Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 19.1, 2013 Selected Papers from Sociolinguistics Summer School 4 Roberts, N. S. and Childs C. (eds.) INTEGRATION AND IDENTITY: ACQUISITION OF IRISH-ENGLISH BY POLISH AND CHINESE MIGRANTS IN DUBLIN, IRELAND CHLOE DISKIN * (University College Dublin) Abstract This paper examines the acquisition of vernacular Irish-English by non-native speaker migrants residing in Dublin, Ireland. Taking the discourse-pragmatic markers like, you know and I mean and quotatives as its variables, it aims to discover whether the level of integration of migrants is reflected by accommodation to native speaker norms. This paper describes a small-scale quantitative analysis of the frequency, distribution and function of these variables among both non-native speakers and native speakers (taken from the ICE-Ireland corpus). The results are discussed and triangulated with qualitative data extrapolated from sociolinguistic interviews. They show that identity plays a significant role in acquisition of vernacular speech. The paper also poses some questions as to the validity of older recordings of native speakers, especially when discussing rapid changes in discourse and quotative like. 1. Introduction In an increasingly globalised and mobilised society, migration has become a way of life for significant numbers of the world’s population. This has resulted in progressively diverse settings for language contact and multilingualism. The study of migration and language has been the focus of considerable research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Applied Linguistics. However, this has mostly been from the point of view of the classroom, and how learners acquire mainstream and prestigious varieties of English, such as American, Canadian or British English (e.g. Jin & Cortazzi 2011). Among policy-makers, the discourse on integration generally features aims and objectives for migrants to integrate within their society by becoming proficient in the official language(s) of the ‘host’ country (see Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform 2005: 32). However, such reports tend to be vague in terms of the definition of ‘proficiency’ and the methods with which it can be measured. These discussions ‘fail to outline precisely INTO WHAT migrants are meant to be integrated’ (Feldman et al. 2008: 4, emphasis added). This paper proposes to measure linguistic integration by the degree to which features of non-standard vernacular English are acquired and used in spontaneous conversation by non-native speakers (NNS) residing in Ireland. This is based on the premise that integration is best understood and measured at the level of individual experience (Feldman et al. 2008: 4). Sankoff et al. (1997) and Nestor et al. (2012) have shown that non-native speakers displaying high levels of accommodation to native speaker (NS) vernacular norms tend to also feel more integrated into the society in question. This paper will focus specifically on the acquisition of pragmatic elements of language, thus involving: * This paper builds on a presentation delivered at the 4 th Sociolinguistics Summer School (2012), Newcastle, UK. Thank you to the delegates there for their insightful feedback and comments. Thank you also to the editors of the Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics. All further errors are my own. This study was made possible by a postgraduate scholarship from the Irish Research Council.