ИСТИНА

It has been repeatedly pointed out that English phonetics was influencing quite a number of Irish speakers, even when Irish was their native language (cf. Lenoach 2012). The influence is believed to be especially common in case of Irish palatal consonants as English has no equivalent to the grammatical function of palatalisation present in Irish (cf. Ó Béarra 2007). Besides, urban varieties (including Dublin Irish) are said to be more prone to such influence due to the constant contact of the two languages. No attempt, however, has been made to describe broad and slender consonants use in Dublin Irish so far. This paper presents the results of the field study conducted by the author in the autumn of 2014 in Dublin and addresses mainly the issue of broad and slender consonants distribution in the speech of bilinguals with English as their first language, or L1. All informants are young Dubliners sufficiently fluent in Irish, i.e. able to use it orally and in writing as well as produce short monologues on common subjects without resorting to English. Both their Irish and English data were collected to ensure that L1 influence (or lack thereof) could be properly traced.