ABSTRACT
The English language in Dublin has been spoken since the late twelfth century when the first settlers came up from the south-east where they had landed around 1169. The records of Dublin English (DE) are slight and consist before 1600 mainly of municipal records which here and there betray the kind of English which must have been spoken in the city. A central issue in contemporary DE is the set of vowel shifts which represent the most recent phonological innovation in Irish English. The clearest phonetic feature of Southern Irish English is the reduction of /t/ and /d/ to a fricative with identical characteristics of the stop, that is, an apico-alveolar fricative in weak positions. Post-sonorant stop deletion is unique to DE. The Dublin phenomenon is confined to positions after /n/ and /l/ and may involve a glottal stop as a reflex of the deleted stop.
