The contexts for the acquisition of Scottish Gaelic have changed significantly in recent decades through the impact of ongoing language shift to English in traditionally Gaelic-speaking communities and different kinds of language revitalisation initiatives, especially in relation to education (for adults as well as schoolchildren). This chapter reviews the sociolinguistic and policy dynamics that have brought about these changes and presents key findings from a range of studies involving linguistic demography, community language use, intergenerational language change, dialect maintenance, family language policy, language acquisition and attainment, and issues of affinity and identity.

When speaking, speakers break down the continuous stream of sounds into smaller units – so-called intonation phrases. Within these intonation phrases, we find a rhythmic pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables, similar to the word stress that we already saw in individual words. This chapter investigates which principles speakers follow when rhythmically grouping the speech flow. Like word stress, the rhythmic structure of utterances does not distinguish meaning in English, or it only does so in a very limited way. However, it does serve important linguistic functions. Additionally, speakers pronounce intonation phrases with specific melodic patterns. Intonation will be dealt with in detail in the subsequent chapter. Rhythm and intonation constitute the suprasegmental level. Even though the suprasegmental level plays a secondary role in the language system of English, rhythm and intonation serve several crucial functions in communicative situations.

In this chapter, we are going to ask one of the most important questions that phonology is concerned with: when are two phonetically different sounds considered variations of the same sound within the system of a language and when are they two distinct speech sounds? Instead of speech sounds, we are going to introduce the terms ‘phonemes’ and ‘allophones’ and use these from hereon. We will learn how phonemes and allophones differ in their function, their occurrence within language (called ‘distribution‘) as well as their phonetic properties. Finally, we can now understand the different interests that the two sister-sciences phonetics and phonology pursue.

Properties of speech sounds can be measured. Speech recognition systems, such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant, make use of the fact that each class of sounds has its own characteristics. In this chapter, we are going to look at the most basic acoustic characteristics of speech, starting with loudness and pitch. Moreover, you will learn how you can make easy measurements with a free software that many phoneticians also use.

Irish is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland. However, it is spoken by just 1.4 per cent of the population on a daily basis outside of the educational system (Central Statistics Office 2023). Irish is taught as a compulsory subject to students in three educational contexts: English-medium, Irish-medium, and Gaeltacht (Irish heartland areas) schools. The education system was given a key role in the revival of Irish when the Irish Free State was established in 1922 and the policy enjoyed some initial success. We argue that the policy was too narrowly focussed and had unrealistic expectations given the amount of instructional time and lack of exposure to Irish outside the school. We critically analyse key studies on the teaching and learning of Irish conducted in primary schools. A common theme that emerges from the studies is the success of immersion approaches to Irish and the disappointing outcomes where Irish is taught as a subject. If the education system in Ireland is to reach its potential in terms of Irish language achievement, then it needs to be transformed by increasing the intensity of exposure to Irish to take full advantage of an early start to language learning.

This chapter reviews current studies focusing on the production, comprehension, and processing of words and idiomatic expressions in neurotypical and neurodiverse Gaelic-speaking children and adults. The review of the literature highlights that the majority of studies on word learning have focused on primary school children attending Gaelic-medium education. This is not surprising given that the revitalisation of Gaelic is pursued through Gaelic-medium education (GME). The majority of new speakers, that is second language learners of Gaelic without prior cultural affiliation to Gaelic, are children or adults from non-Gaelic-speaking homes attending GME. The studies targeting lexical processing or asking how multiword expressions in the form of idioms are acquired highlight that many questions about Gaelic word learning and processing in the early years and across the lifespan are yet to be addressed. The chapter concludes by highlighting where the major research gaps are and by putting forward suggestions for future research.

Irish has a number of features such as VSO word order and initial mutations that make study of the acquisition of Irish morphosyntax particularly interesting to theories of child language development and, more recently, to language change. The chapter opens with a brief overview of Irish morphosyntax. We then outline and critically review studies of Irish morphosyntactic development over four main periods: (1) historical informal research on Irish acquisition; (2) studies of monolingual or strongly Irish-dominant acquisition; (3) a transition phase; and (4) more recent studies of acquisition in what have now become mainly simultaneous bilingual contexts. The findings of these studies are discussed in the light of the international literature and their contribution to our understanding of child language acquisition in general and Celtic languages in particular. The implications of these studies for language support and education are discussed, and future areas for research are considered.

In this chapter, you will discover that sound-changing processes are also at work in connected speech that impact the phoneme sequence. Like allophonic variation, many of these will occur in faster speech and not in careful pronunciation, and they are also speaker-dependent. Over time, though, they may alter the pronunciation of a word, so that many of today’s pronunciations are the result of such phonological processes that occurred in the past, and current frequently occurring phonological processes will lead to the standard pronunciation of tomorrow.

In this chapter, we will look at the writing system, why the Latin alphabet used by English and many other languages is not ideal, as it does not provide letters for all sounds, and what tools phoneticians have at their disposal to accurately write down the pronunciation of words. This textbook takes a hands-on approach. Therefore, in this chapter, you will also be introduced to a free software used by many phoneticians. With this, you can listen to stretches of speech and annotate them. In a later chapter, you will also learn how to perform simple measurements with it. Finally, just like there is standard English grammar and vocabulary, there are also two main pronunciation standards for English, which will be introduced here.

This chapter introduces diphthongs as well as other English vowels that only occur in specific positions. Unlike for monophthongs, where the tongue remains in a steady position, for diphthongs the tongue performs a gliding movement during articulation. Diphthongs are an integral part of the English vowel system. Sometimes diphthongs are indicated in the spelling by a digraph, such as in they. At other times, however, they are represented by a single vowel letter, as in gave. Two classes of vowels deserve special attention, as they only occur in specific positions. Pre-rhotic vowels only occur when in spelling the vowel is followed by ‹r›. Weak vowels, on the other hand, only appear in unstressed syllables, so in syllables that are not accentuated. Finally, the chapter looks at letter-to-sound correspondences. These are more intricate, as the thirteen vowel qualities found in English can only be written with the five vowel letters of the Latin alphabet. However, they are also more regular than might be assumed.

This chapter focuses on other accents of English around the globe. As describing all varieties of English would go far beyond the scope of a single chapter and also as this is still a phonetics textbook, the aim of this chapter is rather to set you up for further studies in this field, and we are going to do so the other way round than you might expect: instead of going through different accents and describing features of their pronunciation, we are going to focus on different phonetic phenomena that you may encounter and for each one give examples of accents in which they can be observed.