James and I watched the movie “’71” the other day. The film is set in Northern Ireland during the period leading up to the violence known as Bloody Sunday. One of the first things I did when we started watching the movie was put the captions on to make it easier to understand the accents.
James laughed at me and asked how I would put the “captions” on when we get to Ireland in a few weeks. I told him there would probably be a lot of requests for people to repeat themselves. When I went to Ireland as a student, I expected the Irish people I met to have an accent that was different than mine. I did not expect them to have accents different from each other. I found the Dublin accent the easiest to understand, but there was quite a range of differences depending on where people were raised.
I had the hardest time understanding a friend when he tried to tell me the name of his home town. Eventually, I had him write it down and it turned out he had been saying Athlone. My ability to understand accents is also a little hindered by the slight hearing loss I have that makes it hard for me to hear some sounds.
Ireland is such a small country, I didn’t expect there to be as much diversity in dialects as there is in the United States, where people from California sound very different from those in Texas or Maine or Michigan. I’m looking forward to hearing accents from around the island on our trip even if I might have a little trouble understanding some of them.
Andersons+Ireland 