Vocabulary
“I'm After Having My Dinner”: The Irish After-Perfect
Irish English marks a just-completed action with “after” plus a verb — “I'm after having my dinner” means I have just had it, not that I am looking for it. The construction calques an Irish-language form and travelled with emigration to Newfoundland, Scotland, Prince Edward Island and the Ottawa Valley.
The question, as everyone in the survey sees it
“I’m after having my dinner.” What does that sentence mean to you?
Answer on your first reading, not after puzzling it out.
- I have just had my dinner — and I would say it this way
- I know it means that, but I would never say it
- I am looking for my dinner
- It does not make sense to me
Who says what
Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.
I have just had my dinner — and I would say it this way
Expected in 6 of the survey's accent profiles.
I know it means that, but I would never say it
Expected in 1 of the survey's accent profiles.
Why this question is in the survey
Vocabulary questions like this one are the fastest way to place a speaker, because the answer is a single conscious word choice rather than a sound people cannot hear in themselves. They also travel: a word that splits England into five regions often splits North America into three quite different ones. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least five people there have answered.
See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.