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Article published In: Interdisciplinary approaches to the language of pop culture
Edited by Rocío Montoro and Valentin Werner
[English Text Construction 16:2] 2023
► pp. 238–260

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Brogues and Blarney

The representation of Irish speech in American comics

 | University of Zurich
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with the University of Zurich.

Published online: 29 February 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/etc.23003.wal
Abstract
From the earliest days, Irish characters have played a prominent role in American comics. The hero of Hogan’s Alley, the first American comic strip to feature a speech balloon, was an Irish child named Mickey Dugan, a.k.a. “The Yellow Kid”. Likewise, the star of Happy Hooligan, the first US comic strip to employ speech balloons on a regular basis, was Irish. Thus, not only are Irish characters important in the early history of American comics, their speech is too. The way that this was represented resembled existing portrayals in pop culture, involving respellings, non-standard grammar and lexical items deemed typical of the variety. While some of these continued to index Irishness in comics, others also emerged. Building on previous research, this study examines a corpus of American comics from numerous genres and publishing houses to offer the most comprehensive overview yet of Irish speech in the medium.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
  • 3.Data and method
  • 4.Findings and discussion
    • 4.1Accent
    • 4.2Lexis
      • 4.2.1Religious exclamations and euphemisms
      • 4.2.2Vocatives and response forms
      • 4.2.3Sure as a discourse marker
    • 4.3Grammar
      • 4.3.1Non-standard use of the progressive
      • 4.3.2It-clefting
      • 4.3.3Topicalization
      • 4.3.4Lack of negator contraction
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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