When people discuss “accent discrimination,” they usually refer to everyday injustices: being passed up for promotions, denied loans, or scolded in school. Contemporary history, however, suggests more severe examples.
In the BBC documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, for instance, Graham Norton describes fraught childhood visits to his grandmother’s Belfast home:
I remember once my father got lost [in the Sandy Road area] and we were walking around, and I’d be gabbling on and my father was like, “shut up! Shut up!” Because if anyone heard our voices, you know, we spoke with a southern accent, it would have been trouble.
Of course, this shouldn’t suggest that Republican neighborhoods would have been more generous to, say, someone speaking Received Pronunciation than a Loyalist enclave would have been toward Dublinese. Furthermore, Norton quickly points out how remarkably things have changed since then. But the anecdote reminds us of how easily language becomes a touchstone in ethnic and political conflict.
Language, of course, often symbolizes sectarian strife. Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian can intuitively be described as dialects of Serbo-Croatian, yet they’re treated as separate tongues largely due to the Balkans’ violent history. Language likewise demarcates schisms and separatist movements in Cyprus, Quebec, and Spain. So how did linguistic variation typify one of the most prominent sectarian conflict in the English speaking world?
I’ll get the most well-known differences out of the way. Whether one described the region as “Northern Ireland” or “The North of Ireland” separated those who aligned themselves with a unified Ireland and those who didn’t. (One might think “Northern Ireland,” which eschews “of’s” extra syntactic level, would be the more “inclusive” term, but “North of” is the preferred Republican phrase.) Along the same lines, one either speaks of Derry or Londonderry, depending on one’s viewpoint. (Although I’ve personally found the situation more complicated when I’ve spoken to people from that city.)
More prosaically, the letter /h/, either termed “haitch” or “aitch,” ostensibly serves as a border between Protestants (aitchers) and Catholics (haitchers). Well, maybe. Wikipedia articles, lexicographers and online forums have repeated this assertion for years, yet I know few substantive studies on the matter. If true, though, these pronunciations may align less with a sense of national identity than they once did: “haitch” has, according to some, become significantly more “British” in the past few decades.
These quirks are so repeated that they’ve taken on a mythological quality. But do the two factions speak differently? Do they have different dialects? I see no easy answer. To my American ears, the rather softened accents of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley, Jr. sound closer to each other than either does to their working-class constituents. But Belfast is different; accents mix, level, and separate unpredictably in urban areas. Belfast, in particular, has so much accent variation that perhaps only locals can confidently pinpoint “Catholic” or “Protestant” speech qualities (if they exist).
Many (especially rural) areas have overwhelmingly Catholic or Protestant majorities, on the other hand, so one might logically find “Protestant” or “Catholic” dialects depending on where you’re listening. And in areas where Ulster Scots is spoken, that language no doubt creates a linguistic barrier. Furthermore, an article from 2008 suggested that in (London)Derry, Protestants are more likely to adopt new speech patterns coming from the region’s more Loyalist East.
However, Ireland as a whole exhibits complex webs of linguistic divisions: urban/suburban/rural, bilingual/monolingual, “local”/”non-local”, educated/uneducated, North/South, East/West. Religion may be a factor as well, but it’s no easy task untangling single threads in isolation.