How to Speak with an Irish Dialect
Americans love accents, and we love to imitate them. Sadly, when we imitate them in conversations with people who actually speak them as their native dialect, we usually fall on our faces. The reason is this: we don't immerse ourselves in the dialect. Instead, we just plunge right in. By paying careful attention to the Irish dialect, focusing on the pronunciation of certain sounds, and with a lot of practice, you can sound like an native Irishman.
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Things You'll Need
- Irish videos
- Books on tape read by Irish actors
- Book of Irish folktales
Instructions
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Watch Irish movies and listen to people speaking with a strong Irish accent (or brogue). Listen to a book on tape read by an Irish actor. Immerse yourself in the sound of the Irish brogue.
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2
The Irish tend to speak quickly, breezing through vowels in a way that makes them all sound the same. Try slurring all of your short vowel sounds until they're almost--but not quite--uniform. Long vowels in the Irish dialect tend to be more pronounced than the way most Americans speak. "Long a" sounds like "long e." The "long i" sound is spoken more like "ay-ee." When making the "long o" sound, the Irish pronounce it with their mouths round like the letter. And the "long u" is pronounced as "yew."
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3
Over-enunciate your consonants. Whereas Americans drop certain sounds, often at the ends of their words, the Irish emphasize them. One exception is that the "ing" at the end of a verb or participle should always be spoken as "in."
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Put a lilt in your voice. As you watch movies and listen to Irish actors, repeat their lines in the same sing-song way they say them.
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Study Irish vocabulary and sentence structure. This can be best accomplished by buying a book of Irish folk tales and reading them out loud to yourself.
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Practice, practice, practice. Wherever you are, in conversations all day long, speak in a brogue. Before you know it, even you will think you're from the the Emerald Isle!
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