Terence Patrick Dolan (–2019)

Priceless list of Irishisms. A great book to dip in and out of. Written by the Associate Professor of English in UCD, so he knows a thing or two about english. He's regarded (according to the back of the book anyway) as the pre-eminent academic authority in Hiberno-English. Could be described as a way of understanding how Irish people speak, it includes pronounciation. Should be standard issue to all people immigrating. An amusing book to dip in and out of, and it's obvious that the writer not only knows his stuff but has both senses of enthuaism and humour.
Eg(leaving out the pronounciation and ref stuff): Yous also Yiz (personal pron.(colloq.) plural of 'you'. In Irish there is both a singular and a plural second person pronoun as there used to be in English, with 'thou' as the singular and 'ye' as the plural. The form 'you' was originally the accusative and dative plural of 'ye'. From the 14th century it became customary to use the plural form, 'you', in addressing superiors, in place of 'thee' and 'thou'; from the 15th century, 'you' began to be used in place of 'ye'. From the time large numbers of Irish people became exposed to English, in the late 16th century and onwards, the 'you' form was therefore the normal form of address to a single person. As regards the verbal forms, there is evidence that in the 17th and 18th centuries some people tried to distinuish between singluar and plural by making changes in the verb: we thus find 'you is' and 'you are'; but this useful device was abandoned in the interests of so-called purity of language. Confronted with this bewildering volatility in the use and formation of the second-person pronoun, it would appear that Irish speakers of English decided to distinuish singular from plural by attaching the plural signal s to the singular 'you', on the analogy of regular pluralisations such as 'cow-cows'. 'Yous all better be back her on the dot of six o'clock or we're leaving without ye.' Joyce, 'A Mother' (Dubliners): "He said yous so softly that it passed unnoticed"; Brown, Down all the Days: "She has a heart of pure bloody gold, that woman, and none of yous appreciates it!"; Doyle, The Van: "Did yiz have your dinners at half-time or somethin?"… (més)