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Abstract

This paper examines language ideological change in the Irish context through a longitudinal analysis of accent choice in a corpus of radio ads from 1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007. The analysis is based on Sussex’s (1989) ad components of Action and Comment. The Action component is generally comprised of contextual dialogic interaction and associated with discourses of ‘everyday informal interaction’ while the Comment component, often associated with the slogan of the ad, tends to be monologic and decontextualised and is associated with discourses of ‘power and authority’ (Lee, 1992). The use of standard British English accent features, particularly in the Comment components in the ads, is pervasive in the 1977 and 1987 sub-corpora but declines in both ad components in 1997 and 2007 and is replaced by the use of the relatively new Irish English Advanced Dublin English accent. These findings are analysed in terms of how they reflect the changing ‘ideological temperature’ (Vestergaard and Schroder, 1985) in the Irish context during the period in which the ads were aired.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.21427/D7TG6R

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