Preface

The articles in this volume primarily represent a selection of papers that were presented at the Conference New Perspectives on Irish English which was held in March 2010 at University College Dublin. The aim o f the conference, and now the volume, was to assess the directions of research on varieties of English spoken on the island of Ireland since the publication of Focus on Ireland which was edited by Jeffrey Kallen in 1997, and highlight how that research has developed in the last fifteen years. Comparing the articles in this volume to those published in Focus on Irish English two broad differences emerge that are worth highlighting: the topics of investigation and the data and analytical approaches.