ABSTRACT
Northern Ireland (NI) was formerly synonymous with emigration. During the Great Famine, its people were drawn to new immigrant dense cities like Melbourne, from townlands like Killycomain that were extremely deprived. This paper explores findings from the first project to investigate the sociolinguistics of globalization and migration in NI both synchronically and diachronically. The approach thus mirrors that of Hymes (1974:77) since it examines “linguistic phenomena from within the social, cultural, political, and historical context of which they are part”. The chapter focusses on the notion of the “feature pool” first introduced by Mufwene (2001:4–6) to examine emerging vernaculars (see also Kerswill and Torgersen, this volume) that are produced by similar forces that generated contact varieties historically in Australia’s wealthy metropolises.
