Women of an uncertain age: quantifying human capital accumulation in rural Ireland in the nineteenth century

Geary and Stark find that Ireland’s post-Famine per capita GDP converged with British levels, and that this convergence was largely due to total factor productivity growth rather than mass emigration. In this article, new long-run measurements of human capital accumulation in Ireland are devised in order to facilitate a better assessment of sources of this productivity growth, including the relative contribution of men and women. This is done by exploiting the frequency at which age data heap at round ages, widely interpreted as an indicator of a population’s basic numeracy skills. Because Földvári, van Leeuwen, and van Leeuwen-Li find that gender-specific trends in this measure derived from census returns are biased by who is reporting and recording the age information, any computed numeracy trends are corrected using data from prison and workhouse registers, sources in which women ostensibly self-reported their age. The findings show that rural Irish women born early in the nineteenth century had substantially lower levels of human capital than uncorrected census data would otherwise suggest. These results are large in magnitude and thus economically significant. The speed at which women converged is consistent with Geary and Stark’s interpretation of Irish economic history; Ireland probably graduated to Europe’s club of advanced economies thanks in part to rapid advances in female human capital.

By our tongues united? Irish and Scots language contact in rural Ulster

This article suggests that the impact of long-term language contact between the languages of Irish, Scots and English in the province of Ulster led to a hybridisation of accent which challenges traditional ethnolinguistic differentiations - namely, the myth that Catholics and Protestants can be differentiated by their accent. The digitisation of archive recordings from the Tape Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English (TRSHE) permitted a detailed phonetic analysis of two speakers from Atticall, a rural townland in the Mourne Mountains with a unique geographical and linguistic setting, due to the close proximity of Ulster Scots and Irish speakers in the area. Phonological features associated with Irish, Northern English and Lowland Scots were garnered from previous dialectological research in Irish, English and Scots phonologies, which aided with the interpretation of the data. Other contemporaneous recordings from the TRSHE allowed further comparison of phonological features with areas of Ulster in which linguistic interaction between Scots and Irish was expected to be less prevalent, such as Arranmore, Donegal (primarily Irish) and Glarryford, Antrim (primarily Scots). Accommodation theory and substrate/superstrate interaction illuminate patterns of phonological transfer in Mourne, Arranmore and Glarryford English, supporting the conclusion that accent in contemporary Northern Ireland is built upon a linguistic heritage of contact and exchange, rather than political or ethnolinguistic division