The linguistic environment of Ireland has changed dramatically in recent decades due to net immigration, with twenty percent of the usually resident population born outside Ireland, according to the 2022 Population Census. This paper focuses on the use of English by those who were born and raised outside Ireland and have become resident in Ireland. They are henceforth referred as ‘new speakers’ of Irish English (IrE), associated with later acquisition of a particular language or a variety. The paper examines the employment of IrE features and analyses it in terms of speaker identity.

The relationship between language and identity can be viewed in terms of identity-marking, in which language displays collective identity, and identity-making, in which linguistic features are used to construct personal identity (Shimada and Mikami 2023). This paper highlights identity-making in the analysis of discourses of new speakers of IrE. The research observes what features of IrE (traditional and innovative) are more frequently and widely used among new speakers in our data sets and furthermore discusses the authenticity (Coupland 2003) of the local variety in relation to language and identity.

The research involves (i) the building of corpora of naturally occurring speech data for new speakers of IrE and (ii) the collection of speaker identity profiles for each informant. The corpora is analysed using corpus linguistic tools and speech data is compared with the identity profiles to examine the relationship between identity and use of IrE features.