Irish English in the context of "Irish poetry"

The spoken English language in Northern England has been shaped by the region's history of settlement and migration, and today encompasses a group of related accents and dialects known as Northern England English or Northern English.

The strongest influence on modern varieties of Northern English was the Northumbrian dialect of Middle English. Additional influences came from contact with Old Norse during the Viking Age; with Irish English following the Great Famine, particularly in Lancashire and the south of Yorkshire; and with Midlands dialects since the Industrial Revolution. All these produced new and distinctive styles of speech.

The pronunciation of the digraph ⟨wh⟩ in English has changed over time, and still varies today between different regions and accents. It is now most commonly pronounced /w/, the same as a plain initial ⟨w⟩, although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern United States, retain the traditional pronunciation /hw/, generally realized as [ʍ], a voiceless "w" sound. The process by which the historical /hw/ has become /w/ in most modern varieties of English is called the wine–whine merger. It is also referred to as glide cluster reduction.

Before rounded vowels, a different reduction process took place in Middle English, as a result of which the ⟨wh⟩ in words like who and whom is now pronounced /h/. (A similar sound change occurred earlier in the word how.)

Loons (North American English) or divers (British / Irish English) are a group of aquatic birds found in much of North America and northern Eurasia. All living species of loons are members of the genus Gavia, family Gaviidae, and order Gaviiformes.

The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant, /r/, is preserved in all phonetic environments. In non-rhotic accents, speakers no longer pronounce /r/ in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the /r/ sound and pronounces them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will preserve the /r/ in that position (the linking R), because it is followed by a vowel.

The rhotic dialects of English include most of those in Scotland, Ireland, the United States, and Canada. The non-rhotic dialects include most of those in England, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Among certain speakers, like some in the northeastern coastal and southern United States, rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic /r/ is deleted depending on an array of social factors, such as being more correlated in the 21st century with lower socioeconomic status, greater age, particular ethnic identities, and informal speaking contexts. These correlations have varied through the last two centuries, and in many cases speakers of traditionally non-rhotic American dialects are now rhotic or variably rhotic. Dialects of English that stably show variable rhoticity or semi-rhoticity also exist around the world, including many dialects of India, Pakistan, and the Caribbean.