Language and Irish Travellers

Irish Travellers are an Irish ethnic minority, distinct from the settled, mainstream community. They have a unique sociocultural identity – they are traditionally nomadic, and have a language of their own, often referred to as Cant. In addition, the Traveller community have lower educational attainment levels and higher levels of unemployment than in their settled counterparts. These factors have an obvious impact on language use. This chapter provides a thorough review of previous linguistic studies of the Irish Traveller community. In addition, it seeks to build on these studies through a corpus pragmatic analysis of family discourse in both the settled and Traveller communities. The pragmatic items of import highlighted by this approach include personal pronouns, vocatives and pragmatic markers. These items are discussed in relation to contextual and sociolinguistic factors characteristic of the Traveller and settled communities.