British Isles - IELTS Listening Answers & Explanations

Hello. I'm glad so many of you have turned out to hear what I have to say today about the British Isles, that area of the eastern Atlantic that we Americans find so confusing. I'm afraid just looking at a map or a page in the atlas doesn't necessarily explain the geographic terminology. In referring to the British Isles, a word of apology for those of you of Irish descent—that is, those whose ancestors come from Eire, the Republic of Ireland—no matter how geographically accurate the place names that I use today are, some of you will be understandably upset to be included in anything termed "British".

I have a very useful image that might help you differentiate between the various labels that distinguish the political and geographic reality of the so-called British Isles. I want to show you a Venn diagram which is a mathematical illustration that shows all the possible relationships between sets. Look at this Venn diagram and you will see that the geographical terminology is in bold while the political terms are in italics. See here the British Isles in bold and the British Islands in italics.

The aim of this lecture is to explain the meanings of and relationships among those terms. In geographical terms, you will see that the British Isles is an archipelago made up of the two large islands of Great Britain and Ireland and including many smaller surrounding islands. Of course you can't tell from the Venn diagram the true comparative size of these islands—you'll need to look at the map for that—but, take my word for it, Great Britain is the largest island of the archipelago followed by Ireland which, in reality geographically, lies to the west and there are over a thousand smaller islands.

Now in political terms, the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' is the constitutional monarchy which includes the island of Great Britain, some small nearby islands (although not the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands) and the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland. Thank goodness it is generally shortened to United Kingdom, the UK, Great Britain or Britain or even the abbreviation GB—although none of these are strictly correct of course.

You'd better listen carefully to the next part because, I warn you, it is very confusing...Ireland is the name of the sovereign republic occupying the larger part of the island of Ireland. But to distinguish it from the name of the island itself, and most importantly from the other part which belongs to the UK, it is called the Republic of Ireland or its Irish-language name, Eire—that's E-I-R-E—even though Eire directly translates as 'Ireland'. The smaller portion of the island is called Northern Ireland. The partition of Ireland took place in 1922 after a great history of struggle that we won't go into here.

England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are legal jurisdictions within the United Kingdom but Great Britain refers to the countries of England, Wales and Scotland as a unit.

The British Islands contain the United Kingdom, the Channel Islands (made up of Guernsey and Jersey) and Isle of Man which all have the British Monarch as head of state. Interestingly, the Isle of Man, although governed as a British Crown dependency, has its own parliament but relies on the UK for defence and in matters of external relations.

So, you've learnt something about the geographical and political confusion surrounding the British Isles; let's have a look at some of the linguistic confusion. To start with, there isn't an adjective to refer to the United Kingdom, so the term British is generally used. However, that means that citizens of Northern Ireland, although not on the island of Great Britain, still describe themselves as British because this reflects their political and cultural identity. Irish, in a political sense, refers to the Republic only, so sometimes citizens of Northern Ireland would call themselves Northern Irish as a point of difference. Of course the 'northern' in "Northern Irish" is not completely accurate either as the most northerly peninsula on the island is in the County of Donegal which is part of the Republic.

OK, we might get in a muddle over the term Irish, but at least Scottish, Welsh and English should be self-explanatory... apparently not to us Americans—and Europeans are often guilty of this too—we often use the term English incorrectly to mean British. I'd have to be the first to admit to calling my Welsh colleague, English, which really gets his heckles up. He is Welsh, he tells me, and he may also be British, but he is definitely not English!

Just one more thing: what is the British Commonwealth? It's a voluntary association of independent states many of which were former British colonies; in fact, what was primarily the old British Empire. However, it's no longer known as the British Commonwealth but is now called the Commonwealth of Nations instead presumably because current members do not want to remember the old colonial ties.