Vera Regan, Professor of Socio Linguistics at UCD, joins Claire Byrne on RTÉ Radio 1 to discuss accents. Listen back above.
Earlier this month, a study from the University of Essex showed that cockney accents and King's English accents were becoming less popular in the South East of England.
With this in mind, Claire Byrne moved her attention to Hiberno-English, and asked Vera Regan, a Professor of Socio Linguistics in UCD, to come on air to discuss Ireland's disappearing accents.
"There's change and there's maintenance," says Professor Regan. "What we find is that we have a new Irish-English."
Within our Irish-English language, we have words and phrases that are "old, local and traditional" as well as "new, innovative and urban".
According to Professor Regan, changes to dialects most often occur in urban centres, where a number of different dialects will "hit off each other" and "flatten each other out".
"The overlapping bits are maintained, but the bits around the edges that might be a bit unusual or difficult to say, they tend to get lost in what we call the 'supralocal'," she explains.
Far from losing our own personal speech, though, Regan says that the way Irish people speak will simply "change around the edges".
"In Dublin, it's changing fairly dramatically, " she explains, "but we're maintaining both the old local Dublin speech in many areas of Dublin, and we're also maintaining it in some of the more rural areas."
Recently, some linguists looked at the use of the word 'youse' in Dublin's Liberties. While the older generations said they only used it sometimes, the younger generation didn't seem to use it much at all - which Regan says is often a sign that a word is on the way out.
"The core of Dublin-English traditional speech is maintained," she insists, explaining that people and communities will protect the things most precious to them - including words.
"Identity reasons are far more important than we realised. Where you might see a change coming, a change could actually be stopped in its tracks, if people decide they don't like it."
For more information on Irish-English linguistics, listen back to the interview in full above.
