THE UNMENTIONABLE: VERBAL TABOO AND THE MORAL LIFE OF LANGUAGE “If I Actually Talked Like That, I’d Pull a Gun on Myself”: Accent, Avoidance, and Moral Panic in Irish English

The robust “accent culture” of English-language speech in the Irish Republic provides an opportunity to explore the concept of verbal taboo in terms of non-referential indexical function (in this case, phonological variants). The paper documents an ongoing moral panic of language in Irish society, centering on a new and fashionable accent of Irish English. This new accent, termed “D4” (after the postal code of a mostly well-to-do part of south Dublin), has been explained by observers and commentators in the Irish media as a way for younger, newly affluent speakers to “hive off” from the masses, by avoiding pronunciations seen as emblematic either of working-class Dublin identity or of rural Irish provincialism. And now, “D4” itself has become an accent to avoid. Determined at the intersection of this double avoidance, D4, and voicings of D4, reveal the anxieties surrounding the compulsive mentionability of “accent” in contemporary Irish media texts. [