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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

'British' is [also] the adjective for people from the United Kingdom (UK). The full name of the UK is the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'.

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Well, the English spoken in Northern Ireland is essentially the same as the rest of Ireland and is more distant from what’s spoken in Great Britain.

A lot of northern accents have heavy Scottish influences, but I will agree they're far from an English accent and more similar to Donegal and Scottish accents.

The English may be the same, but the accents are different, and often so are the speech patterns.

Folks in GB can generally distinguish someone with a Northern Irish accent from someone with a more southerly Irish accent.

e.g. Belfast, or Derry accent vs Dublin accent.

Yes, they're distinct _within Ireland_, but overall the English spoken in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is all considered by linguists to be Hiberno-English, and is its own distinct dialect family vs, say, North American English. And Ulster English is even spoken within the Republic of Ireland, which is obviously not part of the UK and is not British at all.

> And Ulster English is even spoken within the Republic of Ireland

Not surprisingly so since Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan were also extensively settled by Scots immigrants, but were cut off from what's now casually called Ulster in 1922. So they had 300+ years of shared language versus 100 of separation.

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