“[T]‌he largest mountan in nort America”

This chapter takes an empirical look at phonetic representation of what we today would describe as Southern Irish English consonants in the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence and documents their diachronic, geographical, and social distribution in the historical province of Ulster between approximately 1700–1940. The consonant features include dental [t̪, d̪] or alveolar [t, d] stops for dental fricatives /θ, ð/ (TH-fortition), [t̪, d̪] for /t, d/ (T/D-dentalization), voiceless alveolar “slit” fricative [ṱ] for post- and intervocalic /t/ (T/D-fricativization), [ʃ] for /s/ (S-palatalization), and lenition of [tʃ] to [ʃ]. Results show that these typical “Southern” Irish English consonants in fact occurred much further north before the early 20th century, especially around (recent) Gaeltachtaí, than where they are expected today, which could point to language contact and feature transfer between Irish and English.