AUTHOR=Kirk John TITLE=Irish English as a World English JOURNAL=Frontiers in Communication VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2022 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2022.781320 DOI=10.3389/fcomm.2022.781320 ISSN=2297-900X ABSTRACT=This paper applies a range of models for World Englishes to Irish English, for which data from ICE-corpora, the Handbook of Varieties of English, the Mouton Atlas, eWAVE and GloBwE are used, and to which geo-political, dynamic-model, corpus, statistical, and multi-functional factor analysis approaches are applied. It shows the difficulties of applying top-down models to empirical corpus data and concurs that the gap is ultimately unbridgeable. Nevertheless, in so far as status distinctions can be inferred, this paper also concurs that, as a standardised variety, despite a historical legacy of contact, Irish English is indeed an L1.