Noel P Ó Murchadha

Bettina Migge

A Celtic view on minority language dynamics: support, transmission, education and target language varieties

published or not. The documents may come   L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire

Introduction

When we talk of the modern Celtic languages today we refer to the Insular 1 Celtic varieties that have maintained (or indeed regained) a degree of their linguistic vitality and that are practised, to varying extents and in various forms, by users of the Breton, Cornish, Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh languages. Further to their common linguistic derivation, the Celtic languages share a number of additional characteristics that lend themselves well to a common analytical framework (features that they indeed share with many other 'small' languages). Each of the languages has, for a long time, been functioning in a bilingual, if not multilingual, environment (e.g. [START_REF] Timm | Breton at a Crossroads: Looking Back, Moving Forward[END_REF], 2010, on Breton;[START_REF] Ferdinand | A brief history of the cornish language, its revival and its current status[END_REF], George & Broderick, 2009, on Cornish;[START_REF] Doyle | A history of the Irish language[END_REF], Mac Giolla Chríost, 2005, on Irish;George & Broderick, 2009, on Manx;[START_REF] Baoill | A History of Gaelic to 1800. The Edinburgh Companion to the Gaelic Language[END_REF], MacLeod, 2010 on Scottish Gaelic;Davies, 2014, on Welsh). Contact with major global languages has had a decisive and formative effect on the trajectories of the Celtic languages (c.f. chapters in [START_REF] Tristram | The Celtic Languages in Contact[END_REF]. The reality of interaction with the French and English languages since the sixteenth century and especially in more recent centuries, has meant that the Celtic languages have been subject to historical processes of minoritisation and language shift [START_REF] Fife | Typological aspects of the Celtic languages[END_REF][START_REF] Price | The Celtic Languages[END_REF]. Consequently, in global terms, each of the languages is reliant on a relatively small pool of speakers for their survival. Perhaps unsurprisingly for those familiar with the dynamics of minority languages, then, language maintenance, revitalisation and revival projects have been among of the hallmarks of the Celticlanguage experience for some time. This speaks to a familiar appetite among at least some users, as well as non-users, to go against the grain of language loss and to try to ensure that the Celtic languages are used into the future despite an extremely challenging climate.

This special issue of Language, Culture and Curriculum emerged from the first Celtic Sociolinguistics Symposium held at University College Dublin in June 2015. The Symposium, in turn, focused on themes that permeate research on the sociolinguistics of the Celtic languages, including intergenerational transmission; language and identity; language in education; language in the media, and attitudes to linguistic variation. The investigation of sociolinguistic aspects of the Celtic languages provides a useful pan-Celtic perspective on issues in other languages that are endangered and have benefited from revitalisation activities. It thus lends itself to the analysis of the relationship between language and society in related, yet diverse, spaces and cultures. Of course, any sociolinguistic account of the Celtic languages, in one way or another, has to deal with issues of language endangerment and language revival. Therefore, in addition to advancing our understanding of the Celtic languages, the study of their current status offers a context-specific window into the dynamics of minoritised languages and language varieties in modern Western society. The study of the Celtic languages and their speakers can, in this way, illuminate the social, cultural and political factors that shape processes of language loss and preservation. It thus has the potential to enhance our understanding of how social actors recruit, or, perhaps more pertinently in some cases, don't recruit, minority languages in negotiating increasingly fluid social, cultural and political environments. In addition, it adds to our understanding of both language and society in a globalised world. Following a brief outline of speaker demographics in the next section, the remainder of this introductory article will focus on some of the key issues currently faced by the Celtic languages and will illustrate how this special issue makes a contribution to scholarship in those areas.

Speaker demographics

The worldwide trend of diminishing linguistic diversity is well documented (e.g. [START_REF] Crystal | Language death[END_REF][START_REF] Dorian | Small-language fates and prospects: Lessons of persistence and change from endangered languages[END_REF][START_REF] Moseley | Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger[END_REF][START_REF] Nettle | Vanishing Voices[END_REF] and the Celtic languages are, or have historically been, subject to the global flows that induce and precipitate language shift. Intergenerational transmission in the home is routinely cited as one of the mainstays of successful initiatives to sustain the vigour of threatened languages or to reverse processes of language shift [START_REF] Fishman | Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages[END_REF]. The low level, or in some cases the complete collapse, of transfer of the Celtic languages in the home has significantly contributed to shaping the current status of the languages, however (e.g. [START_REF] Jones | Language Obsolescence and Revitalisation[END_REF][START_REF] Giollagáin | Nuashonrú ar an staidéar cuimsitheach teangeolaíoch ar úsáid na Gaeilge sa Ghaeltacht[END_REF][START_REF] Mcleod | Gaelic in contemporary Scotland: challenges, strategies and contradictions[END_REF]. Likewise, the interaction between the home domain and other linguistically-strategic domains has impacted language vitality in the Celtic varieties. Consequently, reported total numbers of speakers of the Celtic languages today and the geographical distribution of those speakers sketch a very different picture to times when the languages were in their pomp. Data on user numbers, despite their limitations and the variation in the levels of detail available in the different language contexts, provide a useful view of the extent of the languages in the different polities where they are primarily used. The data on the Gaelic varieties (Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx), tell us that in Ireland over 77,000 speakers report speaking Irish on a daily basis outside the education system in the Republic of Ireland (Central Statistics Office, 2012), while in Northern Ireland just under 98,000 people claim an ability to speak Irish (Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency, 2012). The figures for Scottish Gaelic reveal that in excess of 57,000 people in Scotland claim an ability to speak the language (National Records of Scotland, 2015) with others claiming 'Gaelic languages', as their 'mother tongue' in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2012). In terms of Manx, more than 1,600 claim an ability to speak the language (Economic Affairs Division, Isle of Man Government Treasury, 2012) while in the case of Welsh almost 361,000 people in Wales report using the language on a daily basis (Welsh Government & Welsh Language Commissioner, 2015) with further speakers present in Patagonia, Argentina [START_REF] Jones | A statistical overview of the Welsh language, Cardiff: Welsh Language Board[END_REF]. Although the last native speaker of Cornish is both widely and contentiously reported to have died in the late 18 th century, some 500 individuals returned as Cornish speakers in the 2011 UK Census (Office for National Statistics, 2013), despite there being no designated space on the form to do so (Tresidder, 2015: 217). In Brittany, at the same time, approximately 200,000 speakers of Breton are estimated (Ofis [START_REF] Publik | Ar brezhoneg[END_REF].

Owing to the loss of domains of usage, as witnessed in the relatively weak patterns of intergenerational transmission in the home and in patterns of peer and community language usage, the Celtic languages are today much more heavily reliant on alternative modes of language transmission and on the interaction between the home and other domains in order to sustain the individual languages. This is the reality faced in supporting the Celtic varieties both in those areas where they endure as community varieties (with a range of degrees of robustness) and in facilitating the expansion of the pool of users beyond these areas. The academic literature on minority language communities commonly reveal that maintenance efforts face challenges in terms of fostering support for small languages, in relation to language transmission in the home, in defining the role of education in maintenance, revitalisation and revival, and in establishing the target language variety/varieties. The Celtic languages are no exception. These issues will each be discussed in turn below with a view to mapping how scholarship on the sociolinguistics of the Celtic languages might progress in the future.

Fostering support

The loss of status and prestige has historically had a decisive impact on the fate of the Celtic languages [START_REF] Price | The Celtic Languages[END_REF], as has been the case in language minoritisation worldwide [START_REF] Fishman | Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages[END_REF]. The advance of English and French and their dominance in prestige domains was accompanied by an inverse development in the Celtic varieties. The Celtic languages gradually came to be deemed superfluous, perhaps even detrimental, to economic progress and social mobility in their respective polities. In modern times, where users of the Celtic languages are at least bilingual, the way the languages are perceived remains important. Positive perceptions of the communicative and the symbolic functions of the languages are fundamental to their continued use in the future. Where individuals raised in Celtic language-speaking homes/communities are convinced of the continued utility of the languages in their own lives, it follows that they are more likely to remain active users of the languages. Likewise for new speakers who have acquired high degrees of proficiency in the languages. For learners or potential learners, the perceived integrative and instrumental value of the Celtic varieties will play an important role in motivating them to commit themselves to attaining a level of ability that will allow them to function in the languages. Even among non-users, the perception of the Celtic languages is important so that resources dedicated to them can be justified with reference to existing levels of public support for their continued use. Support for maintaining the Celtic languages is evident in attitudinal research (e.g. [START_REF] Darmody | Attitudes towards the Irish Language on the Island of Ireland[END_REF][START_REF] Mac Gréil | The Irish Language and the Irish People[END_REF], in the continued use of the languages by some members of traditional communities, in the commitment of new speakers to the languages and in the appetite of some nonusers to learn the languages. However, it is unclear to what extent the current levels of support will secure their futures. How the languages are perceived remains important in deciding their future, but it remains unclear what the conditions are under which support for the Celtic languages translates to actual increases in usage or language transmission. This is a question that would benefit from more sustained sociolinguistic attention. In outlining the current state of play, John Edwards, in his article in this Special Issue, assesses some of the primary challenges faced by the Celtic languages and thus contributes to this debate.

In a broad-ranging article, Edwards examines the current status and future trajectories of the Celtic languages. Focussing especially, though not exclusively, on the Irish and Scottish Gaelic contexts, he explores the factors that continue to restrict the maintenance and expansion of the Celtic languages. Based mainly on a critical assessment of recent media reports on Celtic languages, Edwards shows that the continued use and, particularly, the expansion of the Celtic languages is hampered by negative attitudes in wider society and by the fact that the Celtic languages are still underrepresented in the public sphere. Celtic languages, for instance, are rarely able to occupy a discursive space on their own, but typically co-exist with the dominant language in the setting in order to cater to the needs of the majority population who normally have, at best, a passive knowledge of these languages. Although, he argues, there continues to be sufficient enthusiasm among the wider population and policy makers to maintain some measures to promote these languages, provisions such as Celtic language-medium education are generally only partially effective. He contends that there is generally either a lack of 'man power', such as the absence of qualified teachers to properly carry out these measures or there is a lack of funding. Overall the situation, he suggests, makes for a rather bleak future.

Language transmission

Supporters of the Celtic languages face challenges in assuring the public of the merits of communicating in these languages and of making available financial and human resources to support their survival (e.g. [START_REF] Darmody | Attitudes towards the Irish Language on the Island of Ireland[END_REF]Edwards, this issue;[START_REF] Mac Gréil | The Irish Language and the Irish People[END_REF]. A significant cohort, however, are already committed to maintaining, revitalising or reviving Breton, Cornish, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Manx and Welsh. Many are aware of the benefits of a form of bilingualism that incorporates a Celtic language, are committed to using the language, and/or desire and plan for the next generation to have an ability to communicate in a Celtic language. The choice of language management strategies to achieve transmission to the next generation, however, does not always align with documented successful models (e.g. Ó hIfearnáin, 2006; O'Toole & Hickey, 2016; Smith-Christmas, this issue). Examples are thus described in the literature of situations where even caregivers who are highly competent in one of the Celtic languages and who wish for their children to be skilled bilinguals don't maximise exposure to the minority language in the home [START_REF] Ó Hifearnáin | Beartas Teanga[END_REF]Smith Christmas, this issue). Furthermore, the way these minoritised varieties are used, not used, or discursively framed in the home can engender links between the languages and other domains, such as education or religion, in a way that confines them to those domains and renders their use in the broader context highly marked [START_REF] Smith-Christmas | Being socialised in language shift: the impact of extended family members on family language policy[END_REF]this issue). A mismatch between language management strategies and desired outcomes is evident and is largely attributable to insufficient awareness of successful models of language transmission or to the difficulties in implementing such models despite awareness of them. Although sociolinguists working on the Celtic languages have, with large degrees of success, identified the factors influencing language abandonment, the message regarding strategies for successful transmission in the home has not fully filtered down to the grassroots level. Celtic sociolinguists' proclivity for pointing to the (albeit important) tell tales of language decline, to the neglect of comprehensive descriptions of successful language transmission strategies in the home, is noteworthy here. While the abundant literature that describes the conditions of shift in the Celtic languages is illuminating, only a very sparse literature exists recounting the, admittedly more scarce, examples of successful Celtic language transmission in the home. The academic endeavour to comprehensively outline language shift, maintenance, revitalisation and revival, as well as the general public concerned with the fate of the Celtic varieties, would benefit from scholars becoming more engagé in cases of successful transmission. Such a development would advance our understanding of the conditions of small languages and, in addition, provide an exemplar for the converted. The article in this Special Issue by Cassie Smith-Christmas falls within this area.

The discursive framing of the Celtic languages among their speakers and its impact on language maintenance is the topic of the article by Smith-Christmas. The article critically investigates a longstanding issue that exists in minority language maintenance, namely how minority language immersion programmes and the broader community interact and whether or not the relationship between the two is conducive to the continued vitality of the minority language. Based on an analysis of data from long-term participant observation and recordings of language practices in an extended Scottish Gaelic-speaking family on the Isle of Skye, Smith-Christmas shows that the lack of use of Scottish Gaelic outside of the educational context is not solely attributable to a lack of competence in the language. Rather, it is contended that patterns of language usage are moulded by the language practices of caregivers and the strategies that they employ in order to encourage the use of Gaelic in the youngest generation. The micro-interactional analysis shows that despite the fact that the caregivers of the child in the study, Maggie, generally have highly positive views of Gaelic, are themselves active users of the language, and are in favour of passing it on, Gaelic is not always the medium of interaction between adults in front of the child and child-directed uses of Gaelic are generally framed as a pedagogical exercise. As a result, the author suggests that Maggie has internalised the view that Gaelic is only available for irregular, school-based interaction. In light of this, it seems that despite the desire to achieve language transmission in the home, the fate of the Celtic varieties may be largely dependent on the education system, a point that will be elaborated now.

The role of education

The presence of minoritised languages in education, whether subject only, bilingual programmes, or a full immersion experience, is mostly viewed in a positive light by those interested in their preservation, although it is by no means the panacea that some enthusiasts hope for (e.g. chapters in [START_REF] Hornberger | Can schools Save Indigenous Languages[END_REF]. Much of what emerges from sociolinguistic research on the effectiveness of language education in the Celtic varieties highlights the many strengths of these initiatives and, especially, the challenges they face. The significant demand that exists for education in the Celtic languages [START_REF] Darmody | Attitudes towards the Irish Language on the Island of Ireland[END_REF]O'Hanlon & Patterson, this issue;[START_REF] Redknap | Welsh-medium and bilingual education and training: steps towards a holistic strategy[END_REF] suggests that educational models that include them either as a subject or as a medium of instruction are recognised as effective for linguistic development and/or for broader educational success. Education in the Celtic varieties undoubtedly has the potential as well as a documented record of developing learners' language proficiency [START_REF] Mccloskey | Voices Silenced: Has Irish a Future[END_REF][START_REF] Nance | New' Scottish Gaelic speakers in Glasgow: a phonetic study of language revitalisation[END_REF][START_REF] Duibhir | The spoken Irish of sixth-class pupils in Irish immersion schools[END_REF], of moulding positive ideologies around the languages [START_REF] Mccloskey | Voices Silenced: Has Irish a Future[END_REF][START_REF] Walsh | Becoming a new speaker of Irish: linguistic mudes throughout the life cycle[END_REF] and of functioning as a trigger that prompts lifelong participation in the ethnoculture of habitual users of the languages (Walsh & O'Rourke 2014). However, the modern history of the institutionalisation of the Celtic languages in the form of educational provision demonstrates that the rollout of language in education programmes, even full immersion models, does not guarantee a vibrant language community [START_REF] Dunmore | Bilingual life after school? Language use, ideologies and attitudes among Gaelic-Medium Educated Adults[END_REF]. If it were the case that the inclusion of the Celtic languages in education resulted in widespread use of the languages beyond that domain, for instance, languages like Welsh and Irish (which have a relatively strong presence in education) would be far more widely practiced outside education than is presently the case.

The myriad factors influencing the choice or potential choice to study a Celtic language or to study through the medium of a Celtic language tend to vary. They include, for example, attitudinal factors, a desire to ensure that children develop linguistic proficiency in a Celtic variety, the alignment with a particular culture or identity, and in some extreme cases, an elitist desire to avoid alternatives due to the socio-economic profiles of students [START_REF] Baker | Three perspectives on bilingual education policy in Wales: Bilingual education as language planning, as pedagogy and as politics[END_REF][START_REF] Kavanagh | A Mixed methods investigation of parental involvement in Irish immersion primary education: Integrating multiple perspectives[END_REF][START_REF] Mack | Language attitudes of parents in Irish-medium primary schools in County Dublin[END_REF][START_REF] O'hanlon | Choice of Scottish Gaelic-medium and Welsh-medium education at the primary and secondary school stages: parent and pupil perspectives[END_REF]. People also foreground instrumental reasons such as the pursuit of the academic success that is associated with education in a language that is not the home language and the educational benefits that are linked to bilingualism [START_REF] Baker | Three perspectives on bilingual education policy in Wales: Bilingual education as language planning, as pedagogy and as politics[END_REF][START_REF] Kavanagh | A Mixed methods investigation of parental involvement in Irish immersion primary education: Integrating multiple perspectives[END_REF][START_REF] Mack | Language attitudes of parents in Irish-medium primary schools in County Dublin[END_REF][START_REF] O'hanlon | Choice of Scottish Gaelic-medium and Welsh-medium education at the primary and secondary school stages: parent and pupil perspectives[END_REF]. But, there are also other, more mundane, reasons that play a role such as a school's proximity to the home or to work. Just as the factors that influence the decision to seek education in a Celtic language vary, so does the support for the Celtic language outside of school. Support in the form of opportunities for language use and for the development of literacy in the Celtic languages, for example, is available for some students through the community and in the home, yet is not accessible to others. It is hardly a shock, then, that student outcomes vary with regards to linguistic proficiency and language ideologies, and that education does not lead to more widespread use of the languages outside that domain. Students' motivation to engage with the languages clearly plays an important role. Owing to the diverse sociolinguistic profiles and motivations of students developing proficiency in the Celtic languages through subject only or through Celtic language-medium education (e.g. [START_REF] Baker | Three perspectives on bilingual education policy in Wales: Bilingual education as language planning, as pedagogy and as politics[END_REF][START_REF] Hickey | Mixing beginners and native speakers in minority language immersion: Who is immersing whom?[END_REF]Mac Donnacha, Ní Chualáin, Ní Shéaghdha & Ní Mhainín, 2005;Thomas & Williams 2013), it is apposite to investigate the extent to which the different forms of Celtic language education align with the linguistic needs and aims of those it serves. That education makes some form of contribution to the vitality of the Celtic languages is fairly clear [START_REF] Mccloskey | Voices Silenced: Has Irish a Future[END_REF]. What is less clear, however, is the exact nature of that contribution in terms of promoting positive dispositions and actual language usage outside education. A more complete picture of the role of the Celtic languages in education would emerge were the existing research augmented by studies that explore education within the broader context of the home-school-community nexus (c.f. Walsh, Ó Murchadha, Carty, de Bres, Amorrortu Gomez, Laugharne [START_REF] Nance | New' Scottish Gaelic speakers in Glasgow: a phonetic study of language revitalisation[END_REF]. Thereby, the mechanics of how exactly education, in its interaction with other factors and influences, contributes to the vibrancy of the languages might be more fully explained. Investigations are lacking of the specific pedagogical approaches that best facilitate users and learners of all proficiency levels to participate in the life of a Celtic language as appropriate to their abilities. Furthermore, additional descriptions of the sociolinguistic and pedagogical conditions that are conducive to achieving proficiency and that enable participation in the ethnoculture of habitual language users would also be welcome (e.g. Ní Chlochasaigh, 2014; chapters in Smith-Christmas, Ó Murchadha, Hornsby & Moriarty, forthcoming).

As, education is a key focus of language policy and language planning in the Celtic languages, the factors influencing the likelihood of choice of Celtic language-medium education merits attention. Thus the article by O'Hanlon and Patterson in this special issue focuses on the likelihood of choice of Gaelic-medium education in Scotland. The article draws on data from the 2012 Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, which includes 40 questions on Gaelic and comprises interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,229 participants over 18 years of age. Set within [START_REF] Baker | Three perspectives on bilingual education policy in Wales: Bilingual education as language planning, as pedagogy and as politics[END_REF] model of bilingual education as planning, as pedagogy and as politics, the authors use inferential quantitative methods to investigate the impact of five factors that have been found to play a role in language education in Scotland. They include: demographic characteristics, exposure to Gaelic, cultural and national identities, views on the future of Gaelic and views on Gaelic in education. The authors find that while all factors contribute to the choice of Gaelic-medium education, views about the Gaelic language had the greatest impact, followed by demographic characteristics and cultural and national identity-based issues. This confirms the results from other studies on Gaelic and other Celtic languages which showed that ideological considerations rather than matters of language competence play a crucial role in the likelihood of choice of Celtic language-medium education. Máiréad Moriarty's article in this Special Issue contributes further to the scholarship on the Celtic languages in education. Moriarty examines the educational potential of so-called 'translanguaging' pedagogy in the minority-language classroom. In a departure from approaches to bilingualism and second-language teaching that promote the separation of codes and the sole use of the target language, Moriarty echoes previous calls (Garcia & Wei, 2013;[START_REF] Gorter | Multilingual interaction and minority languages: Proficiency and language practices in education and society[END_REF] for an approach to language teaching that promotes the use of learners' previously-known languages to facilitate the learning of 'new' languages. Focussing on Irish, the article advances research in translanguaging by empirically assessing the potential of this approach to minority language teaching. While the teaching of Irish has been a cornerstone of the Irish state's language maintenance policy since its foundation, it is highlighted that this approach has not, as initially hoped, resulted in high degrees of language use outside education. It is hypothesised that this is in part due to the prescribed approach to the teaching of Irish that promotes the sole use of the target language. The article uses data from a twelve-week case study of integrating rap in the Irish language primary school curriculum to explore the efficacy of rap as an innovative, translanguaging resource for the teaching of Irish. The author suggests that educational resources that allow children to digress from strict normative language use and encourage the use of all social and linguistic resources for meaning making foster a more positive ideological position for Irish in the classroom and in the students' social environment.

The integration of transglossic practices, it is argued, also helps to scaffold learning for different levels of competence. A further issue that consistently arises in research on sociolinguistic aspects of education in small languages concerns contention around competing linguistic norms [START_REF] Murchadha | The efficacy of unitary and polynomic models of standardisation in minority language contexts: Ideological, pragmatic and pedagogical issues in the standardisation of Irish[END_REF]Ó Murchadha, Smith-Christmas, Moriarty & Hornsby, forthcoming). This issue is closely related to education, but will be explored in detail in relation to the Celtic languages in the following section.

What is the target variety?

The hierarchical classification of speakers and of ways of speaking is a common social phenomenon across languages and has concerned modern sociolinguistics since its inception [START_REF] Garrett | Attitudes to language[END_REF]. Varieties are imbued with social values and certain varieties and users are indexed as legitimate, authoritative, authentic, and correct. Others do not enjoy this status. These ideological classifications are found in small languages also (Ó Murchadha, Smith-Christmas, Moriarty & Hornsby, forthcoming) and are attested in the Celtic varieties (Hornsby, 2010;[START_REF] Jones | Language Obsolescence and Revitalisation[END_REF][START_REF] Maccaluim | Reversing Language Shift: The social identity and role of Scottish Gaelic learners, Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona[END_REF][START_REF] Nance | Identity, accent aim, and motivation in second language users: new Scottish Gaelic speakers' use of phonetic variation[END_REF][START_REF] Murchadha | Authority and Innovation in Language Variation: Teenagers' Perceptions of Variation in Spoken Irish[END_REF][START_REF] Murchadha | The efficacy of unitary and polynomic models of standardisation in minority language contexts: Ideological, pragmatic and pedagogical issues in the standardisation of Irish[END_REF]Ó Murchadha & Ó hIfearnáin, forthcoming;[START_REF] Robert | Accommodating ''new'' speakers? An attitudinal investigation of L2 speakers of Welsh in South-East Wales[END_REF][START_REF] Sayers | Standardising Cornish: the politics of a new minority language[END_REF]. Thus, debates on target varieties for Celtic language users have been characterised by contention. The roots of contention lie in ideological assumptions about the value of traditional and post-traditional language varieties and practices and in attitudes to language users who practice those traditional and post-traditional varieties. The authority, authenticity and ownership of the languages and the ways they are practiced become points of tension. This emanates from language management goals that aim to promote the use of the Celtic languages into the future. Echoing [START_REF] Romaine | Planning for the Survival of Linguistic Diversity[END_REF] and Bentahila and Davies' (1993) ideas, Hornsby (this issue) and Ó hIfearnáin (2015) have described how language management efforts in the Celtic languages have tended to focus on their social, cultural and linguistic restoration to pre-shift conditions. At the same time, the sociolinguistic transformation of the languages has been viewed with suspicion. Innovative linguistic features, forms and practices that have developed during shift and revival in the Celtic languages have tended to be denigrated. The post-traditional linguistic styles and practices of younger speakers and of revival or so-called 'new speakers' are strongly contested (Ó Murchadha, Smith-Christmas, Moriarty & Hornsby, forthcoming). Practices are denigrated that deviate from traditional forms in their phonology, grammar and syntax, in using hybrid forms that incorporate French or English, and that make more limited use of the Celtic languages in what some view as tokenistic ways. To the extent that the Celtic languages will be used into the future, however, it is likely that they will be used in an increasingly innovative fashion. In addition to documenting those practices and ideologies around them, it would be informative to illustrate the extent to which different linguistic models are successfully implemented and allow users of all levels of proficiency to participate in the lives of the Celtic languages and contribute to their vitality. Michael Hornsby's article in this special issue is a contribution to this area.

Hornsby investigates the ideological tensions that result from language shift, on the one hand, and the development of what has come to be called 'new speaker' communities for lesser-used languages from the perspective of the concept of post-vernacularity. Focusing on (language) autobiographies and other narratives in the context of Breton, Hornsby explores the language ideologies of the traditional native-speaker community and those of the new speakers. While both sets of speakers are very much invested in the maintenance of Breton, the two sets of speakers do not constitute a 'community', as is frequently the case, especially in the context of Celtic languages. The traditional native-speaker community values Breton as a family and community language and is suspicious of the motives of the new speakers and disproves of their language practices -both how and when they use the language -which often diverge in several ways from their own. New speakers, in contrast, are often language activists whose aim is to spread the use of the language and to increase its visibility for a variety of reasons. The activist stance is often disapproved of by the traditional speakers who actively attempt to curb these new usages among the new speakers through language policing and generally do not actively engage with new speakers.

Conclusion

Although this special issue is by no means an exhaustive account of all of the issues faced by all of the Celtic languages, it is hoped that it will advance research on sociolinguistic aspects of the Celtic languages and that it will contribute more broadly to research on the sociolinguistics of small languages and varieties. Starting from the ideological perspective that linguistic diversity is worth sustaining, we take it that a core function of the sociolinguistic enterprise in minority languages, like the Celtic languages, is to explicate the conditions and strategies that facilitate and restrict the continued use of these languages. Specifically, the articles that comprise this special issue raise important questions that are germane to issues concerning: levels of support for minoritised languages that move beyond the abstract and the symbolic; the diversification of minority language teaching methodologies to include an approach that enables all learners to engage with 'small' languages in an educational context and to contribute to the vitality of the language in a way that aligns with their own current competence; the coherence between native, traditional speakers and non-native, new speakers populations; the local language management strategies that aim to transmit the language to younger generations, but that don't necessarily conform to documented successful approaches; and the social and ideological factors that influence parents' stance on minority language-medium education. Together, the articles address many of the issues that are fundamental to sustaining linguistic diversity and to the vitality of the Celtic languages.

1 Although the designation 'Insular' is by now a bit of a misnomer when it comes to the Breton language, the term is used alongside the term 'Continental' in linguistic categorisations of the historical forms of the Celtic languages. Although Breton has been resident on the continent for around 1,500 years, its geographical and linguistic origins are thought to lie in the insular varieties [START_REF] Fife | Typological aspects of the Celtic languages[END_REF].

Acknowledgements

The writing of this article has benefitted from ongoing discussions on the themes of "new speakers" as part of the EU COST Action IS1306 entitled, "New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges". We would like to thank the authors, the blind reviewers and those who participated in the Celtic Sociolinguistics Symposium for their contributions in shaping this special issue.


Bettina Migge

newcomers to Ireland

teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.

Introduction

The last roughly twenty years have seen a steady rise in research on varieties of English as spoken in Ireland (e.g. [START_REF] Filppula | The grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style[END_REF][START_REF] Hickey | Dublin English: Evolution and Change[END_REF][START_REF] Corrigan | Irish English[END_REF]; Amador-Moreno 2010). One line of research that has been particularly fruitful is the corpus-based investigation of pragmatic aspects of varieties of Irish English. While early work in this area examined hedging phenomena [START_REF] Farr | Would as a hedging device in an Irish context: An intra-varietal comparison of institutionalised spoken interaction[END_REF][START_REF] Farr | The Limerick Corpus of Irish English: Design, description and application[END_REF]), more recent research has been exploring a range of issues such as politeness strategies and relational work in different interactional contexts [START_REF] Clancy | You're fat. You'll eat them all: Politeness strategies in family discourse[END_REF][START_REF] Clancy | Complementary perspectives on hedging behaviour in family discourse: The analytical synergy of corpus linguistics and variational pragmatics[END_REF][START_REF] Farr | Relational strategies in the discourse of professional preformance review in an Irish academic environment : The case of language teacher education[END_REF], the uses, meanings and functions of silence and mitigation [START_REF] Kallen | Silence and mitigation in Irish English discourse[END_REF], vocatives [START_REF] Murphy | I'm fine girl, and how are you?': The use of vocatives in spoken Irish English[END_REF], different types of questions (O'Keeffe 2005) and discourse markers (Amador-Moreno 2005; [START_REF] Clancy | It's lunacy now": A corpus-based pragmatic analysis of the use of 'now' in contemporary Irish English[END_REF]. Most of these phenomena were examined on the basis of the one million word Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) which consists of a diverse set of recordings of naturally occurring speech from all over Ireland [START_REF] Farr | The Limerick Corpus of Irish English: Design, description and application[END_REF]). Although Ireland underwent significant social change between the 1990s and 2007 due to both unprecedented levels of economic growth and immigration to Ireland,1 research on language use in general and pragmatics in particular continues to primarily focus on the speech of people who speak varieties of Irish English as their main or only language. Aside from some recent work on the use of the discourse marker like among a small group of Polish immigrants to Ireland [START_REF] Nestor | Discourse 'like' and social identity -a case study of Poles in Ireland[END_REF], the use of various discourse markers (like, you know, I mean) by a select group of Polish and markers unlike that of structurally embedded items is highly dependent on exposure to interactions in the language as they are generally not easily accessible to conscious reflection:

If a foreign language learner says "five sheeps" or "he goed", he can be corrected by practically every native speaker. If, on the other hand, he omits a well, the likely reaction will be that he is dogmatic, impolite, boring, awkward to talk to etc., but a native speaker cannot pinpoint an 'error' (Svartvik 1980: 171).

Learner's relative degree of usage of discourse markers thus functions as an index of learners' level of exposure to and contact with the language and, by extension, their relative degree of integration. Now is an interesting case. It is commonly used in varieties of English. However, despite its ubiquity, there appear to be certain uses of now that both researchers (Clancy and Vaughan 2012: 232-3) and speakers and non-speakers of varieties of Irish English appear to see as characteristic of Irish English. For instance, when asked about what they see as distinctive about Irish ways of speaking English, several of the newcomers to Ireland whose data will be examined in this study singled out like, now and would as being emblemic of Irish English. A woman of Nigerian origin (A), for only find myself, you know, saying something like that if I'm talking to an Irish person, or, I'm in a group where the Irish people are […] (N2) Section two of the paper presents the data of this study. Section three reviews the concepts of discourse and pragmatic marker and current knowledge about the uses and functions of now in English and Irish English in particular. The fourth section discusses the distribution of now in the interviews with newcomers to Ireland, focusing on those uses that are emblemic of Irish English. The final part summarizes the findings and discusses their implications.

The Data for the Study

The bulk of the data for this study come from semi-guided interviews with recent newcomers to Ireland. 3 We asked interviewees to tell us about a range of issues relating to their life in Ireland such as their reasons for coming to Ireland, their experiences with finding work and in the work place, their contacts with Irish and non-Irish people, their leisure activities, their experiences with government services, their neighborhoods, their views about Irish culture, Irish and English, their future plans and the impact of the current recession on their lives. Australia, North America, India, Uganda and South Africa, and lived in a variety of locations throughout Ireland. Many of the interviewees held a third level degree or had had professional training prior to arriving in Ireland and a small number of them also held a fourth level degree. In Ireland, they worked in a variety of occupational sectors (Table 1). Some of the interviewees held an occupation commensurate with their educational qualification and/or similar to the one that they held prior to coming to Ireland, while others had to, at least initially, work in jobs below their level of qualification and experience. Due to issues with recording and transcription quality with some recordings, only 101 interviews involving 54 interviewees -seven interviewees were only interviewed once instead of twice -were analyzed linguistically for this project. The study also includes recordings from another research project that focused on the linguistic integration of African newcomers to Ireland. 5 For this project, a total of thirteen people living in the Dublin area were accessed through a variety of community groups and interviewed once. Interviewees worked in retail, community services, were full time students or did voluntary work because as asylum seekers they were barred from working. While these interviews also focused on people's lives in Ireland, they included more detailed discussions of people's linguistic backgrounds and linguistic ideologies. For the purpose of this project, five of the thirteen recordings were analyzed in detail. 6 As discussed in Migge (2012: 315f), interviewees had a range of levels of English.

Those who originated from North America, Australia and the UK generally presented themselves as monolingual speakers of English. Interviewees from India and Africa had usually received all or important parts of their education through English but 5 The project was funded by the UCD Seed funding scheme and was entitled in English and/or watching of English-medium films in order to improve their level of English. Those who did take English language classes usually did so for only a short period of time and generally after they had achieved a certain level of fluency. Formal instruction was seen as a way of addressing remaining stylistic and grammatical shortcomings and of obtaining formal certification to be used for professional advancement. All interviewees asserted that they had very little precise knowledge of Irish English on arrival in Ireland and initially struggled to understand locals' language use.

The research on now

Since the data analysis in this paper will particularly focus on now's non-temporal or discursive uses, I briefly discuss the concept of discourse marker before reviewing the literature on now.

Discourse markers

According to [START_REF] Müller | Discourse markers in native and non-native English Discourse[END_REF] 2) research on discourse markers also variously referred to as discourse particles [START_REF] Aijmer | English Discourse Particles[END_REF] or pragmatic markers (Brinton 1998) started

with [START_REF] Lakoff | Questionable answers and answerable questions[END_REF] work on sentence initial why and well. Since that time a fair amount of research has been carried out with a view to capturing their nature (e.g. [START_REF] Schiffrin | Discourse markers[END_REF]Aijemer 2002). However, instead of generating a definitive set of defining characteristics, research to date has highlighted their heterogeneous nature.

For one, they originate from different syntactic classes such as conjunctions, adverbs and prepositional phrases (Fraser 1999: 946) and belong to different lexical classes.

They also do not have a single linguistic structure. Some of them are single morphemes such as well, like, while others are phrasal elements such as I mean and you know in English. Moreover, while they appear to be susceptible to phonological reduction, not all of them have or will necessarily undergo it. Discourse markers tend to be quite frequent in spoken, conversational discourse, but they are also found in written discourse, though to date little research has been done on their uses and frequency in literature (but see [START_REF] Amador-Moreno | Discourse Markers in Irish English: an example from Literature[END_REF], 2012).

Researchers furthermore agree that discourse markers are independent of sentential structure because their removal from an utterance does not render it syntactically ungrammatical. This is an important characteristic that distinguishes discourse markers from their non-discourse marker homonyms. Another distinctive property relates to their function. [START_REF] Fraser | What are discourse markers?[END_REF], building on [START_REF] Schiffrin | Discourse markers[END_REF] notion of discourse coherence, argues that their function is mostly procedural: "With certain exceptions, they signal a relationship between the segment they introduce, S2, and the prior segment, S1." (p. 950). 7 They provide insights into an utterance's place in the discourse structure and signal changes in the framing of an utterance. They guide the interpretation of an utterance such as an utterance's illocutionary force, provide cues as to how an utterance links to the context and/or its relationship to the textual sequence in which it occurs. Discourse markers are generally found in utterance initial position as they introduce S2. However, they may also be found in utterance medial or final position (Fraser 1999: 938).

Although the term discourse marker has often been used as a cover term to refer to all elements that contribute to the pragmatic interpretation of an utterance, it is important to distinguish two broad types of markers because they perform different functions. While discourse markers as defined above have a procedural meaning in that they establish linkages between utterances, what I will refer to as pragmatic markers operate on the interpersonal level. They give insights into the power relationships at play, interlocutors' relative status and cultural norms of communication. The clause-final use of maybe with requests or tag questions with declarative sentences, for instance, is linked to negative politeness and establishes a distance relationship.

7 See also e.g. [START_REF] Blakemore | Understanding utterances: An introduction to Pragmatics[END_REF] on this issue.

2. Current knowledge on now

Descriptive works on English generally describe now as a circumstantial adverb that indexes the temporal circumstances of an activity. It locates an event or stateworking at a certain location, being hungry, availability to speak -at the present time

(1).

(1) a. <#> Yeah <,> yeah <,> yeah <#> I thought I didn't like working there but c. Now isn't a good time to speak to him.

(http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/now_1)

It is also used to set up temporal relationships between utterances. In (2) now indicates that "getting dark" followed a previously mentioned event.

(2) It was getting dark now and we were tired.

(http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/now_1)

Now is also used to indicate a temporal sequence. In (3) now indexes that being a vegetarian started ten years ago and that this state of affairs is still on-going.

(3) She's been a vegetarian for ten years now.

(http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/now_1) Now as a circumstantial adverb is very frequent in spoken discourse, particularly in conversational interactions, and may occur in a variety of positions within the utterance such as utterance initially, medially or finally.

8 ICE-Ireland is the Irish part of the Internation Corpus of English. It consists of transcripts of 300 spoken and 200 written text samples collected in Ireland specifically put together for the purpose of linguistic analysis (http://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/ICE-Ireland/). Now also performs various discursive functions. As a discourse marker it occurs in utterance initial position, is de-accented and unstressed, part of a larger intonational unit and may collocate with other discourse makers. According to Schiffrin (1987: 44), now's discursive meanings are linked to now's deictic meaning. Like temporal now, which is a proximal deictic that locates "an utterance in a ego-centered space, i.e. a space dominated by the producer, rather than the receiver, of an utterance" (Schiffrin 1987:245), now in its discursive uses is also ego-centered, focusing attention on the speaker's view and what they have to say. Discursive now, like other proximal deictics is also evaluative: "now is used to highlight interpretive glosses for one's own talk which a speaker him/herself favors." (Schriffrin 1987: 245). [START_REF] Schiffrin | Discourse markers[END_REF] identifies two broad uses of discourse marker now. First, it is found "in discourse [s] in which the speaker progresses through a cumulative series of subordinate units" (Schiffrin 1987: 232) such as lists, arguments and comparisons. In this case now helps to overtly structure the discourse by introducing or highlighting subparts of a comparison (4) or argument (5).

(4) a. It's nice there.

b. Now our street isn't that nice. (Schiffrin 1987: 231) (5) a. They have an open classroom at Lansdon. b. Now there's lots of the mothers in that room are very upset about it. c. I'm not. (Schiffrin 1987: 234) Second, now also marks pivotal shifts in the participation framework or footing of an utterance, changing "the mode through which the speaker is related to the information being presented" (Schiffrin 1987: 240). It signals a (momentary) change in conversational activity (Clancy & Vaughan 2012: 228) and functions to clear "a bit of conversational space" (Biber et al. 1999(Biber et al. : 1088)). For instance, in (6) it marks a shift from a declarative sentence to an interrogative one that enquires about reception and understanding on the part of the hearer.

(6) They're using socialism t' fight capitalism. Now can you understand that? (Schiffrin 1987: 240) In ( 7) three people are talking about the substandard conditions that an elder has to suffer in a retirement home and the reason for that. Presentation of the reason for the elder's suffering -the elder's stinginess -is set off from the presentation of the conditions using utterance initial now. The latest research on now, [START_REF] Schourup | The discourse marker now: A relevance-theoretic approach[END_REF], attempts to capture the discursive function of now from a relevance theoretic perspective without reference to the notion of local coherence. He argues that now encodes a procedural constraint roughly along the following lines: "Process the utterance in a context that is in part significantly ('noteworthily') new with respect to assumptions already highly accessible" [START_REF] Schourup | The discourse marker now: A relevance-theoretic approach[END_REF](Schourup : 2121)). From this perspective now creates the "impression of interutterance coherence indirectly" because interpretation of utterances headed by now is contingent upon assumptions that emerged in the preceding context [START_REF] Schourup | The discourse marker now: A relevance-theoretic approach[END_REF](Schourup : 2128)).

Research to date (e.g. [START_REF] Schiffrin | Discourse markers[END_REF][START_REF] Aijmer | English Discourse Particles[END_REF][START_REF] Schourup | The discourse marker now: A relevance-theoretic approach[END_REF]) has generally focused on now's use in utterance initial position. However, Clancy & Vaughan's (2012: 229, 236ff) work on now in Irish English shows that now also performs nonetemporal functions in utterance final position. In this position, it has the properties of a pragmatic marker. When it co-occurs with other markers of affective meaning, it is used as a marker of affect intensification. Take for instance example ( 9 The intensification function of now is also found in (some) other varieties of English such as English as spoken in the UK but now appears utterance initially rather than finally in these varieties. In contexts in which now occurs in conjunction with facethreatening activities such as challenges, disagreements, evaluations and orders, it functions as a hedge (Clancy & Vaughan's 2012: 238). In these instances, where it often also co-occurs with other hedges, it mitigates the face-threat to the hearer's face that is inherent in such activities. It "downtone[s] the illocutionary force of an utterance allowing the speaker to weaken his/her commitment to its propositional content." (Clancy & Vaughan 2012: 237). This usage is evident in the discussion about a student loan application (10) from the ICE-Ireland corpus. Speaker C is urging a bank official to process the application quickly because he is running out of money. A is taking this request for faster processing as a face-threat and reprimands C, ordering him to avoid unfriendliness. C mitigates the face-threat inherent in the order by postposing now to the command.

(10) <S1A-053$C> <#> <[> So I said </[> </{> it 'll be another fortnight & Vaughan (2012: 241)

Now in the speech of newcomers to Ireland

The transcribed audio-recorded interviews with newcomers to Ireland were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Using the software package Wordsmith Tools 6 [START_REF] Scott | Wordsmith Tools[END_REF]), all instances of now were randomly extracted for each interviewee. Each concordance line was then examined individually in order to determine the precise function of each token of now. Below I present first of all the frequency distribution of the various functions of now and then discuss each function in more detail based on a qualitative analysis of the data.

1. The frequency of now in the speech of newcomers to Ireland

Analysis of the semi-guided interviews with newcomers to Ireland produced a total of 1870 tokens of now (Table 1). As in the case of other corpora, such as the British National corpus and LCIE whose data consist of speech produced by native speakers of English, 9 temporal uses of now are more frequent than any of the other uses of now.

However, in the immigrant data examined here, temporal uses of now by far outweigh other uses of now; they make up 91% of the total number of now tokens. Compare this with Clancy & Vaughan's (2012: 234-235) figures based on an analysis of 500 randomly selected occurrences of now from LCIE and the British National corpus, respectively. Less than half (41%) in the case of LCIE and 61% of all the now tokens in the British National corpus were found to have a temporal meaning.

There are also broad similarities with respect to the distribution of the other functions of now. In the immigrant data, as in the British National corpus and LCIE, discourse marker uses of now are more frequent than instances where now functions as a pragmatic marker. However, non-temporal uses of now are much less frequent in the immigrant data. They only constitute 5% and 4%, respectively, of the total instances of now in the immigrant data while they make up about a third each in the LCIE (discourse marker 31%; pragmatic marker 28%) and about 37% and 2% respectively in the British National corpus. [START_REF] Clancy | It's lunacy now": A corpus-based pragmatic analysis of the use of 'now' in contemporary Irish English[END_REF] argue that the frequency difference between pragmatic marker now in LCIE and in the British 9 The term native speaker is somewhat controversial as it is often used to mean monolingual. In this paper, I use the term as short-hand for a person who has been using a variety of English as a main or as the only means of communication for most or all of their interactions since childhood.

National corpus is indicative of the fact that this function of now is particular to varieties of Irish English. (2012) discussion of now, the main reason for this might be that discourse maker now is common to a number of different varieties of English while now as a pragmatic marker is specific to Irish varieties of English. This then suggests that only about half (50.8%) of the interviewees have acculturated to some degree to Irish ways of speaking English.

2. Temporal uses of now

Most interviewees employed between twenty to forty tokens of temporal now in the two interviews and about half of that in single interviews (11).10 However, some interviewees (3) used more than 60 instances of now in two one-hour interviews.

Some tokens of now located an activity in the present, usually implicitly or explicitly comparing activities in two different time periods ( 12). Now was also used to mark temporal relations between utterances or their sequencing order. In this usage, it was often combined with and (13a) to emphasize the successive nature of the events. It also indicates that some event or state has been on-going for a while (13b).

(13) a. I started in reservations just like everybody else and now I am in hotel coordination where I work directly with the hotel managers, tell them their success reports on how they are dealing with our preferred guests, the people who come to our hotels often. (2007US11) b. I think Finnish [is the language I'm most comfortable in] but I haven't spoken Finnish for a few months now so mostly I speak Polish to the friends in my college, so that would be... (Fin 1)

3. Discourse marker uses of now

In the immigrant data, discourse marker now is used in similar ways as described for other corpora such as the LCIE corpus [START_REF] Clancy | It's lunacy now": A corpus-based pragmatic analysis of the use of 'now' in contemporary Irish English[END_REF], American English [START_REF] Schiffrin | Discourse markers[END_REF]) and the London-Lund corpus [START_REF] Aijmer | English Discourse Particles[END_REF]. There are a few instances in which discourse marker now is used to structure discourse (Schiffrin 1987: 232). Take for instance (15). Here the interviewee, a man from Venezuela who had spent most of his adulthood in the US before moving to Ireland, is explaining the role of language knowledge in his current job.

(14) No it is because we are dealing with all of Europe and Asia, South America and the United States so we have to have a language for each country so we have like 16 different languages represented, that is for the reservation part. Now moving into the next level it is a lot different because now I have to interact with a lot of Irish people because the people (2007US11a)

In extract ( 14), he is comparing different occupational levels (front line service versus managerial level) in his company with respect to the types of people that employees have to deal with and the importance of knowing languages other than English. Now In both examples now appears to put focus on what follows. However, since the proposition introduced by now adds new information that contrasts with previous information supplied by the interviewee, it might be best to categorize these uses of now as instances of discourse markers now rather than as a presentative now.

Pragmatic marker now

The interviews also include instances where now functions as a pragmatic marker, adding affective meaning to an utterance. As in the case of the LCIE [START_REF] Clancy | It's lunacy now": A corpus-based pragmatic analysis of the use of 'now' in contemporary Irish English[END_REF], pragmatic uses of now in the interviews with newcomers to Ireland also occur utterance finally rather than utterance initially. As a pragmatic marker, now generally co-occurs with emotion or affect expressing forms and either emphasizes their affective meaning (19) or mitigates their illocutionary force (21). In example (19a), for instance, now intensifies the emotional content of the verb love, conveying that the interviewee feels very strongly about West Cork and in (19b) it amplifies the negative feelings expressed by gutted. There are a few cases in the data where it is not clear whether now functions as a pragmatic marker or as a temporal form, possibly conveying both meanings. In (20), for example, it is not clear whether now intensifies big, or whether reference is made to the fact that Sligo used to be small and has grown significantly in recent years.

(20) Interviewer: And do you like living in Sligo?

Interviewee: Yes.

Interviewer: What do you like about it?

Interviewee: The size of the town, it is a very small town. Some people say to me, 'Sligo is a very big town now.' I am from a small Polish city with about 400,000 people. (2004POL03)

The use of now as a marker of intensification is less commonly found in the data than its use as a hedging device. [START_REF] Clancy | It's lunacy now": A corpus-based pragmatic analysis of the use of 'now' in contemporary Irish English[END_REF] argue that now as a mitigator is used to downtone power relationships in face sensitive interactions. Since the interactions in the context of the semi-guided interviews were generally not hierarchical or conflictual in nature, we do not find these kinds of uses of now.

However, there are instances where now appears to mitigate the impact or force of an assertion. For instance, in example (21a) the interviewee wants to downtone the implication that he was acting in a completely goal oriented manner as that has overtones of arrogance. In order to mitigate this implication he modified the verb knew with kind of and now which both reduce its force. In (21b), now is mitigating the force of I don't know, suggesting that the interviewee is not completely in the dark about the outcome of the demand; note that she then also moves on to explain that she has already received approval from Ireland.

(21) a. Interviewer: And so is the firm that you are working for is that the one that you had chosen out of the 5 interviews that you did? The pragmatic use of now which [START_REF] Clancy | It's lunacy now": A corpus-based pragmatic analysis of the use of 'now' in contemporary Irish English[END_REF] identified as distinctive of Irish English was not used by all interviewees and was only used to a small extent (once or twice) by most interviewees who employed it, suggesting that it has not (yet) been widely integrated into these newcomers' language usage.

Conclusion

This paper examined the uses of now in the speech of people who had relatively recently come (between 2-6 years) to live in Ireland for a variety of reasons. The investigation of semi-guided interviews with 59 people coming from a range of European and non-European countries revealed interesting similarities and differences with respect to the use of now. As in the case of so-called native speakers of varieties of Irish English, temporal uses of now were most prominently represented in the speech of all interviewees. Non-temporal now, by contrast, was much less widely used in the immigrant data than among native speakers of Irish English. While a number of newcomers used pragmatic now, one of its uses which appears to be emblemic of Irish ways of speaking English, they at times employed it slightly differently from the uses described by [START_REF] Clancy | It's lunacy now": A corpus-based pragmatic analysis of the use of 'now' in contemporary Irish English[END_REF]. In the immigrant data it does not only operate on the interlocutor's face wants -mitigation of a threat to the interlocutor's face -but was also used to downtone a threat to the speaker's face.

Moreover, although several interviewees highlighted the uniqueness of presentative now, none of them employed it spontaneously in the interview(s).

From the perspective of integration, the low frequency and uneven distribution of the uses of now that appear to be particularly emblemic of Irish English (pragmatic and presentative now) suggest that interviewees have not at all or only weakly acculturated to Irish ways of speaking English. There are two possible reasons for this. On the one hand, low rates of acculturation could be due to lack of sufficient contact with speakers of Irish English. This is indeed an issue that was raised by a number of our interviewees. An Italian interviewee, for instance, argued that she did not have any close relationships with Irish nationals because they do not engage with others in that manner (Gilmartin & Migge in press):

I found quite all the times that it is very easy to hang on with Irish people but then it's not easy to become real friends. To know really who they are, what they want. At some stage you can't be closer to them. (2004IT01)

Another interviewee from the UK argued that he found it hard to make Irish friends because he did not fully understand their socialization patterns.

Interviewee: […] It is hard sometimes to know where to meet people.

Interviewer: Are there any places that you have found good for meeting people so far?

Interviewee: I have been going to a thing, up to last year, to Toastmasters, which is for public speaking and there is a social side to it as well, so that will be starting again in a couple of weeks so I hope to start going to that again.

(2004UK03)

People with Irish partners had more contacts with locals, but often complained that they were not able to make many friends outside of their partner's circle of friends and family.

On the other hand, we also found what could be called a resistance discourse.

While many of our interviewees displayed positive attitudes towards Irish English ('it is very endearing' (2007US08)) and were generally happy to actively use features associated with Irish English, others said that they actively avoided such properties because they felt that it undermined their identity (Migge 2012: 322): "And I would get offended probably if somebody said to me I was getting an Irish accent, and that is honest. But that is because being English is an absolute part of who I am, I don't want it to go" (2004UK05). People of African origin and some interviewees from the USA, in contrast, remarked that they avoided Irish features of English because "Irish people generally perceived such uses as mocking: '[…] like, you want to like, speak the way they speak, they think you are, like making jest of them' (N I)" (Migge 2012: 325).

Apart from the degree of contact between newcomers and Irish people, newcomers' attitudes to things Irish and Irish reactions to newcomers' patterns of language use, it is also possible that the nature of the interactional setting impacted on the frequency and distribution of non-temporal uses of now. While an effort was made to emphasise the informal character of the semi-guided interviews [START_REF] Migge | Unbounding migration studies: The intersections of language, space and time[END_REF], they nevertheless differed from the conversational encounters involving familiar interlocutors of a similar age range on which most of the research on the pragmatics of Irish English is based. Further research on the uses of now and other discourse level elements among newcomers to Ireland should thus verify the findings from this study based on an analysis of recordings of naturally occurring conversations.

  Participants had either arrived in 2004 or in 2007 and were identified using three key methods: snowballing, flyers, and online recruitment via a number of on-line forums for expatriates. Most participants were interviewed twice over a period of two years and interviews lasted about an hour. Participants are representative of Ireland's immigrant population. They consisted of thirty-six women and twenty-four men and their ages ranged from 23 to 68 years of age, with the overwhelming majority in their twenties and thirties. Interviewees originated from different European countries, 4

  now I've decided that I do. (ICE-Ireland, S1A-057) b. God I'm so hungry now I'd love to go for my dinner. (ICE-Ireland, S1A-046) 8

  (7) <S1A-055$A> <#> <unclear> several words </unclear> <#> A place like Saint Ita 's sure would be ideal for the likes <{> <[> of him </[> <S1A-055$B> <#> <[> Yeah </[> </{> <S1A-055$E> <#> But you know it 's cruel where he 's above in Mallow now like <#> And he 's in that ward just there 's three beds here <,> three facing him three behind him and this kind of thing like <#> Now he has plenty of money like but he wouldn't pay to go into a home <#> He <{> <[> wouldn't pay to have a phone below now </[> (ICE-Ireland, S1A-055) Aijmer (2002: 92) also points out that besides introducing a different conversational activity, now is also used to intensify or highlight a subjective opinion particularly in a conflictual situation: (8) ^none of whom will :sp\eak to each_other# and ^all of whom want to cut each other's thr\oats# ^now!I think this is a :very bad th\ing# -^bad thing for British dem\ocracy# -I [e] . ^watch I [we] I'm ^\old e_nough# to have ^watched the !Labour . the ^L\iberal_Party# (5.5 683-88)

( 12 )

 12 For example, I helped a little bit with the Lisbon Treaty, which we lost. I am helping with the local election right now. I am the group which is working with the councilors' candidates in the local elections. (2007POL01) In this function, it occurred in both, sentence or utterance final (12) or initial position, being sometimes modified by elements such as right that emphasize the currency of the activity.

  introduces the second part of the comparison -interactions on the managerial levelhighlighting that it is a subpart of the comparison structure. The use of now in comparisons was not very common overall and mainly found among interviewees coming from the USA, though (15) is an instance from a French interviewee. Further research is needed to determine the distribution of this use of now in varieties of English and other languages. (15) I wouldn't say I am unfairly treated [unclear] like I got teased and everything for that but nothing that would [unclear]. Like there is always this [unclear] maybe I am very typically French and they are typically Irish [unclear] but it is not too bad this way. Now the customer is another story. (2007FR1) As a discourse marker, now is also frequently used to mark what Schiffrin (1987: 240) described as pivotal shifts in the participation framework or footing of the interaction. For instance, in example (16) the interviewee is first providing the interviewers with information about an organization and then puts forward her own assessment of the organization's purpose. The assessment part is set off from the former by the use of now which is combined with I think which overtly marks what follows as an opinion. (16) […] when I was studying in university in Ljubljana I was a member of a student organisation called BEST which stands for Build a European Students of Technology and this organisation is again everywhere in Europe except Ireland and UK for some reason Interviewer 1: They are always different. Interviewee: [unclear overlapping 00:50:47:11] .org and you will see where it is. Now I think the main thing of this organisation is that, first of all it's technical students and the main activity are summer courses which are 2 week long courses on some technical topic […] (SLO1) (17) is an instance where discourse marker now is used to introduce a different footing. Here the interviewee first asserts her acquaintance with Italian chipper families in Dublin before she gives the interviewer privileged information about them. Now marks the shift from a personal experience narrative to a knowledge discourse that highlights her professional engagement with this group of people -she had done a documentary on them for one of her class projects. The change in discourse activity and relationship between the interlocutors is further underscored by ok preceding now and the phrase I will tell you what other people never say about this community. (17) I know all of them because of this [unclear overlapping 01:27:46:11]. I know them and ok now I will tell you what other people never say about this community. They made a lot of money yes on fish and chips but they made a lot of money on gambling. (2004IT01) The immigrant corpus also included two tokens (18) that are susceptible to being instances of what Clancy & Vaughan (2012) referred to as presentative now. Both tokens were uttered by a man from Wales of Irish parents with a strong Irish identity. (18) a. Interviewee: No I just go back and get all that done over there. Interviewer 2: Really? Interviewer 1: Do you? Yes? Interviewee: Now if I could I would like. I have had to, I would use a kind of a doctor and stuff but I think it's very, it's just I can't figure it out at all really like. (2007UK1) b. Interviewer : How about for example media and newspapers and whatever you read. What kinds of things do you read? Like if you want to find out? Interviewee: BBC.co.uk. Interviewer: You don't read the Irish Times or Interviewee: Ah no I do. Now I would read the Irish Times a bit now.

(

  19) a. I have been to Galway, Dublin, I haven't been to the North of Ireland yet. I love West Cork now, I have been there a few times, to Clonakilty, it is nice. Dublin I have been to a couple of times, two or three times, a nice city but it is a bigger city. (2007FR01) b. I think so yes. I think like I am kind of happy kind of here now at the moment like and I would be pretty gutted now like if I was going to lose my job and I did have to go back. I would be kind of, yes. I am just kind of happy how it all kind of worked out and the kind of the friends I made like and where I am at the moment like so, and with the work and stuff like so. (2007uk1)

Interviewee:

  It is. I kind of knew now, I knew before I, out of the 10 interviews really like I kind of knew that if this firm had of offered me a place I would have gone for them like because I knew about them before and stuff and they offered a place then like so its. (2007UK1) b. Interviewee: Yes and that's what I had the contact with the Revenue here because I need the letter from them that I am a taxed resident here and it was easy I just called them and they sent it so. Interviewer: Oh. So and that worked out without any problems? Interviewee: Well I don't know now it's in process. It worked out on the Irish side I don't know what Slovenia is going to say. (SLO 1)

Table 1 :

 1 Occupation of interviewees at time of interview

	Employment Sector	No. of	Type of Job
		Interviewees
	Construction	5	Architect, engineer, technician,
			administrator

3 The IRCHSS-funded project was entitled Towards a dynamic approach to research on migration and integration (PI: Mary Gilmartin, University of Maynooth) and ran from December 2008 to December 2010.

4

They came from the France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and UK.

  ) from the LCIE corpus. Here now highlights or intensifies the negative feelings expressed by

	lunacy.
	(9) <Speaker 1>	No I'd never do that.
	<Speaker 2>	I'll go.
	<Speaker 1>	Sarah I wouldn't do it.
	<Speaker 2>	I always wanted to do that.
	<Speaker 3>	It's lunacy now.

<Speaker 1>

I wouldn't do it.

(Clancy & Vaughan 2012: 229)

  <#> Well do you think you could do it a bit faster like you know <#> I 've got no money here <S1A-053$A> <#> Don't be rude now <#> Sure you 're on the list <#> We 're doing the best we can <&> laughter </&> <S1A-053$C> <#> And then my money ran out so I banged down the phone and said shit (ICE-Ireland, S1A-053)Clancy & Vaughan (2012: 235) argue that the use of now as a hedge is unique to Irish English and contributes to the high frequency and salience of now in Irish English as opposed to British spoken English, for instance. They argue that now's use as a

	utterance final hedge contributes "towards minimising power", underscoring "a
	crucial characteristic of the pragmatic system of Irish English: the emphasis on
	solidarity and corollary downtoning of power, both actual and conversational."
	context.
	(11) <Speaker 1>	Can I use the internet please?
	<Speaker 2>	Yeah yeah sure.
	<Speaker 1>	Thanks very much.
	<Speaker 2>	Are you finished?
	<Speaker 1>	And I printed up two pages. How much is that?
	<Speaker 2>	One fifty. Now. Thanks.
	<Speaker 1>	Thanks very much. Bye. (Clancy

(Clancy & Vaughan 2012: 240

; see also

[START_REF] Farr | Relational strategies in the discourse of professional preformance review in an Irish academic environment : The case of language teacher education[END_REF][START_REF] Farr | Would as a hedging device in an Irish context: An intra-varietal comparison of institutionalised spoken interaction[END_REF][START_REF] Kallen | Silence and mitigation in Irish English discourse[END_REF]

.

[START_REF] Clancy | It's lunacy now": A corpus-based pragmatic analysis of the use of 'now' in contemporary Irish English[END_REF]

also highlight yet another function of now that appears to be particular to Irish English, namely its use as a presentative marker. In this function, now makes an entity in the real world salient to the discourse by pointing to it. Example (

11

) is an example of this usage of now. Its use makes salient the money that is being handed over as part of the verbal interaction. This use was also commented on by several of the newcomers to Ireland. The presentative function is part of now's discourse marker function: it points to something new within a known

Table 1 :

 1 The distribution of now in the corpus of semi-guided interviews with

	newcomers to Ireland
	Temporal now Discourse	Pragmatic	Presentative now Total
	now	now
	1708 (91.3%) 92 (5%)	63/7	2	1870
	In order to gain a better understanding of the actual distribution of the different

instances of now in the semi-guided interviews, I also explored inter-speaker variation. While temporal now was found in all interviews, people's use of discourse and pragmatic marker now differed. Only 20 of the 59 interviewees used both discourse and pragmatic marker now, 15 used only discourse marker now and ten employed only the pragmatic marker now. The absence of non-temporal now may be related to interviewees' comparatively low levels of competence in English in some cases (7). However, this reason cannot explain the absence of non-temporal now in the case of other interviewees as some of them (3) where native speakers of English from the UK and the USA. Further research is required on this issue. Overall, it appears that non-temporal uses of now are established among most of the interviewees though the discourse marker function of now appears to be somewhat better established than the pragmatic function of now. Following

Clancy & Vaughan's

At the height of the boom, the foreign population of Ireland nearly doubled within the space of four years: from 7% or

274,000 people in 2002 to 13%, or 420,000 people in 2006. Until recently, UK citizens constituted the largest group of newcomers(Gilmartin & Mills 2008), however, recent census data suggests that people from Poland exceed UK citizens. Other newcomers came from a variety of EU 15 (e.g. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands) and EU 25 (e.g. Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia) countries, and from countries outside of Europe such as Australia, the United States, Nigeria and India.

Note that all examples from my own data are presented in a clean format because the data have to date not been assembled into a tagged corpus. The examples taken from the ICE-Ireland corpus and those quoted from the LCIE appear in tagged format.

The recordings also included a number of instances where now occurred in fixed expressions such as now and then, nowadays. These instances were excluded from consideration.