The aim of this thesis is to describe the sounds of Ballyvourney English, considering to what extent the modern dialect is a survival of the seventeenth-century English which was introduced into the area, as well as how the dialect has been influenced by Irish and certain forms of standardized English speech. Unlike many other dialect studies, this description is based not upon the speech of one typical conservative speaker but upon the speech of three generations in order to illustrate linguistic change in progress in a living dialect. The account is by no means complete since time has made a complete examination of the phonology impracticable. No attention has been paid to intonation, to phonetic variations at word or morpheme boundaries, or to related problems of juncture, while stress and vowel length are only very briefly dealt with. Likewise, the morphology of Ballyvourney English has not been considered and there is only a short appendix relating to certain aspects of syntax and lexicon.