The Voices of Irish Identity: A Taxonomy of Cinematic Accents

The reestablishment of the Irish Film Board in 1993 sparked a rapid increase in the amount of indigenous films being produced in Ireland. This growth paralleled a significant cultural, economic, and social shift in Ireland known as the Celtic Tiger. As cultural commentators observed, this shift manifested to some degree in a change in indigenous accents.¹ During this period and subsequently, accent performance began to occupy a more loaded and publicly recognized position in relation to national and class-based identity in Ireland, leading the journalist Ed Power to note in 2005 that if "our accents are integral to who we are then Ireland is suffering a collective identity crisis."²

Identity politics have been a key component of Irish film scholarship since the publication of the foundational text Cinema and Ire-land in 1988,³ with much written in subsequent years on gender, class, landscape, religion, and even language.⁴ However, while accent is used for ideological purposes in many contemporary texts, and popular criticism of accents in Irish film is common in online and print media, the scholarship dedicated to accent in the national cinema is limited. My approach works to redress this imbalance; in this essay, I outline a taxonomy of five categories, which I argue encapsulate the current possibilities for thinking about accents in Irish film. Examples from each, where available, are discussed as a demonstration of the current taxonomy and a means of understanding some of the multitude of ways that accent is featured and reshaped in cinematic texts. Although the current essay focuses on Irish-related texts, the taxonomy offered can be applied to cinema more generally as a means of approaching accent in cinematic texts. With the word "accent," I invoke a vocal concept with specific characteristics: (1) a regional identity, (2) a related identity position (e.g., race, age, or class), (3) a possibility for blending both of these in one simultaneous performance, and (4) the possibility for recognition or identification by a third party of all of the above. Accent therefore precludes other acoustic vocal qualities such as tone (e.g., gravelly, hoarse, or soothing) and pitch (high or low register). As with any taxonomy, categorical traits may be shared from grouping to grouping; the categorization here is informed by the primary identifiers of each film placed in a given section.

The first category in this taxonomy, accent as central theme, features the most significant use of accent in any film. Although there exists a rich tapestry of Irish accent variation and modulation in contemporary Irish cinema, to date no single film addresses accent thematically in a sustained way. For such an example we must turn to the work of an exiled Irish playwright who was markedly sensitive to the cultural, social, and identity ramifications of accent performance—George Bernard Shaw and his play Pygmalion (1913). Most popularly known as the source text for the musical My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), one of the only English-language films to place accent at the center of the text as core theme, the narrative follows the molding of a young Cockney flower girl into a lady, through accent shift, by the older Professor Higgins. In this category, accent represents a substantial aspect of the diegesis of the text, with My Fair Lady's phonetician protagonist Higgins waxing lyrical about the accents of contemporary Britain. In fact, the entire raison d'être of the central couple in Pygmalion and its subsequent adaptations is accent.

The second category I propose, accent as peripheral thematic connection, comprises moments in which diegetic accent use or styling contributes to a central theme of the text, even when this is a minor contribution. For an example of this we can turn to Lenny Abrahamson's Adam and Paul (2004), a film that follows a day in the life of two heroin addicts in Celtic Tiger Dublin. Dervila Layden notes the formal ways in which the film "establish[es] the two protagonists themselves as outsiders; their homelessness, their lack of social skills, their behavior, their treatment in the text, their naming...