Are the Cork and Jamaican accents really that similar?

Ellen O'Donoghue

Cork TD Thomas Gould recently went viral for a speech in the Dáil, in which some viewers said he sounded unmistakably Jamaican.

The reaction was animated among Jamaican heritage communities.

Responding to the Sinn Féin TD's viral moment, one person wrote online: “The influence the Irish have on the Jamaican accent is uncanny.”

Gould said he had been overwhelmed by the response he received after the speech in January, particularly from Jamaica.

But is there actually a linguistic link between Ireland and Jamaica, or is something else at play?

Hubert Devonish, professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of the West Indies, told The Guardian that the popular narrative needs careful correction.

"There are four main sources of English from the British Isles that potentially affected Jamaican speech,” he said, pointing to the speech of indentured servants in St Kitts and Barbados in the period before the English captured Jamaica in 1655; that of indentured servants from south-west England and from Monmouthshire in the 17th century; and the later recruitment of Scots overseers.

“There is no record of significant numbers of Irish coming to Jamaica in these formative periods that I know of.”

The linguistic evidence, he added, “points to a concentration of regional features from Somersetshire, East Anglia and Monmouthshire, in that order”.

In Montserrat, which is historically referred to as an Irish-dominated colony, research by Prof John C Wells found “zero influence traceable to dialects of Irish English” on the local creole.

Many Irish indentured servants deported in the 17th century, he noted, spoke Gaeilge rather than English. With that said, he did not deny that similarities can be heard.

Speaking to The Guardian, Wells asked why these comparisons resurface so strongly.

“One version of the Jamaican mythology is that of ‘out of many, one’, and a disproportionate desire to connect with the European part of their heritage."

In the popular imagination, "the Irish represent a prominent ‘non-standard’ identity from which one can hang the linguistic ‘peculiarities’ associated with being Jamaican, far more respectable than linking them with Africa”.

"It isn't that the Irish have got excited, but that it is Jamaicans who have got excited about the supposed similarity."

Jamaica was seized by England in 1655 and transformed into a plantation colony built on enslaved African labour. Barbados, colonised earlier in about 1627, became a staging ground for plantation capitalism, exporting settlers and systems to Jamaica.

Dr Taryn Hurley Hall, a PhD researcher examining language variation in Barbados, said that Welsh and Bajan accents share similarities in the pronunciation of certain vowels.

She added, though, that Jamaican and Irish English share some noticeable traits. “They both also pronounce the ‘th-’ in ‘three’ and ‘though’ in almost the same way as ‘tree’ and ‘dough’,” she said.

She also said that some varieties of Caribbean English are frequently described as "sing-song".

The article concludes that the fascination with Gould’s speech may therefore reveal less about hidden Celtic roots and more about how colonial histories continue to echo in sound, and how European strands of heritage can sometimes be privileged over African ones in popular imagination.