Sociolinguistics of Standardisation of English in Ireland

"The main objective of the Sociolinguistics of Standardisation of English in Ireland project has been to use Ireland as a test case by which to investigate questions such as:

* How far do national varieties of standard English conform to international standards, and how far to they reflect local cultural and political conditions?
* How far does standardisation eliminate socially significant variation?
* How far are national Englishes distinct, identifiable codes which are separate from each other?
* What is the role of political borders in conditioning standard English across historical dialect and language borders?

In order to test these and related hypotheses, the project relied on a corpus-based methodology, joining with other research teams on the International Corpus of English in order to create a machine-readable corpus with the following characteristics:

* 1 million words per corpus
* Standard English defined by a combination of speaker selection and text type. There is no linguistic prejudging of what counts as standard for inclusion in the corpus.
* Speakers usually have completed secondary education (or equivalent standing); most formative years spent in the relevant country
* ICE corpora use a standardised list of spoken and written text types
* An ICE corpus is made up of 500 texts: 300 spoken, 200 written, each approximately 2000 words long
* Each text is transcribed orthographically and stored in text format for computer searching: phonology is not indicated in ICE transcripts" (from project web site; please see for more details).