Sociolinguistic Artifacts

"When the Irish Revival began to be appreciable Mrs. Kearney determined to take advantage of her daughter's name [Kathleen] and brought an Irish teacher to the house... Soon the name of Miss Kathleen Kearney began to be heard often on people's lips. People said she was very clever at music and a very nice girl, and, moreover, that she was a believer in the language movement" (Joyce, 117-118 Norton Critical Edition). Here we see an interesting example of a language revival movement acting as a marker of social status, and even marriage eligibility for middle and upper-middle class Dubliners. While the Irish language doesn't hold prestige as the language of the state (Ireland is part of the U.K. at the time of "Dubliners"), it acts as a marker of in-group cultural identity and national pride for those able to study it - the lower and working class people of Dublin have no such opportunity (c.f. Ulysses, Joyce, 12-13). The daughter's name, "Kathleen", is another fashionable index for Irishness after the protagonist of a 1902 play by Yeats (footnote in text).