Comparing the syntactic complexity of Gaeltacht and urban Irish-Language broadcasters

Irish, while nominally a national language, is primarily spoken as a native language in rural enclaves called Gaeltachtaí. The language has recently experienced an urban revival, however, with Irish now being spoken as a domestic language in towns and cities all over Ireland. Following on my previous work in phonetics and morphology, this paper analyzes the two varieties of Irish (rural and urban) with particular emphasis on syntax and lexicon, with a view to discovering whether they are distinguishable using those features. I undertake a syntactic and lexical analysis of Gaeltacht and Urban speakers of Modern Irish. In the case of syntax, I am applying the well-known D-Level complexity scale of Rosenberg and Abbeduto to a number of transcriptions from speakers on urban and Gaeltacht radio stations (and adapting the scale for Irish syntax), while in the case of lexicon I perform a simple lexical diversity analysis on the same transcriptions using TTR (Type-Token Ratio) calculation. A complexity scale for Irish has been a major desideratum for several decades, and this article intends to provide such a scale. Similarly, no TTR analysis of Irish adults has yet been done, and this analysis will be a first.