‘Brirish’ – two languages joined as one, now, so!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Twenty very odd years ago years ago I was ensconced in Pádraicín’s bar in Furbo, relating a heinous anecdote to my good friends The Body and Blitz.

“Whereabouts was this in Cork? Was it West Cork or Cork City?” asked Blitz.

“Neither really!” I replied, “More north South Cork!”

This produced an unexpected and uproarious reaction from my two Irish friends, and once he had calmed down and stopped coughing and wheezing and going red in the face in a particularly scary way, Blitz turned to me.

Raising his glass, he clinked mine, and toasted:

“To an honorary Irishman. You’re as good as, Charlie, and that’s saying something!”

Even if our aim as immigrants is to assimilate entirely, there’s no chance of any foreigner becoming so Irish that the Irish cannot tell you are foreign. This blow-in wouldn’t want that anyway. We must each be proud to be who we are, even though after a few too many Jemmies in a Connemara pub, my accent can go worryingly local farmer.

After living and working in the USA and Australia, I’d already experienced how other nations evolved my native tongue, but as always Ireland offered a paradox. Somehow the Irish have taken English and adapted it into a form that feels simultaneously foreign, yet sometimes more comfortable and accessible than the original version.

Grunt by grunt, inflection by verbal twitch, blow-ins start to osmose the Irish way of speaking English.

First to suddenly pop out of my mouth one day was ‘Grand!’, quickly followed by ‘Mighty!’

Then there are the greetings. Despite ‘Howya!’ sounding so similar to the English ‘How are you?’, it necessitates a wholly different response. Back in England it would be perfectly acceptable to reply

“Bloody terrible actually. The dog bit me, I got burgled and then the bloody car broke down.”

But here in my adopted country, I quickly learned that nobody wants to hear anything but the most positive report imaginable.

The only acceptable response must be either ‘Grand!’, or ‘Mighty!’ or even, for the more advanced class, ‘Not a bother on me!’ spoken as one word.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.