Segmental and Intonational Analysis of Drogheda English

Drogheda is the main town in the North-East of Ireland, about 35 miles away from Dublin. It lies within the linguistic boundary zone separating the major Irish English (IrE) varieties: Northern IrE and Southern IrE. This book presents a detailed analysis of the variety’s segmental system and emphasises on its intonational aspects. Findings show that Drogheda English is a typical Southern IrE variety. Chapters 1-3 introduce background, literature, and methods of the study. Chapters 4-7 present findings of the variety’s: acoustic and auditory analysis of vowels and consonants; tonal patterns using a modified version of the ToBI labelling system; interrogative intonation, particularly as the tonal patterns in questions lack final rises; and peak alignment where the author proposes two kinds of alignment: intrinsic and extrinsic. Chapter 8 discusses implications of the findings. Dialectal studies provide insights on how systems of languages work.Intonational aspects of a dialect can be just as important primary markers of linguistic boundaries as segmental aspects. This book is useful to researchers who work on intonation or IrE varieties, and to the wider community of speech sciences.