"Tis the Way We Says it, boy" A Look at the Cork Accent and Vocabulary

By now most people in Ireland know more or less what a ‘langer’ is. Not quite as impercipient as a ‘gowl’ or a ‘noodeenaw’ - though fatuity figures largely in his makeup, the langer is something of a shoneen oblivious to the snide dismissals of his neighbours. The fine-tuning process employed in pitching a langer’s mettle is almost impossible to explain. If you weren’t born under Shandon’s chimes, you would have had to live in Cork for a long time to even attempt to explain the subtlety.

All jokes, stories, back-stabbing and colloquialisms are governed by finite epistemological rules. If a Clareman, for instance, says that some fellow is ‘the two ends of a hoor’, a Corkman would be put to the pin of his collar to understand him. Conversely if a Corkman says he has a ‘jag with a lasher’, he’s looking forward to a date with a pretty girl.

Epistemology alone doesn’t shape the queer way we speak in Cork. There’s the languid Lee valley; the Vikings; Elizabethans and Normans have all left an indelible echo on the habitus and common speech of the people and Cork, to quote anthropologist Mick Moloney still retains marked inflections of its industrial past in dialect, humour and word play, it is one of the most distinctive urban regions in the late twentieth century.

In the excellent television series The Story of English, there was a scene at Murphy’s brewery in Cork where philologists spoke with the older workers and explained to us that words they were using like mate and ate instead of meat and eat were redolent of Elizabethan English. Unfortunately with the relentless force of gunge radio and linguistic institutionalisation, it is unlikely that autonomous accents will survive. The lovely broad primary vowel sound, for instance seems to be in retreat. Without it, as a suffix to most words used in Cork one of the lynchpins of our dialect will be unhitched. Words and terms for instance like, Barrack-a (Barrack Street) Pana (Patrick Street) the Butter-a (The Butter Exchange) and steerin’-a (steering cart) will loose their vigour. The imported dark alveolar ‘l’ which is taking root in our speech like thistles in a meadow drives me daft; bourgeois children can barely say ‘Cork” anymore!

Consequently, I see Tim O’ Riordan’s Langer Song, which in defiance of every rule in the music business, hung at number one in the charts for several weeks not just as a gimmick but as a serious retaliatory broadside against the hegemony of Dublin Four and Mid Atlantic accents.

It would be wonderful if during our incumbency as European Capital of Culture we would shake off the shackles of colonialism even for a year and some proud Corkman or woman would host a real Cork restaurant where the bill of fare would proudly flag the best of the local cuisine generally considered uncool by yuppies. The menu might comprise of:

Starters and Soups:
Sweetbreads, pan-fried with onions (pancreas of bull)
Clonakilty Blackpudding with souses apple and brown bread
Pigs’ ear in tomato and basil sauce
Hare soup

Entrees:
Boddice (spare ribs) with Ringabella new potatoes and spring cabbage

Crubeens with Castletreaure turnips (pigs’ feet)
Half (pigs’ head), bacon and cabbage
Tripe with onions and sauce ‘maitre du hotel’ (lining of sheep’s stomach)
Drisheen dressed in Donnybrook tansy (pigs’ blood sausage)
Skirts and Kidneys in consume

Desserts:
Donkeys’ Gudge (Gur or Chester Cake)
Daunt Square Goody laced with brandy
Milk and Odds (Milk and Cakes)

In his excellent lexicon of Cork slang, Seán Beecher has assimilated a treasure-trove of words and expressions still in currency with interesting notes on derivation and comparison. The amount of Irish origin is not surprising and Beecher has written another book on the prodigious amount of that language still spoken within the city walls even as late as the early twentieth century. Areas like Shandon Street, Dominic Street in the Northside and Barrack Street in the Southside where considerable enclaves of country market gardeners and shopkeepers still spoke Irish when they didn’t want the children to understand.

For instance words like a ‘trawneen’, a thing of little use or importance is hardly removed from the Irish traithnín. Or I gave him a ‘right tullock’. (I struck him) is presaged by the Irish word tolg, an attack.

‘Did you twig what that fellow was on about,’ a Cork person might well ask, meaning did you understand, is according to Beecher from the tuigim verb. It’s always a plus to receive a ‘tilly’ from the publican after you’ve put away a few ‘whackers’ or ‘half-wans’. The word ‘tilly’ no doubt, derives from the Irish tuilleadh meaning further or additional.’That young fellow is full of taspy,’ wouldn’t be an unusual observation sentence and ‘taspy’ no doubt comes down to us from the Irish adjective teaspach: full of ardour or ‘giddum’ from the Irish word giodam which denotes restlessness or liveliness.

With the influence of the British military it is not surprising that some English slang words have become part of the philological rainbow. Elizabeth Fort off Barrack Street for hundreds of years saw soldiers come and go and their social intercourse with the people brought in a new tide of words. In many of the urban ballads I have collected I find it amazing that sometimes even words of Turkish origin present themselves doubtlessly resulting from the far-flung adventures of the Munster Fusiliers. Even the world ‘langer’, when used in it’s other sense denoting the male appendage, according to Seán Beecher may derive from ‘langur’ the long-tailed monkey found in India. Other words and terms used by the soldiery like ‘brassed-off’ (grumbling; complaining) ‘codger’ from the Turkish kodja meaning an old person; ‘conjun-box’ from tamil ‘kanji’ - a lock up and still used by Cork children in that context. In my own childhood I wished like all children that my conjun-box would be full by Christmas.

© Jimmy Crowley