The medieval period

The documentary record of medieval Irish English is confined for all intents and purposes to the collection of 16 poems of Irish provenance in BM Harley 913 which are known collectively as the Kildare Poems (Heuser 1904; Lucas 1995) after one of the poems in which the author identifies himself as from the county of Kildare to the south-west of Dublin. The collection probably dates from the early 14th century. The language of these poems is of a general west Midland to southern English character. Many of the idiosyncratic features can be traced to Irish influence. It is a moot point whether the Kildare Poems were written by native speakers of Irish using English as a H-language in a diglossic situation or whether indeed the set was written by one or more individuals. Apart from the Kildare Poems, medieval Irish English is attested in a number of verse fragments and in city records from Dublin and Waterford, comments on which can be found in Henry (1958).