, you might hear some people saying ‘twenny’ instead of ‘twenty’, or ‘ciddy’ instead of ‘city’. An example of this accent would be Bono of U2 (although I think his accent has an unusually pronounced American influence).

Unlike the middle-class Dubin accent, speakers of the working-class accent pronounce soft d and t as hard d and t, in keeping with most of the rest of Southern Ireland. For instance, see Wikipedia article on rock group Thin Lizzy, where the following explanation is given for the origin of their name: The name came from an idea by Bell about a robot character in The Dandy called Tin Lizzie, which they adjusted to Thin Lizzy as a playful reference to the local Dublin accent, in which “thin” would be pronounced as “tin”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_Lizzy