Irish and the Ordnance Survey Letters – Dialects, Accent Features, and Levels of Irish

In the 1830s and 1840s, scholars employed by the Topographical Section of the Ordnance Survey of Ireland were sent across Ireland to collect place names. The scholars decided as well to collect information about Irish speakers and the Irish they spoke. As Irish-speakers themselves, the scholars in the Topographical Section had a unique opportunity to document the Irish spoken. This included dialectal variations and the levels of Irish in a townland/parish, which they recorded in the Letters they wrote back to the Section Headquarters in Dublin. This small dataset records their findings from close reading the Letters. Hosted on Zenodo, this dataset is of interest to those involved in historical linguistics, dialectology, and nineteenth-century Irish Studies.