Irish Accent

Ireland has two official languages, Irish and English. We have already told you that Irish (Gaelic) is compulsory in schools but is a limited part of the country which has this as the main language, in fact most of the population speaks English. That's the reason why we are going to see some peculiarities of the Irish accent.

According to some sources there are more than just a single English accent in this country. They have South-Western accents, Northern accents and the accents typical of the East Coast of Ireland. In this case we are going to have a look at the main one, the East Coast Irish English, from Dublin and we will make some comparisons with the other accents.

Rhotic
Okay, the first we should know is that the Irish accent is said to be rhotic and... What the hell does it mean?

It means that the /r/ will be pronounced in words like "water", while the British accent will omit it, anyway in some very working class variants we can find this lack of the /r/ preceded by a vowel but it is not usual in everyday life in Ireland.

Diphthongs
Another feature to consider is the change in diphthongs. They are pronounced as similar to most American and British accents. However, in the rest of Ireland diphthongs usually become monophthongs. Let's see the changes:

• /eɪ/ tends to sound more like /e:/, for example, the word "face" sounds like "fe:s". Some authors say that it comes to sound like /i:/, for example in "name" we find the sound "ni:m".

• /aɪ/ usually sounds like /ɔɪ/, for instance, "like" can sound a bit like “lɔɪk”. There is also another point of view in which the diphthong sounds like /a/, for example in "time" we would hear something like "tam".

• /aʊ/ sounds more like /eʊ/, for example, "mouth" can sound like “meooth” Referring to the South-Western accent "about" would sound more like /ɔʊ/, like “a boat”.

Changes
The third special feature of the Irish accent is the change of fricatives by plosives.

      - Every time we find a word with the sound /θ/, like "think", "thanks", "thumb", it becomes /t/, for example in this sentence: He is a thin person  /hiz ə 'tɪn 'pɜ:sən/  
     - The same happens with the sound /ð/, words like "this", "the", "breathe" are pronounced with a /d/ sound. Have a look at this sentence: Go to that street   /'gəʊ tə 'dæt 'stri:t/

Finally, here is a video in which, if you still don't get an idea, you'll be able to listen to these special features. I hope you like it, as I do. 

I went through a lot of websites in which the information was not so clear but I've tried to explain it the most clear way possible for you to learn. I hope it was worth it, I'll be back soon with more stuff. See you.

Sources:

http://html.rincondelvago.com/irish-accent.html

http://dialectblog.com/irish-accents-dialects/