Sociolinguistic information and Irish English corpora

The central part of this chapter presents the sort of sociolinguistic information that is retrievable from some corpora of Irish English (IE) that currently exist. However, in order to fully explore and contextualise the research possibilities that corpora of IE offer the sociolinguist, we probe the relationship emergent, developing or with the potential to develop between the core concerns of sociolinguistic research and contemporary corpus linguistics. Hence, the nature of language corpora and the fundamental aspects of the sort of analytical tools commonly used to mine them become relevant. An emergent consensus in most recent work on corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics (e.g. Friginal and Hardy 2014) is to take the view that as a methodogical approach, corpus linguistics has much to offer sociolinguistics (and vice versa, though this is not as frequently discussed, see Kendall 2011). For the purpose of the present chapter, corpus linguistics is understood to be both an independent field of linguistic enquiry and a principled methodological approach to the analysis of linguistic data, one that is in the process of developing a strong, mutually beneficial research relationship with sociolinguistics, as evidenced in recent book-length treatments (for example, Baker 2010, or Friginal and Hardy 2014).