Irish Traveller Language: An

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 Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities
Series Editor: Gabrielle Hogan-Brun
An Ethnographic and Folk-Linguistic Exploration

Maria Rieder
Irish Traveller Language
Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages
and Communities

Series Editor
Gabrielle Hogan-Brun
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
Worldwide migration and unprecedented economic, political and social
integration present serious challenges to the nature and position of lan-
guage minorities. Some communities receive protective legislation and
active support from states through policies that promote and sustain
cultural and linguistic diversity; others succumb to global homogeni-
sation and assimilation. At the same time, discourses on diversity and
emancipation have produced greater demands for the management of
difference.
This series publishes new research based on single or comparative case
studies on minority languages worldwide. We focus on their use, status
and prospects, and on linguistic pluralism in areas with immigrant or
traditional minority communities or with shifting borders. Each volume
is written in an accessible style for researchers and students in linguis-
tics, education, politics and anthropology, and for practitioners inter-
ested in language minorities and diversity. We welcome submissions in
either monograph or Pivot format.

More information about this series at

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 Maria Rieder

Irish Traveller
Language
An Ethnographic and Folk-Linguistic
Exploration
Maria Rieder
Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics
University of Limerick
Limerick, Ireland

Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages and Communities

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 Preface

Introduction
When I first came to Ireland in the early 2000s, my first acquaintance
with Irish Travellers was not by personal contact, but indirectly, through
the massive boulders that lined residential roadsides and hard shoulders
around towns and cities. These were explained to me as a measure to
keep Travellers from setting up camp.
It was not until several years later that I first personally met a
­member of the Traveller community. Working at the local tourist hostel,
a colleague of mine, whom I will call Rose, mentioned in passing that
she was a Traveller. This was after several weeks working side by side
with her. She was reluctant to answer my questions about the commu-
nity and culture, saying that she had left all of this behind. One thing,
however, that she proudly referred to as part of her culture, is that the
community had their own language, Cant.
Wondering what it was about this community to whom other Irish
people felt the need to keep a distance and where Rose’s reluctance to
speak about her community came from, the acquaintance with this lady
gave me the first impetus to start exploring. Talking about language

v
vi   Preface

seemed to be a good—and with Rose apparently the only—entry point

into a conversation about the community, and so I started asking ques-
tions about Cant. She explained that Cant was used to speak privately
amongst Travellers in the presence of “settled” bystanders. She taught
me a few words and a sentence that I remember to be my first Cant
sentence and that I still use today when asked to illustrate the use of
Cant to interested people: “I’m crushing down the thobar”—I’m ­walking
down the street. From the way she explained the workings of Cant,
I figured that the language is—put in a very simplified way as I would
later find out—the Travellers’ own lexicon inserted into the English
grammar. For any further information, however, she referred me to
other people, “experts” in the Traveller language and culture. One of
these experts, the late Willie Cauley from Limerick, a painter, poet,
and author of the most recent Cant dictionary (Cauley and Ó hAodha
2006), agreed to see us, and so Rose and myself went to visit him and
his family. I kept wondering, however, why this community had the
need for a language that they described as a sort of a secret code, stand-
ing as a communicative barrier between the Irish Travellers and the rest
of the population.
This book embarks on a journey that explores possible answers to this
question, answers that tell us much more than “just” about language,
but that I take as a lens into the world of the community and their per-
ceived position in wider Irish society. Before starting the journey, the
following lines describe how I came across these answers and my history
of interpreting and reinterpreting them.
In a first, smaller research project, I sought out more experts like
Willie Cauley: Oein DeBhairduin, now manager of the Clondalking
Traveller Training Centre and extremely knowledgeable of Irish and
Irish Traveller history, Mícheál Ó hAodha, an expert on Irish and Cant
and author of many Irish and Irish Traveller related publications work-
ing and lecturing at the University of Limerick, and many more. The
local town library gave me access to their archive and I could review
a lot of newspaper material with a mention of Irish Travellers. The
University College Dublin Folklore Collection Archive was h ­ elpful in
making available historical, cultural, and linguistic materials on the
Irish Travellers. Lastly, Traveller organisations such as the Irish Traveller
 Preface   vii

Movement and Pavee Point in Dublin, and the Traveller Training

Centre in Tullamore furnished me with a lot of material and publi-
cations written by members of the community. The variety of these
materials gave me a first insight into multiple perspectives on this
indigenously Irish and traditionally nomadic community: the general
population’s perspective through the (mostly hostile) news coverage
of Travellers occupying road sides, researchers’ attempts to document
Cant, and Travellers’ own accounts of past and present-day life.
Sharing a long history with the general Irish population, Irish
Travellers are living in an enclave within wider Irish society and iden-
tify as a distinct cultural and linguistic group. The majority of non-
Travellers I have spoken to over the years played this distinctiveness
down and were, however, unaware of cultural features such as the
existence of a Traveller language—a finding quite decisive in itself in
terms of cross-cultural interaction. Travellers’ attitudes to the language,
referred to as Shelta, Gammon, or Cant, were diverse and its value a
contested matter: some described it as symbolic of their identity and in
need to be documented and revitalised, while others (seemingly indif-
ferently) said that it is almost lost and a thing of the past. Of course,
there were many opinions in between these two poles. Furthermore,
the former group proudly upholding the language as a symbol of iden-
tity had many different experiences of and opinions on the use, vitality,
authenticity, and most importantly the spreading of the language. This
diversity of views is very similar to discourses witnessed in other com-
munities where ownership, cultural expertise, and authenticity are con-
tested (see, for instance, Pietikäinen 2013 for the Sámi in the Finnish
context, and Coupland 2010).
Different discourses about language are often an indication of com-
munity internal struggles. These struggles are very evident today, 15
years after I started my journey and just after the Irish state recognised
the community as an ethnic minority community on 1 March 2017,
after a 20-year-long campaign. Different people reacted in different
ways to the recognition. Many feared that it would stigmatise them
more and lead to more discrimination against them. However, the rec-
ognition has also had positive effects on many: Old friends and partici-
pants in my studies who before may have needed to be pushed to speak
viii   Preface

about their community, culture, and language, now do so more openly

and proudly. Many are engaging not only in discussions on how pride
in Traveller identity could be strengthened or how the community could
implement support structures to alleviate problems such as depression
and suicide. Also more open challenges of Irish state policies are more
frequent, as public housing, education, and health services have for
decades put the Irish Traveller community at a disadvantage (e.g. Bond
2006; Watson et al. 2017). Social media groups facilitate the organisa-
tion and reach of talks, peaceful gatherings, and demonstrations.
Language, again, is a setting where these changes, brought about by
the recognition and by the campaign going before that, are becoming
highly visible. Where before the term ‘language’ may have been used
with some apprehension for Cant (see Chapter 4), it is now very often
referred to as ‘the Traveller language’. Rising cultural awareness has led
to Cant revitalisation projects initiated by Travellers.1 As part of some
projects, social media provide valuable opportunities for sharing Cant
material online, which is criticised by some and welcomed by others.
Lying beneath these community movements, and, for many to a cer-
tain degree, reinterpretations and reidentifications with Traveller cul-
ture, is a long history of experienced hardship and disadvantage. To
name only the most recent developments (see Chapter 1 for a more
detailed history of the Irish Travellers), financial budget cuts during
the austerity period and beyond have removed services that were put
in place in the 80s and 90s to facilitate integration, causing a lack of
support across all social sectors. Traveller education and cultural cen-
tres were closed all over the country and support teachers at schools
withdrawn, a massive loss to the community, who were very suddenly
expected to move into mainstream education programmes without fur-
ther support. Travellers are suffering more than non-Travellers from
the public housing shortage, as well as from cuts in health services and
employment programmes.2
This is, very briefly, the context in which my further, extended
research is set. Between 2010 and 2012 I was lucky to experience
the last two years of a Traveller Education Centre and a Traveller
Homework Club in the West of Ireland, where many young and
adult members of the local Traveller community had for decades been
 Preface   ix

gathering, sharing stories, coming together to learn and complete school

leaving and other certificates under the guidance of non-Traveller staff
members. I joined the centre as a staff member and learner, as a partic-
ipant and observer, in order to meet more community members and to
get first-hand stories about the Traveller culture and language. I ended
up staying for two years, talking to people, taking notes, and record-
ing people’s stories. This centre is the primary location on which this
research rests and where the majority of data were gathered. A total
of 37 learners, 16 females and 21 males, were registered at the centre
during the time of the research. The age of these students ranged from
18 to approximately 70 and they had enrolled in the centre in order
to learn how to read and write, obtain Further Education and Training
Awards (FETAC) in Graphics and Construction Studies, Craft and
Design, Visual Art, Engineering, Social Studies, Hair and Beauty,
Information and Communication Technology, Irish, Mathematics,
and Leisure Studies, or in order to do the Leaving Certificate Applied
(LCA).
Similar to Wenger’s (1998) point on communities of practice, I see
the study of a limited number of participants as highly beneficial to
get a picture of the inner workings of the community. A small group
of people who regularly meet and interact is the setting where we can
actually observe the concrete effects of and reactions to what is going
on in the wider community, of the influences of institutions on indi-
viduals’ lives and subgroups, of how individuals see themselves in wider
Irish society and how all of these influences are mediated and negotiated
in interactions between individuals. In addition, individual people bring
their own personal stories to the setting: they are part of a wider, mul-
ti-layered community whose boundaries are both internally and exter-
nally defined by a shared history and core cultural and linguistic values.
However, they are heterogeneous in the way they have their own histo-
ries and identify to various degrees with the wider speech community
and their practices. It is both the shared aspects as well as the diversity
of answers on language and community that I explore in this book.
Reflecting the diversity within the wider community, the group of par-
ticipants I worked closest with includes a total of 15 women and men of
all age groups as well as different social backgrounds: The majority were
x   Preface

accommodated in Traveller halting sites around the town, several lived in

social housing estates, and others lived in caravans parked in sites or on the
roadside. Most of the Travellers had large families, but some also had cho-
sen to do their leaving certificate first and then plan a family or look for
employment. Some of the male students had been in previous wage labour
employment. A small number of families were said to be very wealthy
and to possess several horses and big caravans, while others appeared to be
very poor. As regards education, all learners had dropped out of school at
any time before the second year of secondary school. Most of the young
Travellers aged between 18 and 25 were able to read and write, while most
of the Travellers over 40 had no or very low literacy skills.
The Centre was a place where cultural values, traditions, and cus-
toms of Travellers were cherished and promoted, while the learners were
also motivated to enhance their interaction with modern Irish society,
not only by being provided educational opportunities, but also by the
practical advice they were given. The centre was also a valuable point of
contact between Travellers and the local council. Providing a comforting
environment for Travellers for whom an educational setting is normally
associated with difficult childhood experiences, the centre was extremely
valuable for this research. The participants were relaxed both among
themselves and with teachers and this together with my lengthy and con-
stant presence over a period of two years was beneficial for forming close
relationships, particularly with the women I spent most time with, and
allowed near-natural conversations about many quite sensitive topics.

Studying a Language and a Community

A number of studies exist on the Irish Travellers and on Cant in par-
ticular, for instance on its history (e.g. Ní Shuinéar 2002), its syntactic
structure (e.g. Browne 2002), the sociolinguistic situation (e.g. Binchy
1994, 2002, 2006; Browne 2004), and also on its debated linguistic
status and classification (e.g. Grant 1994; Ó Baoill 1994; Ó hAodha
2002). However, the cultural side and speaker-perspective of Cant and
the role it plays in everyday life has never been explored systematically
and in detail. This book presents community members’ stories of past
 Preface   xi

and present-day life intertwined with stories of past and present-day

language use, and the value that Cant had and has for the speakers in
difference to English.
As Makoni and Pennycook (2007) have pointed out, there are
strong “relationships between what people believe about their language
(or other people’s languages), the situated forms of talk they deploy, and
the material effects—social, economic, environmental—of such views
and use” (p. 22). In other words, views regarding use and functions of
Cant as well as stories about its use in context not only paint a vivid and
dynamic picture of active language use in interaction and in society, but
they can tell us so much more about the community: Through people’s
accounts, Cant comes alive as a social practice that is interwoven and
interdependent with material social and cultural experiences. Stories
about language are then always carried by the narrators’ conscious and
unconscious feelings and perceptions of themselves in their own com-
munity, their position in wider society, and their relationships beyond
community boundaries.
Exploring people’s language stories and their many meanings put
this work in the field of folk-linguistic study, the study of lay people’s,
i.e. non-linguists’ and ordinary speakers’ knowledge, attitudes, and ide-
ological beliefs about their own and other languages (see Preston 1994,
1996, 1999, 2004, 2011; Niedzielski and Preston 2000). Ethnographic
insights derived from my years of observation of and reading about the
history and present-day situation of the community contextualise these
folk stories. Linguistic ethnographic research developed in the 1960s
and endeavours to find out not only what is going on in language and
society, but also why things are as they are, why languages are spoken the
way they are spoken, or, in the case of folk-linguistic research, why peo-
ple describe language the way they do. Using different methods to make
sense of the social reality in which a speech form is used and comments
about language are made,3 ethnography is a process of discovery and
benefits from immersion of some form in a community. The Traveller
Education Centre provided me with a setting in which I could mingle
with community members on a daily basis for two years.
The students at the centre were taught in five different groups, two of
which were all female and three all male. Each group consisted of about
xii   Preface

eight students. One female and one male group were registered for the
Leaving Certificate Applied Course, while the remaining groups were
enrolled in different courses within FETAC. In the first two months of
contact-making, I visited all classes, male and female, equally. However,
in the course of the first weeks I noticed discomfort on the side of the
men caused by my presence, which manifested in competitive behav-
iour or temporary withdrawing from the group. Natural conversation
was rarely witnessed in the men’s classes. Also from the side of the
women it seemed to be viewed with some suspicion that I spent a cer-
tain amount of time in the men’s classes, sometimes as the only female.
After weighing the advantages and disadvantages of limiting participa-
tion to all-female classes, I decided that the risk of losing the women’s
trust was too high, and that getting well-acquainted with the women
first may open doors to the men’s world at a later stage of the research.
I therefore restricted participation to the women’s classes, and mainly
to the women’s FETAC group. This group counted eight women, three
under 27 and five over 40. I found that my regular presence in this
group made it possible to get to know each other on a deeper level as
confidence grew and more and more personal stories were shared. In the
classes, I took up an intermediary position between student and staff
member: a student among the Traveller students in practical classes
such as cookery, sewing, leisure, and health and beauty on the one side,
and on the other a member of staff organising social events or helping
out in literacy classes. As the literacy levels of the two age groups were
very different, the group was often divided in two groups, and I looked
after the older women’s group engaging in the practice of reading and
writing. But even if they accepted me as another student in their group
after a while I was aware that I would never be regarded as an insider.
What I believe I was able to achieve during this time is that the image
of a stranger and intruder was no longer attached to me.
In the beginning, some people seemed very alerted when I men-
tioned that I was interested in their language and expressed their worry
that I was just there to find out about the Cant, learn it myself and pub-
lish it in books. I got suspicious comments in this direction quite often
during those first weeks. Their very noticeable discomfort made the
necessity of building a relationship of trust and confidence very obvious.
 Preface   xiii

Over the course of six months I therefore just participated in their

classes and events, talked about their and my life during knitting, cook-
ing, hairdressing, and arts classes and tried to develop a feeling for their
boundaries, for what is acceptable, unacceptable and why, and which
questions are ok to ask. Other activities helping this confidence-build-
ing included the attendance of county council committee meetings on
accommodation, health, and education, which are central concerns to
the community. Taking some of the people of the centre with me to the
committee meetings I sometimes acted as a mediator between the two
parties’ needs.
I learned a lot from the community during these first six months,
very much in the sense that Charles Briggs (1985) and Agar (1996)
described in their own work: I was an apprentice, a student of a culture,
who gradually learned about cultural themes, language use, and atti-
tudes, and whose research methods adapted to the situation, the rela-
tionship, and the characteristics of the participants. Learning about the
reasons for why Cant is protected I discarded my plans to document
Cant. Instead, I came to understand how rich their stories about cul-
ture and language were in themselves. I came to appreciate the meaning
that Cant has in their lives, why it was protected by some and reduced
to unimportance by others. And I decided that this in itself was worth
exploring more: their stories about Cant.
For these reasons, this book is not an analysis of Cant. Apart from
previously published work it does not contain any linguistic data in
the form of word lists or recordings of actual Cant, but focuses on the
speakers’ views about language, about the functions, structure, and his-
tory of Cant. Any recordings of Cant utterances that were triggered by
conversations in which participants remembered situations of use hap-
pened spontaneously and voluntarily. Cant words that appear in tran-
scripts stemming from these conversations are words that have already
appeared in previous publications and were described by the partici-
pants as old Cant words which have been replaced by newer words.
Recording conversations about culture and language was a major step
after the first six months of participation and observation. However, I
had the feeling that our relationship was now on stable enough grounds
and that I had, as Wax (1971) expressed, shared enough meaning with
xiv   Preface

the people I was working with, i.e. knew them well enough that I could
leave the observation and participation role and select appropriate
explicit methods of research and question-making. This was the point
when I gathered everybody for a meeting in which I explained to them
what I had learned in the past months and how I felt that their stories
were very rich. I asked them if they would be willing to spend some
more time on story-telling, making clear that this would not include
revealing Cant words to me. Everybody was happy to do so and they
were also happy to let me record these group conversations.
The nine focus group interviews that followed revolved around cul-
tural, historical, and language-related topics such as how Cant is used,
in which contexts, frequency of use, beliefs about, and attitudes towards
culture and language more generally, attitudes towards non-­Travellers,
and Traveller identity and language in wider Irish society. Most of
the focus groups were recorded with the group of eight women. The
interviews held with the men were less successful in terms of content,
as it was very hard to get them to speak about language and culture.
However, apart from the fact that this may have to do with myself being
a female, this in itself is a valuable finding and attitudes of the men will
be explored in more detail in Chapter 6.

My Own Role
While a folk-linguistic approach puts the views of speakers at the cen-
tre of attention, this may misleadingly insinuate an impartial, o­ bjective
stance that seeks to reveal thoughts, motivations, and intentions of
the participants. What I have got are, however, outwardly expressed
thoughts, motivations, and intentions, a fraction of the myriad expla-
nations that exist, and filtered by the fact that they were uttered in a
certain context, the Traveller Training Centre, and in conversation
with a researcher and outsider. In addition, the stories in this book are
told through the lens of my own ways of making sense of what I wit-
nessed, and therefore tainted by my cultural background, personality,
experiences, and worldviews. This book means to give an honest and
reflective account of an outsiders’ personal learning process, a process of
 Preface   xv

‘making sense’, by using folk-linguistic and ethnographic tools to limit

subjectivity. This learning process and making sense has led to the devel-
opment of thematic chapters which are carried by and titled as ques-
tions of inquiry in relation to Cant and the community. While being
an attempt to get at the worldview of a community as told by the par-
ticipants, the book does not in any way claim to truthfully represent the
diverse views that exist on Cant in Ireland and beyond and the diverse
ways of Travellers’ lives. Both lenses, my own as well as contextual and
situational features influencing the stories, are always considered from
the interpretive stance of ‘Travellers talking to an outsider’. This stance,
rather than seen as distorting the actual truth, is used as a layer that
adds value to the book in that it reveals much about communication
patterns and attitudes towards outsiders—which lie at the heart of the
question why Irish Travellers need Cant—as well as allowing certain
interpretations about power structures and historical and societal causes
of these patterns and attitudes.

Limerick, Ireland Maria Rieder

Notes
1. See The Irish Traveller Language Project on facebook (https://www.face-
book.com/theirishtravellerlanguageproject/) and twitter (@travlanguage).
2. For the scale of the impact, and level of disinvestment on the Irish
Traveller Community during the austerity period see Pavee Point (2013).
3. See, e.g. Hymes (1974), Cameron (2009), Coupland and Jaworski
(2009), Wolfram (2009), Duranti (2001), Woolard and Schieffelin
(1994).
xvi   Preface

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 Acknowledgements

It would not have been possible to write this book without the help and
support of friends and colleagues who have accompanied me on the
way.
First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to the many
members of the Irish Traveller Community who not only welcomed me
among them, but also gave their time to this project and provided the
valuable data on which this book rests. I am especially indebted to the
students and staff of a Traveller Training Centre and Traveller Children’s
Afterschool Club in the West of Ireland who opened their doors to me
to carry out this research. Many of them have over time become friends
and I am extremely grateful for the rich experience at the centre, and
for the friendship and trust I received. Also community members and
community workers outside the centre have greatly helped me on the
way and provided invaluable input. I would particularly like to thank
the late Willie Cauley, Sylvia O’Leary, Oein DeBhairduin, Jeaic Ó
Dubhsláine, Hannagh McGinley, Lesley Hamilton, Helen O’Sullivan,
and Rita Kilroy. I very much appreciate the knowledge they shared with
me, their inspiration and encouragement.

xix
xx   Acknowledgements

Many people have provided professional advice and helped me tremen-

dously with their expertise. I especially thank Dr. Jeffrey L. Kallen, Prof.
Jennifer Smith, Prof. John Saeed, Dr. Mícheál Ó hAodha, Dr. Lorna
Carson, Prof. Sari Pietikäinen, Prof. Helen Kelly-Holmes, and Dr. Gisela
Holfter. I would also like to acknowledge the generous financial, academic,
and technical support of Trinity College Dublin and the University of
Jyväskylä in Finland. Further, the library of the University of Limerick, has
been extremely helpful in granting me access to the Traveller and Roma
Collection. I also thank the staff of the National Folklore Collection at
University College Dublin who patiently dug through the archive for me.
My gratitude goes out as well to my colleagues at both the School
of Linguistics, Speech and Communication Sciences, Trinity College
Dublin, and the School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics,
University of Limerick, who have not only been a source of inspira-
tion, expertise, and collaboration, but also of friendship and emotional
support. I would like to give special thanks to my friend and colleague
Dr. Laura Diver, who has been an anchor windwards during good and
bad times.
Lastly, I thank my family and friends for all their love and encour-
agement. To my parents who have raised me with a stubborn mind and
have always supported me in all my pursuits. To my sisters, whose con-
sistent care erases any physical distance. To Javi Orta, my companion
of many years, for his continuous encouragement and trust in my abili-
ties. And lastly to my friends in Ireland and abroad, who never cease to
remind me that there are other important things in life than academic
matters.
 Contents

1 Setting the Scene: The History of a Community

and a Language 1

2 Who Are the Irish Travellers? Traveller Culture

in Transition 61

3 When Is It Used? The Role of Cant Within Traveller

Culture 105

4 What Is It Called? Naming Practices and Folk

Classifications of Cant 147

5 Folk Views on the Structure and Formation of Cant 181

6 Language Ideology and Traveller Identity 209

7 Conclusion 247

Index 255

xxi
 Transcript Notation

(.) (0.1) Pause, length of pause

: Stretching of preceding sound
wor- Sharp cut-off
[ Overlap
otexto Quieter speech
( xxx ) Speech unclear
(text) Analyst’s guess at unclear speech
((text)) Analyst’s comment

xxiii
 List of Tables

Table 1.1 Words shared in Cant and Béarlagair na Saor 21

Table 1.2 Mixed languages, based on Croft (2003)
and Bakker (2003) 31

xxv
 1
Setting the Scene: The History of a
Community and a Language

Introduction
For 30,987 people in the Republic of Ireland who identify as Irish
Travellers, 1 March 2017 was a historic moment.1 After a decade-long
campaign,2 then Taoiseach Enda Kenny addressed the Dáil, the Irish
Parliament, and formally recognised the indigenously Irish yet culturally
distinct and traditionally nomadic community as an ethnic minority group.
What had gone before this “momentous decision”, as President
Michael D. Higgins’ expressed,3 were many decades of campaign and
activism for Traveller rights and against a social policy that had, until
the 1980s and beyond, been largely characterised by a continuous
neglect of Traveller identity and Traveller needs.4 It was not until the
International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial
Discrimination, which Ireland ratified in 2000, recommended the rec-
ognition of Traveller ethnicity, that cultural identity, ethnicity, and most
importantly legislation regarding discriminatory and racist acts against

This chapter is derived in part from an article published in Language Awareness, published online
5 February 2018, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/
full/10.1080/09658416.2018.1431242.

© The Author(s) 2018 1

M. Rieder, Irish Traveller Language, Palgrave Studies in Minority Languages
and Communities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76714-7_1
2   M. Rieder

Travellers were discussed more seriously. Early Irish responses to the rec-
ommendation tried to get around such recognition in various ways: A
first progress report in 2001 argued that the state had already imple-
mented measures that catered for the community in other ways, for
instance by adopting a more inclusive attitude towards Traveller-specific
needs and increased government spending on Travellers (see McElwee
et al. 2003). More definitely, a 2005 report expressed outright denial of
Traveller ethnicity based on the argument that there was no proof for
ethnic or racial difference between Irish Travellers and the settled pop-
ulation (Government of Ireland 2005). Also, as the 2005 report went
on, the consideration of the Irish Travellers as an ethnic group was of
no significance, as Irish Travellers were specifically identified as pro-
tected by “the key anti-discrimination measures, the Incitement to
Hatred Act, 1989, the Unfair Dismissals Acts 1977, the Employment
Equality Acts and the Equal Status Acts” (Government of Ireland 2005,
p. 38) and the Government was committed to legislative, administra-
tive, and institutional provisions that would protect the rights and
improve the situation of Travellers. The UN responded with concern,
reiterating their position that a recognition would indeed have impor-
tant implications in terms of improving the Irish Travellers’ social
situation, and requested a revision of the decision (Bond 2006).
Since then, a variety of recent developments, new insights, and pres-
sure from Traveller and other organisations may have led to the gov-
ernment’s change of opinion and a formal recognition of ethnicity in
2017. Not least, recent genetic studies on the Irish Traveller community
(Gilbert et al. 2017; Relethford and Crawford 2013; North et al. 2000)
confirmed that, despite great heterogeneity within the sample and the
Irish Travellers’ undoubted ancestral Irish origin, there were genetic clus-
ters that were occupied by Irish Travellers only, and the study “estimated
a divergence time for the Irish Travellers from the settled Irish to be at
least 8 generations ago” (Gilbert et al. 2017, p. 9).5 Further, no genetic
connection with other European nomadic or Gypsy groups was found,
though their cultural identity was described as very similar (Relethford
and Crawford 2013). Indeed Irish Travellers share many traditions
and values with other nomadic groups, such as the preference of self-­
employment, birth, marriage and burial customs, and values concerning
morality, taboos, and purity (Freese 1980; Pavee Point 2017).
 1 Setting the Scene: The History of a Community and a Language    
3

Apart from these scientific insights, several studies into Traveller (men-
tal) health, education, employment, and accommodation (e.g. Watson
et al. 2017), as well as a series of events, have led to a growing campaign
for Traveller rights in the hope that ethnic recognition would bring pos-
itive public policy changes. One of the most tragic events that boosted
the campaign was a fire which broke out on a halting site in Carrickmines
(South County Dublin) on 10 October 2015, killing five adults and five
children. The heated debate that followed not only highlighted the deplor-
able living conditions of many Traveller families but also the degree of
marginalisation, racism, and discrimination Travellers were and are fac-
ing, and which became very visible in the racist commentary across tradi-
tional and social media as well as in the fierce (and physical) opposition to
rehousing the surviving, now homeless Travellers near their estates.6
A number of scholars (Walsh 2008; Ó hAodha 2007a; Hayes 2006;
Ní Shuinéar 1994, 2002; Helleiner 2000) have discussed reasons and
origins of this degree of animosity and anti-Traveller attitudes in Ireland
and elsewhere and see them as concomitant with changing discourses of
sedentarism and the rise of the modern nation-states in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, as well as with more recent changes of eco-
nomic relations between Travellers and non-Travellers in an increasingly
urbanised country (Ó hAodha 2007a). Specific to the Irish case, “colo-
nial residues” (Walsh 2008, p. 24) and an anxiety in relation to landless-
ness have been considered as the root of anti-Traveller sentiments. This
theory suggests that British colonial practices and discourses of seden-
tarism aimed, from the sixteenth century onwards, to suppress mobility
and “civilise” the Irish, which resulted in a trauma of colonial domina-
tion, leading to a projection of “otherness” onto the Traveller community
and to a perception of nomadism as a threat to civil society. Especially
on the way to the formation of an independent Republic, unity and
homogeneity needed to be established discursively as well as institution-
ally and aberrant behaviour such as mobility not only posed problems
to authorities due to a lack of control, but also a threat: processes con-
nected to globalisation and urbanisation have substantially changed the
Irish society as a whole as well as former economic relations between
Travellers and non-Travellers, and the Travellers’ way of life now more
than in previous times challenges new established orders by subvert-
ing beliefs about the normalcy of settlement, wage labour, and private
4   M. Rieder

property (Walsh 2008). Ensuing responses to this threat were and are
policies that seek to control aberrant behaviour and absorb the commu-
nity into mainstream Irish society (Walsh 2008; Helleiner 2000).
As a result, after decades of governmental and institutional pressures,
most Travellers—according to the 2016 Census 83% (Central Statistics
Office 2016)—now live in some form of settled accommodation, which
has substantially affected many other aspects of the community’s life-
style. Thus, even though a nomadic mindset—a “different way of per-
ceiving things, a different attitude to accommodation, to work, and to
life in general” (McDonagh 1994, p. 95)—continues to characterise
the community, Traveller culture has gone through substantial changes,
brought about by community external, government-led initiatives with
the aim of assimilation, as well as internal developments, manifesting in
changing family relations and working patterns. These developments as
well as present cultural clashes heavily influence contemporary relations
between settled people and Travellers, causing hostility and distrust on
both sides (McElwee et al. 2003; Helleiner 2000).
In midst of this environment, the Irish Traveller Cant is a substan-
tial feature of the community’s communicative and social practices.
Cant, in the form it possesses today, consists of the Travellers’ own lex-
icon which is inserted into an English grammatical framework. Using
mostly English when amongst themselves, Travellers, according to their
own accounts, switch into Cant in specific, Traveller-related situations
(e.g. Binchy 1994). Cant and its linguistic status has not only been a
matter of substantial debate among linguists and other scholars, but
also among activists and Traveller organisations involved in the eth-
nic recognition campaign, given that possessing one’s own language is
one of the fundamental legitimising aspects in the formal recognition
of an ethnic minority (see, for instance, anthropologist Barth 1970; the
Irish Traveller Movement 2017; Ní Shuinéar 1994). Especially in the
aftermath of the successful ethnic recognition campaign, we can now
observe a more open engagement among the community with matters
of cultural ownership and revival, including Cant revitalisation attempts
and definitions of Cant as language, when before there was little discus-
sion about this matter.7 Folk definitions are strongly bound up with a
community’s self-perception, their views on history, and the perceived
 1 Setting the Scene: The History of a Community and a Language    
5

relationship with their social surroundings. This book explores a

group of Travellers’ ways of describing Cant and what their descriptions
can tell us about their perceived status in society against the background
of the above-mentioned attitudes, developments, and events.
The data for this investigation of folk statements about Cant and
their implications stem from ethnographic research carried out in the
Mid-West region of Ireland during 2010–2012. However, before look-
ing at the interview data and ethnographic fieldnotes collected in a
Traveller Training Centre,8 in which I was present as a participant and
observer for the duration of two years, I am here going to set the scene
for this exploration, first by reconstructing, as much as possible, the
social history of Irish Travellers and presenting key characteristics and
figures of Traveller culture today. Second, we are going to look at Cant
and various hypotheses in relation to its age, origin, and structural and
functional development, as well as its present-day structure and lexicon,
locating it within established linguistic categories and comparing it to
other, similar languages. Different researchers have variously used the
terms “Gammon”, “Cant”, or “Shelta” when referring to Cant. The par-
ticipants in this study mostly referred to today’s form of the language
as “Cant”. As this study concentrates on the folk linguistics of Cant
exemplified by this particular group of Travellers, I stick with the term
“Cant” or the more neutral term “Irish Traveller language” throughout.
However, we will further examine the difference that my participants
made between Cant, Gammon, and Shelta in a later chapter.

The Irish Travellers—Social History

and Social Reality
Gilbert et al. (2017) estimated a genetic divergence of the Travelling
from the non-Travelling community at least eight generations ago. Their
study further revealed that the Irish Travellers represent a subset of the
Irish population which has resulted from a genetic drift. This drift had,
as they explain, increased the distance from the settled population over
time due to endogamy within the community, a process typical of other
nomadic minority communities.9 In addition, they found that there is
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