“Amn’t I as happy here as anywhere?” she’d say herself, but her father knew she was pretending and was saddened because the weight of circumstances had so harshly interfered with her life.— (William Trevor, The Ballroom of Romance, 1972, dans Maureen O’Rourke Murphy et James MacKillop (éds), An Irish Literature Reader: Poetry, Prose, Darma, 2e édition, 2006, ISBN0-8156-3046-8)
↑Lieselotte Anderwald, Negation in Non-Standard British English: Gaps, Regularizations and Asymmetrie, 2002, ISBN0-203-16750-3 : Where it does occur, amn’t is in most cases just one of several alternatives; it is never the only option available to the speaker. We can see that if the ‘gap’ of the standard system is filled, in most dialect areas this is done not by the introduction of a contracted form of the negater with am, but either by substitution of are for the first person singular, or by a form deriving from be (cf. Shropshire with binna, bunna). These alternative strategies are much more frequent than forms of amn’t.
