Irish (Gaeilge na hÉireann) is a Goidelic language spoken in Ireland. The language is sometimes referred to in English as Gaelic (SAMPA: /"geIlIk/) or Irish Gaelic but is more generally referred to in Ireland simply as the Irish language or simply Irish. Use of the term Irish also avoids confusion with Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig na h-Alba), the closely-related language spoken in Scotland and usually referred to in English as simply Gaelic (SAMPA: /"gAlIk/).

Irish has recently received a degree of formal recognition in Northern Ireland, under the Good Friday Agreement alongside a small minority language called Ulster Scots (though some critics have pointed out that Ulster Scots is not a language in its own right but simply a dialect of Lowland Scots).

There is an Irish language version of Wikipedia at [1].

Table of contents
1 Gaeltachtaí
2 Dialects
3 Linguistic Structure
4 History and politics
5 The Irish Language Today
6 External link

Gaeltachtaí

There are pockets of Ireland where Irish is spoken as a native, traditional language. These regions are known as Gaeltachtaí (sing. Gaeltacht). The most important ones are in Connemara (Conamara), including Aran Islands (Oileáin Árann) in County Galway (Contae na Gaillimhe), and the west coast of County Donegal (Contae Dhún na nGall), in Irish called Tír Chonaill, and the Dingle peninsula (Corca Dhuibhne) in County Kerry (Contae Chiarraí). Others exist in Mayo (Contae Mhaigh Eo), Meath (Contae na Mí), and Waterford (Contae Phort Láirge).

The numerically strongest Gaeltachtaí are those of Connemara and Aran. The highest percentages of Irish speakers is found in Ros Muc, Connemara, and around Bloody Foreland (Cnoc na Fola) in Tír Chonaill.

Dialects

There are a number of distinct dialects of Irish. Roughly speaking, the three major dialect areas coincide with the provinces of Munster (An Mhumhain), Connacht (Connachta), and Ulster (Ulaidh).

Munster dialects

Munster Irish is spoken in the Gaeltachtaí of Kerry (Ciarraí), Coolea (Cúil Aodha) in the western part of County Cork (Contae Chorcaí), and the tiny pocket of Irish-speakers near Dungarvan (Dún Garbháin) in County Waterford (Contae Phort Láirge). The most important subdivision in Munster is that between Decies Irish (spoken in Waterford) and the rest of Munster Irish.

The one typical feature of Munster Irish is the use of personal endings instead of pronouns with verbs, thus "I must" is in Munster "caithfead", while other dialects prefer "caithfidh mé" ("mé" means "I").

Connacht dialects

Connacht Irish is, for all the practical purposes, identical with Connemara-Aran Irish, with the exception of the very threatened dialect spoken in the northern part of County Mayo (Maigh Eo). The remnants of the Irish of Tourmakeady (Tuar Mhic Éadaigh) and Joyce Country (Dúthaigh Sheoige) in southern Mayo are very similar to the Irish spoken in Connemara. Thus, the most important subdivision is that between Northern Mayo Irish and the rest of Connacht. Northern Mayo dialect is in grammar and word-building essentially a Connacht dialect, but shows an affinity in vocabulary with Ulster Irish.

Connacht Irish is in many respects the most standard kind of Irish, and very popular with learners, thanks to Mícheál Ó Siadhail's self-tuition textbook Learning Irish. However, there are features in Connacht Irish which are not accepted standard, notably the preference for verbal nouns ending in -achan, such as "lagachan" instead of "lagú" = "weakening".

Ulster dialects

The most important of the Ulster dialects today is that of the Rosses (na Rosa), which has been used extensively in literature by such authors as the brothers Séamus and Seosamh Mac Grianna, locally known as Jimí Fheilimí and Joe Fheilimí.

Ulster Irish sounds very different and shares several in Ireland unusual features with Scots Gaelic, as well as having lots of peculiar words and shades of meanings. However, since the demise of those Irish dialects spoken natively in what is today Northern Ireland, it is probably exaggerated to see Ulster Irish as an intermediary form between Scots Gaelic and the southern and western dialects of Irish. Indeed, Scots Gaelic does have lots of non-Ulster features in common with Munster Irish, too.

The Irish of Meath is a special case. It belongs to the Connemara dialect, as the Irish-speaking community in Meath is simply a group of mostly Connemara speakers who moved there in the nineteen thirties, after a land reform campaign spearheaded by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, subsequently the greatest modernist writer in the language.

Comparisons

The differences between dialects are considerable, and have led to recurrent difficulties in defining standard Irish. Even everyday phrases can show startling dialectal variation: the standard example is "How are you?":

In recent times, however, contacts between speakers of different dialects have become more common, and mixed dialects have originated. Nevertheless, many dialect speakers (especially Ulster) are still jealously trying to guard their own variety against influences from other dialects. Among non-native speakers, this can be seen as a quest for authenticity. Regional accents are commonly taught to non-natives and imitated: an urban non-native speaker of Irish in Cork City (Cathair Chorcaí) is very probably trying to emulate Coolea or Kerry dialect; one from Belfast (Béal Feirste) tends to speak an Irish modelled on the Rosses dialect of Donegal; and Galwegian Irish-speakers, living next door to Connemara, will do their best to sound like a Connemara native.

There also exists a cant called Shelta, based primarily on Irish, in use by the Irish Travellers.

Linguistic Structure

The most unfamiliar features of the language are the orthography, the initial mutations, and the use of two different verbs for "to be". However, initial mutations are found in other Celtic languages (as well as in some Italian dialects, as an independent development); and the two verbs for "to be" are to some extent analogous to those found in Spanish.

Orthography

The written language looks, to those unfamiliar with it, like a lot of unusual consonantal combinations and vowels everywhere! Once understood, the orthography is relatively straightforward. The acute accent, or fada (´), serves to lengthen the sound of the vowels and in some cases also changes their quality. For example, in Munster Irish (Kerry), "a" is /uh/ or /ah/ and "á" is /aw/ in "law" but in Ulster Irish (Donegal), "á" tends to be /ah/ lengthened.

About the time of World War II, Séamas Daltún, in charge of Rannóg an Aistriúcháin or the official translators department, issued his own guidelines about how to standardise Irish spelling and grammar. This de facto standard was subsequently approved of by the State and called the Official Standard or "Caighdeán Oifigiúil". It simplified and standardized the orthography. Many words had silent letters removed and vowel combination brought closer to the spoken language.

Examples:

  • Gaedhilge / Gaolainn (Munster) => Gaeilge, "Irish language" ("Gaoluinn" or "Gaolainn" is still used in books written in dialect by Munster authors, or as a facetious name for the Munster dialect)
  • Lughbhaidh => Lú, "Louth"
  • biadh => bia, "food" (The orthography "biadh" is still used by the speakers of those dialects, which show a meaningful and audible difference between "biadh" - nominative case - and "bídh" - genitive case: "of food, food's". For example, in Munster Irish the latter ends in an audible -g sound, because final -idh, -igh regularly becomes -ig in Munster pronunciation.)

Modern Irish has only one diacritical sign, the acute (á é í ó ú). The punctum delens, used over consonantal letters in the pre-Caighdeán orthography, has been ousted by the leniting h, added immediately after the consonantal letter.

Consonants

Irish consonants are either palatalised or plain (velarised/labialised). Palatalised consonants are also called "soft" or "slender" (caol in Irish); plain consonants are also called "hard" or "broad" (leathan in Irish). (This contrast also occurs in many Slavic languages, such as Russian.)

In principle, the quality of the consonant depends on the neighbouring vowels: a preceding or following a, o, or u makes the consonant broad, while i and e make the consonant slender. This is the general idea; however, historical developments have lead into a situation where vowel letters are often used as otherwise mute indicators of consonantal quality. Thus, in a word such as "seó" (this is the English word "show", a long-established loan word in Irish, where it has developed new meanings), the -e- is just an indicator of the s- being pronounced as slender, i.e. approximately as the English "sh" sound.

Mutations

In Irish, there are two classes of initial mutations:

History and politics

The Irish Language Movement

The Irish language was the most widely spoken language on the island of Ireland until the 19th century. A combination of the introduction of a primary education system (the 'National Schools'), in which Irish was prohibited and only English taught by order of the British Government in Ireland, and the Great Famine("An Drochshaol") which hit a disportionately high number of Irish language speakers (who lived in the poorer areas heavily hit by famine deaths and emigration), hastened its rapid decline. Irish political leaders, such as Daniel O'Connell(Dónall Ó Conaill), too were critical of the language, seeing it as 'backward', with English the language of the future. Contemporary reports spoke of Irish-speaking parents actively discouraging their children from speaking the language, and encouraging the use of English instead.

Some, however, thought differently. Though the initial moves to save the language were championed by Irish unionists, such as the linguist and Protestant clergyman William Neilson, in the end of the eighteenth century, the major push occurred with the foundation by Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, of the Gaelic League (known in Irish as 'Conradh na Gaeilge'). Leading supporters of Conradh included Pádraig Mac Piarais and Éamon de Valera. The revival of interest in the language coincided with other cultural revivals, such as the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association and the growth in the preformance of plays about Ireland in English, by such luminaries as William Butler Yeats, J.M. Synge, Sean O'Casey and Lady Gregory, with their launch of the Abbey Theatre.

Even though they wrote in English (and indeed some disliked Irish) the Irish language affected them. The version of English spoken in Irish, known as Hiberno-English bears striking similarities in some grammatical idioms with Irish. In contrast to English as spoken in England, Hiberno-English offers a greater range of expression. Some have speculated that even after the vast majority of Irish people stopped speaking Irish, they perhaps subsconsciously used its grammatical flair in the manner in which they spoke English. This fluency is reflected in the writings of Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and more recently in the writings of Seamus Heaney, Paul Durkan, Dermot Bolger and many others. (It may also in part explain the appeal in Britain of Irish-born broadcasters like Terry Wogan, Eamonn Andrews, Graham Norton, Desmond Lynam, etc.)

This national cultural revival of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century matched the growing Irish radicalism in Irish politics. Many of those, such as Pearse, de Valera, W.T. Cosgrave Liam Mac Cosguir and Ernest BlytheEarnán de Blaghd, who fought to achieve Irish independence and came to govern the independent Irish state, first became politically aware through Conradh na Gaeilge, though Hyde himself resigned from its presidency in 1915 in protest at the movement's growing politicisation.

Independent Ireland & the language

The independent Irish state from 1922 (The Irish Free State 1922-37; Éire from 1937, also known since 1949 as the Republic of Ireland) launched a major push to promote the Irish language, with some of its leaders hoping that the state would become predominantly Irish-speaking within a generation. In fact, many of these initiatives, notably compulsory Irish at school and the requirement that one must know Irish to be employed in the civil service, proved counter-productive with generations of school-children alienated by what was often heavily-handed attempts at indoctrination, that created a cultural backlash. Demands that children learn seventeenth century Irish poetry, or study the life of Peig Sayers (a Gaelic speaker from the Blasket Islands) whose accounts of her life, as recounted in Irish language books, though fascinating, was taught in a poor manner, left a cultural legacy of negative reactions among generations, all too many of whom deliberately refused to use the language once they left school.

The emergence of a new, more pragmatic and technocratic leadership in the beginning of the sixties, with Seán Lemass as Taoiseach, marked the shift in the attitude of Ireland's dominant élites towards the language. Whereas the first three presidents of Ireland (Douglas Hyde/Dubhghlas de hÍde, Sean T. O'Kelly/Seán T. Ó Ceallaigh and Eamon de Valera) and the fifth (Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh) were all so fluent in Irish that it became the working language in their official residence, later presidents struggled with any degree of fluency, its use declining to such an extent that it is only used now (if at all) in occasional speeches. Similarly, where earlier generations of Irish government leaders were highly fluent, recent prime ministers (Albert Reynolds/Ailbhe Mag Raghnaill, John Bruton, Bertie Ahern) had little fluency, they struggling to pronounce passages of their speeches in Irish to their Ard-Fheiseanna (party conference(s), pronounced 'Ord Desh-ana') .

It is, though, disputed to what extent such professed language revivalists as de Valera genuinely tried to Gaelicise political life. Ernest Blythe did little, in his day as Minister of Finance, to assist Irish language projects beyond the vested interests of already established organisations. Even in the first Dáil Éireann, few speeches were delivered as Gaeilge (in Irish), with the exception of formal proceedings. None of the recent taoisigh (plural of 'Taoiseach', meaning 'prime minister') has been fluent in Irish, of the recent Presidents only Mary McAleese - Máire Mhac Ghiolla Íosa - (though Mary Robinson/Máire Mhic Róíbín studied the language to improve her fluency while in office; the President of Ireland does take her inauguration 'Declaration of Office' in Gaelic, but that too is optional.

Even modern parliamentary legislation, through supposed to be issued in both Irish and English, is frequently only available in English. Much of publicly displayed Irish is ungrammatical, thus irritating both language activists and enemies of the language and contributing to the public image of the revival as phony and bogus. In 2002, at the launch of Dublin's new traffic management system, it was revealed that the vast majority of signs would be in English only. The justification offered was that, in making the English lettering large enough to be easily read by motorists from a distance, there was no space to include Irish. The use of the single Irish words left, 'An Lár' (meaning city centre terminus) was criticised on the basis that no-one would know what it meant, even though it was a term used widely for decades on street signs. Even the once common method in Ireland of beginning and ending letters (beginning 'A Chara' (meaning friend) and ending 'Is Mise le Meas') is becoming rarer.

On balance, the overly enthusiastic promotion of Irish by the political and cultural elite from the 1920s did more harm than good to the language's longterm prospects. Instead of winning over people to the concept that they could speak Irish, they attempted to follow a process of saying they must speak Irish. That created a backlash that made many people more determined than ever not to. The language went into long-term decline, with Gaeltacht areas (exclusively Irish speaking areas) shrinking as the results of each national census returns were analysed. Today, most people even in what are officially Gaeltacht areas, no longer speak the language. In a last ditch effort to stop the complete collapse of Irish-speaking in Connemara in Galway, new planning controls have been introduced to ensure that only Irish speakers will be given permission to build homes in Irish speaking areas. But even this may be too little, too late, as many of those areas have a majority of English-speakers, with most Irish speakers being bilingual, using English as their everyday language except among themselves.

Attempts have been made to offer some support for the language through the media, notably the launch of Raidió na Gaeltachta (Gaeltacht radio) and Teilifís na Gaeilge (Irish language television, called initially 'TnaG', now completely renamed TG4). Both have had limited success. While TG4 has offered Irish-speaking young people a forum for youth culture in gaelic (through rock and pop shows, travel shows, dating games as Gaeilge (in Irish), and even a controversial award-winning 'soap opera' in Irish called 'Ros na Rún' (featuring among others an Irish-speaking gay couple and their child!) most of TG4's viewership comes from showing European soccer matches and films in English.

In 1938, the founder of the Conradh na Gaeilge, Douglas Hyde, was inaugurated as the first President of Ireland. The record of his delivering his inauguration 'Declaration of Office' in his native Roscommon Irish remains almost the only surviving remnant of anyone speaking in that dialect, which in effect died out with him. Over sixty years later, the majority of the Gaeltacht and Irish speaking areas in existence as he took that oath, no longer exist.

Northern Ireland

Attitudes towards the Irish language in Northern Ireland have traditionally reflected the political differences between its two divided communities. The language has been regarded with suspicion by Unionists, who have associated it with Catholic dominated Republic in the south, and more recently, with the republican movement in Northern Ireland itself. Many republicans in Northern Ireland, including Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, learnt Irish while in prison. The language was not taught in Protestant schools, and public signs in Irish were effectively banned under laws by the Parliament of Northern Ireland, which stated that only English could be used.

This was not formally lifted by the British Government until the early 1990s. However, Irish-medium schools, known as gaeilscoleanna had been established in Belfast and Derry, as was an Irish-language newspaper called ('day'). BBC Radio Ulster began broadcasting a nightly half-hour programme in Irish in the early 1980s called Blas ('taste'), and BBC Northern Ireland also showed its first TV programme in the language in the early 1990s. The Ultach Trust was also established, with a view to broadening the appeal of the language among Protestants, although hardline Unionists like the Reverend Ian Paisley contined to ridicule it as a 'leprechaun language'. Ulster Scots, was, in turn, ridiculed by nationalists as 'a DIY language for Orangemen'.

The Irish Language Today

In spite of all the efforts since Ireland achieved independence (some critics claim because of those efforts) the Irish language is in rapid and perhaps terminal decline in the Republic of Ireland. According to data compiled the Irish Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, only one quarter of households in Gaeltacht areas possess a fluency in gaelic. The author of a detailed analysis of the survey, Donncha Ó hÉallaithe, described the Irish language policy followed by Irish governments a 'complete and absolute disaster.' The Irish Times (January 6, 2002), referring to his analysis, which was initially published in the Irish language newspaper Foinse, quoted him as follows: 'It is an absolute indictment of successive Irish Governments that at the foundation of the Irish State there were 250,000 fluent Irish speakers living in Irish-speaking or semi Irish-speaking areas, but the number now is between 20,000 and 30,000.'

According to the language survey, levels of fluency among families is 'very low', from 1% in Galway suburbs to a maximum of 8% parts of west Donegal. With such sharp decline, particularly among the young, the real danger exists that Irish will largely become extinct within two generations, possibly even one. While the language will continue to exist among English speakers who have learned fluency and are bilingual (though mainly English-speaking in their everyday lives) Gaeltachtaí embody more than just a language, but the cultural context in which it is spoken, through song, stories, social traditions folklore and dance. The death of the Gaeltachtaí would make a break forever between Ireland's cultural past and identity, and its future. All sides, irrespective of their view on the methodology used by independent Ireland in its efforts to preserve the language, agree that such a loss would be a cultural tragedy of a monumental scale.

See also:

External link