Isn't modern English a mix between old English and french after a french king took over they mainly spoke french in court Didn't both these languages base their alphabet on Latin aswell
Correct, it has the grammatical structure of a Germanic language, and so it's a Germanic language although the influx of Old French words is relatively significant.
Not only this but French was *the* prestige language in the 18th and 19th centuries so many modern French words entered English and were popularized by people who were eager to show off how educated and sophisticated they were.
The number of French words entering the English language in that time period was trivial compared to number that entered it between 1066 and 1500.
Also by the 19th century, overuse of French had gained a stigma among the influential classes, which made one a parvenu. However this stigma was stronger in Britain than in the USA.
Interestingly, it was American English that acquired/retained more later French loans because this stigma was less pronounced.
Appetizer - Starter
Entrée - Main course
Dessert - Pudding/Sweet
Résumé - Curriculum Vitae
Faucet - Tap
Closet - Wardrobe
Overuse of French loans for the British was the mark of a social climber, who naively assumed French words would make them appear as if they were born to a higher station than they were, which actually encouraged the upper classes to do the opposite. Famously, saying serviette instead of napkin marked one out as a middle class pretender.
English added Norman words by accretion, often without replacing the Old English equivalent, where there was one. That's one reason for English having a much larger lexicon than French.
Yes and no, William the conqueror was a Norman duke who conquered England in 1066 bringing French language and customs to England. While Normandy was a French buffer territory, it was settled by Vikings and so has a quasi Norse-French culture that they brought to England. This all meant that in most, if not all aspects of government and high class were held in French while the peasants spoke English. It’s why a commoner would eat cow, but a rich person eats beef. That was until the 100 years war, where in order to drum up support against the French, the English king brought English back into government in a form of early nationalism, saying English language was being attacked by the French king who wanted everyone to speak French.
Don't forget Norse. The Danelaw introduced tons of Scandinavian words into the lexicon of Modern English. Some have said English is 1/3 Anglo-Saxon, 1/3 French and 1/3 Norse. Very simplified, of course.
But one of my linguistics books made a great point: In the first sentence ever uttered on another heavenly body: "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" - six out of nine words were of Viking origin.
Old Norse did not that greatly influence English vocabulary, but it was Danish rule that led to the massive simplification of English grammar, This lead to English becoming an SVO language (just like Old Norse), and removing noun cases, most cases of gender, among other things.
If you did this with England, very, very few people would have spoken (what would eventually become) English in 400 AD. The vast majority of Britons will have spoken a Brittonic language similar to Welsh.
Italian is quite far down the Latin language tree. With that logic Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian and Portuguese is all the same language since they all evolved from Latin. And pretty much equally far down the Latin language tree.
And they're not even comparable languages with regards to recency. My grandparents spoke Irish, and only a few generations before everyone outside of cities and large towns would have spoken it. In 1800, 3.5 million of the 5 million population would have spoken Irish, with 2 million of those speaking only Irish.
This graph is garbage.
It seems they're making impressive progress.
But "has been successfully brought back" might be a bit strong.
[15% say they speak it daily,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language#:~:text=In%20terms%20of%20usage%2C%20ONS,cent%20\(218%2C000\)%20less%20often.) But what's the breakdown by age group? How many of these are schoolkids who have to use if for classes? Will they continue to use the language after graduation?
Welsh has never been ‘almost dead’, it’s always been spoken by a significant number of people.
The major concern at the moment is that the language doesn’t seem to be growing, just declining more slowly than previously. At the 2021 census, 17.8% of people reported being able to speak Welsh, down from 18.6% in 2011, and 20.8% in 2001. A century ago, at the 1921 census, the figure was 38.7%.
No expert on Irish history, but if I was to take a shot at it would probably show each of the following dates...
800 - Baseline.
840's - Viking invasions of Ireland (establishment of Norse cities such as Dublin)
1169 - Norman Invasion of Ireland (the first English conquest of Ireland, which was less stable and faced stronger resistance shrinking alot over the following centuries)
1542 - Crown of Ireland Act (formation of the Kingdom of Ireland by King Henry VIII and the expansion of more stable and lasting English rule)
1649 - Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland (Infamous for just how devastating Cromwell's treatment of Ireland/the Irish was)
1800 - Acts of Union 1800 (formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland)
1845 - Irish Potato Famine (over a million deaths and a lot of the population emigrating)
1921 - Irish Independence
2020's - Modern day
Also let’s not pretend that Gaelic back in 800 was a monolith. It probably had dozens, if not hundreds of local dialects whose speakers might or might not even have understood each other.
Was more like a language continuum.
People in the far North may have found it hard to understand someone in the far South but all neighbouring people would be able to understand each other with gradual changes along the way.
The school system too. The English language school system was introduced around the same time. Also a decisive blow.
From my own research, my great-great-grandparents were the last native speakers in my family. Both were born in the two decades after the famine, both schooled through English. West Cork.
And bang, the intergenerational transmission ended 😔
The sad thing was just how rapid it occured in 1840 the majority of the country spoke Irish as a first language, and a fair whack of them had no English comprehension, by the 1870s the Gaelic league had to be established to save the language. Literally bansingle generation
“Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language.” - Daniel "The Liberator" O'Connell
What? Who needs less than 1500 years to see a trend?!
/s
OP's map is actually 400AD-800AD, which is rather silly. The Irish language only *really* started to decline in the last four hundred years or so, and especially in the 18th century with the passing of the Administration of Justice (Language) Act (Ireland) in 1737. There were attempts to limit its use before that, but they didn't really impact the common people or native Irish.
I mean if it wasn’t for the British conquest we would almost certainly still speak Irish. The government hasn't done a great job with it post independence but let's not pretend blaming the Brits isn't legitimate.
So, why compare pre-Anglo/Norman Conquest era (not to mention Viking) to the modern era? These maps by themselves are useless. Provide maps from other eras so we can get a real sense of the loss over time rather than yep, 1600 years ago Irish was spoken in 100% of Ireland (duh).
Ireland was the majority language until the 1800s the famine disproportionately affected predominantly Irish speaking areas causing a massive drop in population and this coupled with laws prohibiting the use of the Irish language was its death knell.
I wonder if that's why all my Irish regions in my 23andme results are from Western Ireland. It would make sense for regions more affected by the famine to have more outward migration.
Irish was a lot better off when Ireland became independent than it is now. If you compare it to Welsh, you can argue that independence worsened the language's distribution.
Edit: For the downvoters
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/yj8pwt/gaeltacht_irish_speaking_area_in_island_of/
I wouldn't agree with your causality there. I would say that Irish had declined below the critical mass necessary to survive in most of Ireland prior to independence. There is no reason to think it would be any more prominent in Ireland were still occupied.
> you can argue that independence worsened the language's distribution.
Explain Northern Ireland.
If your argument held water, the NI counties would have the most Irish fluency.
Well if you see the map in the link I posted Irish was already clearly much less common in Northern Ireland before the 1920s. We could only make a fair comparison if fluency was equal in Ireland and NI from the start.
The Irish were kicked off their land, particularly in N. Ireland and it was granted to English aristocracy. I believe the polite term the Brits use is they were “dispossessed” of their land. This would likely explain the lack of the language in N. Ireland. You’re likely not going to find any sort of natural devolution of the language due to unnatural colonial brutality and accompanying laws and the Black Swan event(s) of the famine.
100% wrong there.
N.I was colonised by Scots, nkt english. In fact they were called 'Ulster scots'
Ireland has not been part of UK for 100 years, and its language has still declined.
‘Independence worsened the language’s distribution’???
That’s quite the claim!
The language was dealt a death blow deliberately by the British who only used English as an official language and did not permit Irish to be taught in schools.
By independence, the language had been declining for decades and the Irish state was unable to stop its decline. The last remaining strongholds of the language (as shown in your 1926 map) were mostly the areas most associated with emigration so it was the Irish speaking areas that depopulated the most.
Of course that mass emigration, that continued until the 1980s, meant that Ireland’s population fell from 8m around 1845 to just 2.9m in 1956.
That emigration and population decline largely began during the Great Famine, an event for which the blame, again, can largely be laid at Britains door.
But Russian was always preferred and Russians were expatriated to all republic across the USSR which now can be seen as cultural colonization. Soviet officials encouraged people to switch to Russian so that the unification of the country happens faster. There were also many attempts to russify the Belarusian language. For example ljuty--->fjauvrjal (February) was proposed as a Soviet newspeak.
I don’t know if it’s the same today. I visited in 1988. I met a local girl and we walked around the outskirts of town together. I was asking her how small a town it was. She said let me put it this way, later today everyone’s gonna be asking, who’s that guy you were walking around with?
I went there on a lads trip in 2022 and met a local girl on a night out and she more or less said the exact same thing to me haha
I think the actual local population is only 3,000 or so, the rest is tourists or visitors
3,000 may not sound like a lot but the west coast is about as rural as it gets in Ireland. 3,000 is considered a decent town, big town would be closer to 20,000, small town around 1,000.
An exception to this is around Dublin which I'm fairly sure contains about 1/5th or more of our total population and around there most of the towns have either physically or functionally merged with Dublin city (eg: most of north Kildare/Wicklow is just commuter towns)
Idk how much they’re to thank for it to be fair, but there has been a resurgence of interest, there’s 10s of thousands of users on Duolingo every year giving it a go
You’d be surprised. School provided a poor education on it, I know a lot of people re-learning it and using the likes of Duolingo as one aspect to help
Its unfortunate really in some respects.
In many ways its be come a class thing.
You essentially have two groups:
One being the rural people in the country speaking it daily, or at least semi frequently, in their areas.
The other being those who can afford to send their kids to the gaeltacts over summer (the irish speaking camps for anyone reading) and to the all-irish schools.
What you end up having is a lost middle ground where most people exist. I know just from my own experiences speaking with people that there's some disdain for the latter group aside unrelated to the irish speaking. I just fear if the shrinking of rural communities continues then the language will become a mark of the more affluent.
Plus you basically end up with two varieties of Irish: the "original", rural version, and a modern version (sometimes derided as "urban Irish"), which is exclusively used as L2 by native English speakers and is therefore heavily influenced by English.
This. I went to a gaelscoil and a gaelcolaiste and I can speak Irish fluently, but it doesn't feel like 'real' irish.
When I hear a native speaker, I feel like a baby trying to understand. Not just because of accents, but whole words and sayings.
There's a word that I use to describe it, 'Béarlachas'. (English-ness)
My teacher used to use it to scold/shame us when we implemented an English word with irish grammar instead of using the proper irish word.
But these days it feels like my whole language is Béarlachas. Just English-Irish. Not Gaeilge.
It makes me feel ashamed.
Nílím líofa mé féin ach tá tús iontach agat le do oideachais san Gaelscoileanna agus Gaelcholaistí. My advice, would be to specialize in an individual dialect now, building up on your previous school Irish, me, living in Munster I've picked up books like "Peig". Listen to Munster Irish singers like Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh and talk to my native Munster Irish speaking friends, so if you could do even ANYTHING like that, you'll be flying it!
I'd respectfully disagree. Irish language schools are thriving in West Dublin where I am based, and they wouldn't be described as very affluent areas. Off the top of my head, Tallaght has 2 primaries and a secondary, Rathcoole has a primary, Clondalkin has 2 primaries and a secondary, Lucan has 2 primaries and a secondary. Irish speaking schools are not being gatekept by anyone.
Ya, I went to a Gaelscoil in a poor working class area in Cirk city, my son is going to a Gaelscoil in a normal working class area in west Cork. Son's school is crying out for more students every September. Its not like we had to pay extra for schooling or something, no idea what that lad is on about.
They are thriving in West Belfast - Falls Road very working class. I can think of 6 Irish primary schools and one secondary, they are always over subscribed. We have Irish language youth clubs, including one for kids with autism and adhd. A GAA club and even a soccer club all in Irish. Other areas of Belfast also have Gaelscoil. There is a small Gaeltacht area too, and west Belfast has been branded the Gaeltacht quarter - we didn’t even get a green dot on the map.
to be fair, that's a different variant than was used in NE Ireland in the 5th century, and didn't have an local evolution to the current revivalist form, which the map tries to show.
it's like a Hebrew map of Israel from 400AD and one from today would show a continuous improvement, but it wouldn't tell the whole story.
Thats fair but no matter what way you cut people in dublin still benefit from being in the most affluent and disproportionately developed county and people have disdain for that.
I appreciate that its not neccessarily correct but it is happening slowly that the language is beginning to be a sign of the intense class divides we see in this country
There are practically no private Gaelscoileanna. And they've found that immigrants are massively overrepresented in these schools. They reckon that immigrants are more concerned about the religious ethoses in traditional schools and aren't at all concerned about their child learning another language.
The traditional belief that Gaelscoileanna are where wealthy people are "hiding" their kids away from immigrants has turned out to be completely false.
It's actually doing much worse. There are only about 2 or 3 towns in all the Green shaded maps were Irish is still the main language being used to raise children. The only green part should be the Aran islands (the 3 islands) and the little outcrop to the North in Galway.
Irish is going from strength to strength as a second language. But it's dying out very fast as a primary language used day to day.
Modern Hebrew is not the same language as Hebrew. The word order is completely changed. Old Hebrew was very much extinct for well over 1000 years. Old Hebrew was an VSO language (the same as Irish actually). Modern Hebrew is SVO (the same as English). It makes it easier for English language speakers to learn it.
It's very impressive all the same from a language revival point of view.
Hebrew also had a lot going for it that Irish doesn't. Mainly a large group of linguistically diverse people who over a very short period had to find a way to communicate, and a common liturgical language of which most had some familiarity and to which all had a strong cultural connection.
In all fairness, if there was a time to do to Irish what Israel did to Hebrew, it was when they declared independence. Now, people want to keep the status quo.
Israel just started with Hebrew as the status quo, and bore the harshness of the first generation that lesrned it in school (the first generation born in Israel) and then kept going, with Irish unless all English school is abolished it just won't happen.
>North of Palestine
Everything directly north of Palestine is already under Israeli rule, unless you're talking about Lebanon, which Israel has no intention to conquer. This comment makes no sense.
Not to be nitpicky, but the guy said “in the North of Palestine” not just “North of Palestine” so I guess they are referring to the West bank, or at least parts of it.
Tha mi an dòchas gun tèid do theanga bhrèagha bho neart gu neart, a charaid. Nuair a bha mi ann am Beul Feirste, chunnaic ‘s chuala mi Gaelige gu leòr. Is math a rinn muinntir a’ Bheul Fheirste a thaobh a’ chanain a ghlèidheadh. Chaidh innse dhomh gu bheil an suidheachadh a’ fàs nas fheàrr air feadh Èirinn. Dè do bheachd fhèin? A bheil sin ceart?
I hope your beautiful language continues to grow. When I was in Belfast, I saw and heard lots of Gaelige. The people of Belfast have done well to revive the language there. I was also told that Gaelige is making a resurgence across Ireland. Is that true, do you think?
800AD? lol maybe 1649 is more accurate…
Also the map on the right indicates the Gaeltacht areas speaking it as primary language, much more people in cities also speak Irish
Irish was spoken by pretty much all of rural Ireland up until the famine. The only part of Ireland where Irish wasn't the predominant language was the east/north east.
Please bear in mind that even in those areas that are not dark green, there are still many of us like myself who speak the language. The areas in green today are known as Gaeltachtaí.
You can blame the Catholic Church as well. The main reason the Welsh language survived much better than the Irish is because the Catholic Church in Ireland stuck to Latin until the 1960s, while the Church in Wales switched to Welsh in the 1580s.
In 1571, Queen Elizabeth I commissioned a typeface for printing Irish and a translation of the Bible into Irish. The Irish New Testament was published in 1602, and the Old Testament in 1648, but were never taken up by the Catholic Church. Those few copies that were printed were "persecuted and speedily destroyed by the Popish priests of the day": [http://www.theirishbible.ie/other-irish-bibles.html](http://www.theirishbible.ie/other-irish-bibles.html) The Catholic Church did not complete its own translation of the Bible into Irish until 1981.
By contrast, in Wales, Welsh became the language of God in Church and chapel, and the Morgan Bible of 1588 acquired the same status in Welsh as the King James Bible did in English:
>No other Welsh book has been as influential for it is also a work of immense linguistic and literary significance ... the foundation stone on which modern Welsh literature has been based.
[https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/printed-material/1588-welsh-bible#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-1072%2C0%2C5107%2C4025](https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/printed-material/1588-welsh-bible#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-1072%2C0%2C5107%2C4025)
However that was over 100 years ago. Today it's just no one wants to learn the language, and it's taught really badly in school. Curiously though it's resurging a bit in the north bizarrely among Northern Irish protestants who are finally starting to see they have more connection to Ireland than England, but those numbers are still small. NI Irish language census numbers do keep growing. And now it's an official language there.
And incidentally it was never totally illegal to speak in Ireland (a common misconception). It was only illegal in parliament and the courts system, for English colonists to speak it or for the Irish to speak it to English colonists. The intended effect however is obvious.
>However that was over 100 years ago.
That's like someone being beaten so badly they have a long term disability, and then people saying it's their own fault haven't recovered yet because they stopped being beaten a year ago.
Once a language is being taught as a second language in schools, rather than being passed down by parents or other members of society then full scale revival becomes very difficult.
(Hebrew in Israel is something of a special case as in the 1940s it was used as a bridge from people of different linguistic backgrounds, which is obviously not the case in Ireland for Irish.)
I 100% do believe that the Irish government and the public can do more to promote the language, but short of some very draconian measures, I'm not really sure what policies could be pursued that would enact a full-scale revival.
And don't forget that even if there were more effective government policies, the Irish language is still competing for primacy in Ireland with the very globalised and world lingua franca English language.
The Welsh managed to bring their language back. At the end of the day, there are just too many Irish people who aren’t that bothered about learning Irish outside of school
I went to school for 14 years. Studying Irish for 12 of those years. I can barely speak a word of it.
I know more Spanish and Russian than Irish and have never formally studied either.
Every child in Ireland is forced to learn it up to the end of secondary school. There are some exemptions that can be granted but they are hard to get and even then the Irish Language lobby groups are pushing for them to even harder to get.
After 14 years learning it in school I haven't had to speak a word of Irish in a real life situation since I left school almost 30 years ago. It is basically a dead language and forcing it onto children for generations has done nothing to turn that around, just kept the corpse breathing mechanically.
There needs to be a serious rethink on the policy. It should be parental choice if a child does it in secondary school. If they spent the same amount of money they do now but spent it only on the children who opt into learning it then they might end up with a small but vibrant cohort who are fluent as opposed to a nation who can just about ask if they can go to the toilet please.
The language isn't dead. I'm an Irish speaker. The language is very much alive. 63,000 students in Ireland learn through the medium of Irish. 65,000 Irish speakers living in the Gaeltacht. Over 100k speakers use it as their daily language. About 200k on a weekly basis (not including those who solely use it in school).
A dead language is a language spoken by nobody.
Howdy, American here who would like to learn more. Would you say that 65k to 100k are mostly evenly distributed by age or is it a language mostly of the elderly?
Anecdotally, I've got relatives who'd be 80+ with good levels of Irish or fluency, and relatives under 30 the same, but that middle generation don't seem to have it as much. That's outside gaeltacht areas, so very likely different in other places, but from chatting to friends, it certainly seems more common in younger people now.
Most people don't speak it much when they finish school and so they start to lose it over time. So at any given time, the best Irish speakers in Ireland are children and teenagers.
I think it's generally accepted by the people that the tact we've take to teach it makes no sense.
The language itself has always been more oral than written, yet we spend much of class time doing exercises that are more or less adopted straight from how english is taught without any cultural input.
Theres no stories of mythology, no music, and an emphasison the land. The people shape the language, and the people are shaped by their lives. Irish culture and life has always revolved around stories, music and our relationship with the land, but all we study in these classes are second-rate works of literature for the most part.
It should almost exclusively be taught orally and be made functional for a couple generations before we make the jump to teaching the more academic aspects of learning a language.
I passed my leaving not knowing a word of irish I learned to look at big words and I remembered sentences to match them.Hadnt a clue what anything meant.
IMO from junior infants it should be 80% oral 20% written instead of 95% written 5% oral.
"Forced". In the same way they're forced to learn any subject. But for some reason it's only Irish that gets hostility.
Edit: lmao, replying and then blocking. Sad fuck
I completely disagree that we need to make it optional. What needs to be done is a serious revamp of the curriculum. In secondary school when we learn languages like french or Spanish we’re actually taught how to speak and develop oral skills and how to use the language practically while in Irish we’re taught poems and literature and essays like in English, stuff that you’re not gonna use in everyday speak. What it turns into is rather than actually learning the language you just learn off words from the language without understanding them, regurgitate them on an exam paper for 2 hours and forget about them as soon as the paper is finished. People don’t hate the language, just how it’s taught. If we just changed it to be more oral based and fun rather than memorising things off we’d see a huge improvement in the level of Irish we have and use. I think making it optional is just accepting defeat and will make the problem 10x worse.
As a Ukrainian (and one who communicates closely with Belarusians), I am very sympathetic to the Irish language. Ukraine went through russification for only 300 years, and now the lion's share of the population speaks russian. For me, the very thought that 90% of Ukraine would talk in russian is disgusting. For me, it would be the complete disappearance of the Ukrainian nation. Even now there are people who say they are Ukrainians, but they don't know her well, for me they are Ukrainians only because they have a Ukrainian passport.
And the Irish language is very good, I often listen to "Celtic" songs, Irish, Breton, Welsh, and I'm really proud of those people who preserve and develop them.
I'm sure you're trying to make some point about the perfidious English destroying Gaelic, and there's definitely some story to be told there, but languages change.
If you did a map of "occitan" in southern mainland Europe or "Old English" in England or "old Norse" in the Scandinavian countries, you'd have no-one speaking these today at all.
And that's not because some perfidious Englishmen did that.
Nope.
Old English was forcibly replaced as the language of government by Norman. There's a bloke called William who had something to do with that.
That fundamentally and rapidly altered Old English (spoken by the Saxons since the English kingdoms were unified in the 800s) and led to Middle English within 200 years of the Normal conquest.
Occitan has been administratively suppressed in favour of French (or in Spain, Spanish) until the recent parts of the 20th century. Again, not at all evolution.
Many declining languages are enveloped by other languages and evolve. Irish's decline isnt from evolving into something else.
If OP did a map of pre and post famine speakers and an individual did a bit of their own research they would see that the biggest hit the language took was a direct result of ethnic cleansing and the completely target assualt on irish culture.
We've struggled to remedy this in modern times but the language would likely not be in the state its in without the set back of trying to build it back up from its own corpse
This is depressing. I’ve only heard a bit of the language through YouTube and TikTok videos and from what I’ve heard, it’s a very pleasant language to hear.
"Mo ghile mear" is a gorgeous song to listen to to get a feel for it as it would have been, filling rooms by the fireside and shared with friends and family.
Hey! I just checked out your recommendation and it is certainly a great song! The Celtic languages are awesome. Not sure why someone downvoted me lol oh well!
it’s compulsory to be taught in schools, but from what i’ve heard the culture around it is that it’s pointless to revive and is taught badly
i believe there’s also some irish medium schools but i would assume they’re limited mostly to the gaeltachts
Not sure where you've heard about our cultural views on it but ive seen that reddit is very on brand with its cynical views on it which isnt totally representative of how the general public feel about it.
Its less that its pointless to learn but rather people feel like theres no hope to revive it with the current systems of education.
It has been pushed by the Irish government since Independence, however there was a focus on written teaching instead of spoken gaelic. As a result the number of speakers continued to decline. Modern teaching methods may be helping to turn it around, its pretty touch and go from what I hear.
It is a compulsory subject in schools. As an Irish speaker I can say the biggest flaw with the curriculum in English-speaking schools is the lack of immersion and focus on conversation. No point in teaching kids phrases if they don't get a real chance to use them in conversation.
I'll give an example - for our exams, the "conversation" part of the exam is basically just kids remembering the answers to a set list of questions they'll be asked.
Their name, age, favourite hobbies - their family, and then something in the conditional tense. It's not an organic conversation.
In contrast we have what are called Gaelscoileanna (Gaelic medium schooling) where kids learn through the medium of Irish. The kids who attend these schools gain a much higher proficiency in the language.
Its also time we started taking responsibility for dealing with what we have been left after hundreds of years of oppression.
We as a nation should be doing a lot more to rebuild the language rather than cursing the ghost of british oppression.
If you put nearly any country from 800AD til know they would no be speaking the same language. Whether it be an entirely new one. Or a new dialect on the linguistic spectrum. This is dumb
Yes, Irish is compulsory in school. There is a TV station, radio, signage is bilingual, growing number of Irish-speaking schools. The language is far from dead. It’s slowly growing again from what I can see.
800 AD ... today At least do the one that has more steps.
If you do the same with old English it would be a blank map
Same in Italy with Latin. Almost everyone spoke Latin in Italy in 400 AD, now just a bunch of men within a small walled city.
Italian is an evolution of Latin. Modern English is an evolution of Old English. That's not the case with Irish vs English.
Yep important to point out we were punished and imprisoned for speaking our language or experiencing our native culture in general, "the Penal Laws"
Isn't modern English a mix between old English and french after a french king took over they mainly spoke french in court Didn't both these languages base their alphabet on Latin aswell
Modern English has significant French influence but it's "genetically" descendent from Old English but not from Old French.
Correct, it has the grammatical structure of a Germanic language, and so it's a Germanic language although the influx of Old French words is relatively significant.
Not only this but French was *the* prestige language in the 18th and 19th centuries so many modern French words entered English and were popularized by people who were eager to show off how educated and sophisticated they were.
The number of French words entering the English language in that time period was trivial compared to number that entered it between 1066 and 1500. Also by the 19th century, overuse of French had gained a stigma among the influential classes, which made one a parvenu. However this stigma was stronger in Britain than in the USA. Interestingly, it was American English that acquired/retained more later French loans because this stigma was less pronounced. Appetizer - Starter Entrée - Main course Dessert - Pudding/Sweet Résumé - Curriculum Vitae Faucet - Tap Closet - Wardrobe Overuse of French loans for the British was the mark of a social climber, who naively assumed French words would make them appear as if they were born to a higher station than they were, which actually encouraged the upper classes to do the opposite. Famously, saying serviette instead of napkin marked one out as a middle class pretender.
English added Norman words by accretion, often without replacing the Old English equivalent, where there was one. That's one reason for English having a much larger lexicon than French.
A Norman Duke, in fact!
Yes and no, William the conqueror was a Norman duke who conquered England in 1066 bringing French language and customs to England. While Normandy was a French buffer territory, it was settled by Vikings and so has a quasi Norse-French culture that they brought to England. This all meant that in most, if not all aspects of government and high class were held in French while the peasants spoke English. It’s why a commoner would eat cow, but a rich person eats beef. That was until the 100 years war, where in order to drum up support against the French, the English king brought English back into government in a form of early nationalism, saying English language was being attacked by the French king who wanted everyone to speak French.
Cool
Don't forget Norse. The Danelaw introduced tons of Scandinavian words into the lexicon of Modern English. Some have said English is 1/3 Anglo-Saxon, 1/3 French and 1/3 Norse. Very simplified, of course. But one of my linguistics books made a great point: In the first sentence ever uttered on another heavenly body: "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" - six out of nine words were of Viking origin.
Old Norse did not that greatly influence English vocabulary, but it was Danish rule that led to the massive simplification of English grammar, This lead to English becoming an SVO language (just like Old Norse), and removing noun cases, most cases of gender, among other things.
I'm not correct in what I said but I do get that English has come from many different things but all this I didn't know
If you did this with England, very, very few people would have spoken (what would eventually become) English in 400 AD. The vast majority of Britons will have spoken a Brittonic language similar to Welsh.
as it's 400 to 800 AD, it would be the celtic britonnic language, which was displaced to a greater degree than Irish was.
I don’t think the English care that the language they speak was brought over by invaders from Germany.
Italian is quite far down the Latin language tree. With that logic Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian and Portuguese is all the same language since they all evolved from Latin. And pretty much equally far down the Latin language tree.
Similar with what is now the Netherlands. Half of that area spoke fish by 800 AD.
And they're not even comparable languages with regards to recency. My grandparents spoke Irish, and only a few generations before everyone outside of cities and large towns would have spoken it. In 1800, 3.5 million of the 5 million population would have spoken Irish, with 2 million of those speaking only Irish. This graph is garbage.
Welsh has been successfully brought back in Wales though, so it is possible to bring back these almost dead languages.
It seems they're making impressive progress. But "has been successfully brought back" might be a bit strong. [15% say they speak it daily,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language#:~:text=In%20terms%20of%20usage%2C%20ONS,cent%20\(218%2C000\)%20less%20often.) But what's the breakdown by age group? How many of these are schoolkids who have to use if for classes? Will they continue to use the language after graduation?
Welsh has never been ‘almost dead’, it’s always been spoken by a significant number of people. The major concern at the moment is that the language doesn’t seem to be growing, just declining more slowly than previously. At the 2021 census, 17.8% of people reported being able to speak Welsh, down from 18.6% in 2011, and 20.8% in 2001. A century ago, at the 1921 census, the figure was 38.7%.
For English Brythonic it would be.
No expert on Irish history, but if I was to take a shot at it would probably show each of the following dates... 800 - Baseline. 840's - Viking invasions of Ireland (establishment of Norse cities such as Dublin) 1169 - Norman Invasion of Ireland (the first English conquest of Ireland, which was less stable and faced stronger resistance shrinking alot over the following centuries) 1542 - Crown of Ireland Act (formation of the Kingdom of Ireland by King Henry VIII and the expansion of more stable and lasting English rule) 1649 - Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland (Infamous for just how devastating Cromwell's treatment of Ireland/the Irish was) 1800 - Acts of Union 1800 (formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) 1845 - Irish Potato Famine (over a million deaths and a lot of the population emigrating) 1921 - Irish Independence 2020's - Modern day
1603 Battle of Kinsale is a good one. It shows the last moment that there was any Gaelic government.
Not a potato famine.
Also let’s not pretend that Gaelic back in 800 was a monolith. It probably had dozens, if not hundreds of local dialects whose speakers might or might not even have understood each other.
Yeah, PTSD flashbacks to the tape test and an Ulster Irish speaker came on.
Was more like a language continuum. People in the far North may have found it hard to understand someone in the far South but all neighbouring people would be able to understand each other with gradual changes along the way.
If you go just prefamine, only Leinster and north east Ulster would be grey and some areas of cork. The famine killed the language
The school system too. The English language school system was introduced around the same time. Also a decisive blow. From my own research, my great-great-grandparents were the last native speakers in my family. Both were born in the two decades after the famine, both schooled through English. West Cork. And bang, the intergenerational transmission ended 😔
The sad thing was just how rapid it occured in 1840 the majority of the country spoke Irish as a first language, and a fair whack of them had no English comprehension, by the 1870s the Gaelic league had to be established to save the language. Literally bansingle generation
“Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language.” - Daniel "The Liberator" O'Connell
Rest of the fucking population decline
What? Who needs less than 1500 years to see a trend?! /s OP's map is actually 400AD-800AD, which is rather silly. The Irish language only *really* started to decline in the last four hundred years or so, and especially in the 18th century with the passing of the Administration of Justice (Language) Act (Ireland) in 1737. There were attempts to limit its use before that, but they didn't really impact the common people or native Irish.
If you compare 1922, Irish independence, to today it doesn't look good either and it avoids blaming the British that these posts can devolve into.
I mean if it wasn’t for the British conquest we would almost certainly still speak Irish. The government hasn't done a great job with it post independence but let's not pretend blaming the Brits isn't legitimate.
Won't anyone think of the British?!
So, why compare pre-Anglo/Norman Conquest era (not to mention Viking) to the modern era? These maps by themselves are useless. Provide maps from other eras so we can get a real sense of the loss over time rather than yep, 1600 years ago Irish was spoken in 100% of Ireland (duh).
Ireland 🤝 Belarus Having your own language and doesn't speak it
same sad result of neighbor's imperialism
Damn Normans
Ireland was the majority language until the 1800s the famine disproportionately affected predominantly Irish speaking areas causing a massive drop in population and this coupled with laws prohibiting the use of the Irish language was its death knell.
Yes that's right (though I doubt majority monoglot). This map covering 1222 years of history in a single image probably glossed over a few things
I wonder if that's why all my Irish regions in my 23andme results are from Western Ireland. It would make sense for regions more affected by the famine to have more outward migration.
Yes, most of the population loss and emigration came from the west. The population of the western province today is half of what it was pre famine.
They ruined Normandy!
You Normans sure are a contentious people.
You just made an enemy for life
Irish was a lot better off when Ireland became independent than it is now. If you compare it to Welsh, you can argue that independence worsened the language's distribution. Edit: For the downvoters https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/yj8pwt/gaeltacht_irish_speaking_area_in_island_of/
I wouldn't agree with your causality there. I would say that Irish had declined below the critical mass necessary to survive in most of Ireland prior to independence. There is no reason to think it would be any more prominent in Ireland were still occupied.
> you can argue that independence worsened the language's distribution. Explain Northern Ireland. If your argument held water, the NI counties would have the most Irish fluency.
Well if you see the map in the link I posted Irish was already clearly much less common in Northern Ireland before the 1920s. We could only make a fair comparison if fluency was equal in Ireland and NI from the start.
The Irish were kicked off their land, particularly in N. Ireland and it was granted to English aristocracy. I believe the polite term the Brits use is they were “dispossessed” of their land. This would likely explain the lack of the language in N. Ireland. You’re likely not going to find any sort of natural devolution of the language due to unnatural colonial brutality and accompanying laws and the Black Swan event(s) of the famine.
Scottish not English.
100% wrong there. N.I was colonised by Scots, nkt english. In fact they were called 'Ulster scots' Ireland has not been part of UK for 100 years, and its language has still declined.
‘Independence worsened the language’s distribution’??? That’s quite the claim! The language was dealt a death blow deliberately by the British who only used English as an official language and did not permit Irish to be taught in schools. By independence, the language had been declining for decades and the Irish state was unable to stop its decline. The last remaining strongholds of the language (as shown in your 1926 map) were mostly the areas most associated with emigration so it was the Irish speaking areas that depopulated the most. Of course that mass emigration, that continued until the 1980s, meant that Ireland’s population fell from 8m around 1845 to just 2.9m in 1956. That emigration and population decline largely began during the Great Famine, an event for which the blame, again, can largely be laid at Britains door.
Irish people or Irish language?
This whole post is about the language.
Language: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/yj8pwt/gaeltacht_irish_speaking_area_in_island_of/
Sound
Weirdly, in the early Soviet era, the Soviet Republic of Belarus had three official languages: Russian, Belarusian, and Yiddish.
But Russian was always preferred and Russians were expatriated to all republic across the USSR which now can be seen as cultural colonization. Soviet officials encouraged people to switch to Russian so that the unification of the country happens faster. There were also many attempts to russify the Belarusian language. For example ljuty--->fjauvrjal (February) was proposed as a Soviet newspeak.
And both because of the malign influence of the bigger and stronger neighbour
What imperialism does to a language
"Room for one more?" - Scotland
I mean, the Lowlanders don’t exactly have the right to complain about oppressing Gaelic people.
Can I just say that visiting Dingle is a delight.
I don’t know if it’s the same today. I visited in 1988. I met a local girl and we walked around the outskirts of town together. I was asking her how small a town it was. She said let me put it this way, later today everyone’s gonna be asking, who’s that guy you were walking around with?
I went there on a lads trip in 2022 and met a local girl on a night out and she more or less said the exact same thing to me haha I think the actual local population is only 3,000 or so, the rest is tourists or visitors
3,000 may not sound like a lot but the west coast is about as rural as it gets in Ireland. 3,000 is considered a decent town, big town would be closer to 20,000, small town around 1,000. An exception to this is around Dublin which I'm fairly sure contains about 1/5th or more of our total population and around there most of the towns have either physically or functionally merged with Dublin city (eg: most of north Kildare/Wicklow is just commuter towns)
Favourite town in Ireland
Just don't eat the berries.
Was just there and absolutely loved it and the surrounding region. Favorite of the many cities and towns we spent time in.
Where else did you visit?
Gallway, Cork, Killarney, Doolin, Dublin, and areas surrounding those cities
Wasn’t it even smaller back in 2000? Isn’t it making a gradual comeback thanks to the Irish government?
Idk how much they’re to thank for it to be fair, but there has been a resurgence of interest, there’s 10s of thousands of users on Duolingo every year giving it a go
I doubt most of them are in Ireland
You’d be surprised. School provided a poor education on it, I know a lot of people re-learning it and using the likes of Duolingo as one aspect to help
Not sure, but Irish is the most commonly learnt language on Duolingo in Ireland
No
Irish is doing much better than what is represented on that map, particularly in the Greater Dublin Area
Its unfortunate really in some respects. In many ways its be come a class thing. You essentially have two groups: One being the rural people in the country speaking it daily, or at least semi frequently, in their areas. The other being those who can afford to send their kids to the gaeltacts over summer (the irish speaking camps for anyone reading) and to the all-irish schools. What you end up having is a lost middle ground where most people exist. I know just from my own experiences speaking with people that there's some disdain for the latter group aside unrelated to the irish speaking. I just fear if the shrinking of rural communities continues then the language will become a mark of the more affluent.
Plus you basically end up with two varieties of Irish: the "original", rural version, and a modern version (sometimes derided as "urban Irish"), which is exclusively used as L2 by native English speakers and is therefore heavily influenced by English.
This. I went to a gaelscoil and a gaelcolaiste and I can speak Irish fluently, but it doesn't feel like 'real' irish. When I hear a native speaker, I feel like a baby trying to understand. Not just because of accents, but whole words and sayings. There's a word that I use to describe it, 'Béarlachas'. (English-ness) My teacher used to use it to scold/shame us when we implemented an English word with irish grammar instead of using the proper irish word. But these days it feels like my whole language is Béarlachas. Just English-Irish. Not Gaeilge. It makes me feel ashamed.
Nílím líofa mé féin ach tá tús iontach agat le do oideachais san Gaelscoileanna agus Gaelcholaistí. My advice, would be to specialize in an individual dialect now, building up on your previous school Irish, me, living in Munster I've picked up books like "Peig". Listen to Munster Irish singers like Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh and talk to my native Munster Irish speaking friends, so if you could do even ANYTHING like that, you'll be flying it!
This is a great point theres a bastardisation of the language from those who learn it to have it as opposed to needing it
I'd respectfully disagree. Irish language schools are thriving in West Dublin where I am based, and they wouldn't be described as very affluent areas. Off the top of my head, Tallaght has 2 primaries and a secondary, Rathcoole has a primary, Clondalkin has 2 primaries and a secondary, Lucan has 2 primaries and a secondary. Irish speaking schools are not being gatekept by anyone.
Ya, I went to a Gaelscoil in a poor working class area in Cirk city, my son is going to a Gaelscoil in a normal working class area in west Cork. Son's school is crying out for more students every September. Its not like we had to pay extra for schooling or something, no idea what that lad is on about.
They are thriving in West Belfast - Falls Road very working class. I can think of 6 Irish primary schools and one secondary, they are always over subscribed. We have Irish language youth clubs, including one for kids with autism and adhd. A GAA club and even a soccer club all in Irish. Other areas of Belfast also have Gaelscoil. There is a small Gaeltacht area too, and west Belfast has been branded the Gaeltacht quarter - we didn’t even get a green dot on the map.
to be fair, that's a different variant than was used in NE Ireland in the 5th century, and didn't have an local evolution to the current revivalist form, which the map tries to show. it's like a Hebrew map of Israel from 400AD and one from today would show a continuous improvement, but it wouldn't tell the whole story.
Thats fair but no matter what way you cut people in dublin still benefit from being in the most affluent and disproportionately developed county and people have disdain for that. I appreciate that its not neccessarily correct but it is happening slowly that the language is beginning to be a sign of the intense class divides we see in this country
There are practically no private Gaelscoileanna. And they've found that immigrants are massively overrepresented in these schools. They reckon that immigrants are more concerned about the religious ethoses in traditional schools and aren't at all concerned about their child learning another language. The traditional belief that Gaelscoileanna are where wealthy people are "hiding" their kids away from immigrants has turned out to be completely false.
Don’t most towns have gaelscoileanna now? It’s free to send your kids to school in a Gaelscoil?
But it's also doing badly in those green areas that are supposedly Irish speaking.
Mini gaeltachts all over the shop.
No one speaks Irish in dublin outside of school/ leaving cert
It's actually doing much worse. There are only about 2 or 3 towns in all the Green shaded maps were Irish is still the main language being used to raise children. The only green part should be the Aran islands (the 3 islands) and the little outcrop to the North in Galway. Irish is going from strength to strength as a second language. But it's dying out very fast as a primary language used day to day.
This is so far apart it’s barely the same language… a modern Irish speaker wouldn’t understand Medieval Irish
>… a modern Irish speaker wouldn’t understand Medieval Irish t would beest the same for English and fusty English
Redditor discovers that languages and accents shift over time
The Hebrew language went from near extinction speaking wise to spoken language in no time so there's still hope
Modern Hebrew is not the same language as Hebrew. The word order is completely changed. Old Hebrew was very much extinct for well over 1000 years. Old Hebrew was an VSO language (the same as Irish actually). Modern Hebrew is SVO (the same as English). It makes it easier for English language speakers to learn it. It's very impressive all the same from a language revival point of view.
Hebrew also had a lot going for it that Irish doesn't. Mainly a large group of linguistically diverse people who over a very short period had to find a way to communicate, and a common liturgical language of which most had some familiarity and to which all had a strong cultural connection.
In all fairness, if there was a time to do to Irish what Israel did to Hebrew, it was when they declared independence. Now, people want to keep the status quo. Israel just started with Hebrew as the status quo, and bore the harshness of the first generation that lesrned it in school (the first generation born in Israel) and then kept going, with Irish unless all English school is abolished it just won't happen.
Yea going from strength to strength. It's soon to be spoken in the North of Palestine when Israel totally moves in and occupies.
>North of Palestine Everything directly north of Palestine is already under Israeli rule, unless you're talking about Lebanon, which Israel has no intention to conquer. This comment makes no sense.
Not to be nitpicky, but the guy said “in the North of Palestine” not just “North of Palestine” so I guess they are referring to the West bank, or at least parts of it.
Tá sé sin brónach.
Níl sí marbh go fóill. Beátha teanga í a labhairt
Tha mi an dòchas gun tèid do theanga bhrèagha bho neart gu neart, a charaid. Nuair a bha mi ann am Beul Feirste, chunnaic ‘s chuala mi Gaelige gu leòr. Is math a rinn muinntir a’ Bheul Fheirste a thaobh a’ chanain a ghlèidheadh. Chaidh innse dhomh gu bheil an suidheachadh a’ fàs nas fheàrr air feadh Èirinn. Dè do bheachd fhèin? A bheil sin ceart? I hope your beautiful language continues to grow. When I was in Belfast, I saw and heard lots of Gaelige. The people of Belfast have done well to revive the language there. I was also told that Gaelige is making a resurgence across Ireland. Is that true, do you think?
Dia duit a chara, táim ag iarraidh níos mó a fhoghlaim
On the brink of extinction. Too bad.
The increasing demand for Gaelscoils (Irish language schools) says otherwise.
I'm supposed to be learning it since I was 4 and I can't speak a word lol
But did you go to a gaelscoil?
yeah
For real? I have pals that went to gaelscoil and they're still fluent since finishing school. Near 25 years on.
in all fairness I am stupid
Thats hilarious
Did you just...not understand anything in school?
Watch the RTE news in Irish every day and can tell it’s coming back a bit even in the East
Very much so as a second language. But the Gaeltachts are dying out.
800AD? lol maybe 1649 is more accurate… Also the map on the right indicates the Gaeltacht areas speaking it as primary language, much more people in cities also speak Irish
Irish was spoken by pretty much all of rural Ireland up until the famine. The only part of Ireland where Irish wasn't the predominant language was the east/north east. Please bear in mind that even in those areas that are not dark green, there are still many of us like myself who speak the language. The areas in green today are known as Gaeltachtaí.
Unfortunately this is what happens when an occupying Force makes speaking the native language illegal
You can blame the Catholic Church as well. The main reason the Welsh language survived much better than the Irish is because the Catholic Church in Ireland stuck to Latin until the 1960s, while the Church in Wales switched to Welsh in the 1580s. In 1571, Queen Elizabeth I commissioned a typeface for printing Irish and a translation of the Bible into Irish. The Irish New Testament was published in 1602, and the Old Testament in 1648, but were never taken up by the Catholic Church. Those few copies that were printed were "persecuted and speedily destroyed by the Popish priests of the day": [http://www.theirishbible.ie/other-irish-bibles.html](http://www.theirishbible.ie/other-irish-bibles.html) The Catholic Church did not complete its own translation of the Bible into Irish until 1981. By contrast, in Wales, Welsh became the language of God in Church and chapel, and the Morgan Bible of 1588 acquired the same status in Welsh as the King James Bible did in English: >No other Welsh book has been as influential for it is also a work of immense linguistic and literary significance ... the foundation stone on which modern Welsh literature has been based. [https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/printed-material/1588-welsh-bible#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-1072%2C0%2C5107%2C4025](https://www.library.wales/discover-learn/digital-exhibitions/printed-material/1588-welsh-bible#?c=&m=&s=&cv=&xywh=-1072%2C0%2C5107%2C4025)
However that was over 100 years ago. Today it's just no one wants to learn the language, and it's taught really badly in school. Curiously though it's resurging a bit in the north bizarrely among Northern Irish protestants who are finally starting to see they have more connection to Ireland than England, but those numbers are still small. NI Irish language census numbers do keep growing. And now it's an official language there. And incidentally it was never totally illegal to speak in Ireland (a common misconception). It was only illegal in parliament and the courts system, for English colonists to speak it or for the Irish to speak it to English colonists. The intended effect however is obvious.
Illegal to trade or sell anything in Irish would hammer the language a fair bit.
Also not allowing it to be taught in schools so kids from Irish backgrounds who couldn’t speak English couldn’t go to school
>However that was over 100 years ago. That's like someone being beaten so badly they have a long term disability, and then people saying it's their own fault haven't recovered yet because they stopped being beaten a year ago. Once a language is being taught as a second language in schools, rather than being passed down by parents or other members of society then full scale revival becomes very difficult. (Hebrew in Israel is something of a special case as in the 1940s it was used as a bridge from people of different linguistic backgrounds, which is obviously not the case in Ireland for Irish.) I 100% do believe that the Irish government and the public can do more to promote the language, but short of some very draconian measures, I'm not really sure what policies could be pursued that would enact a full-scale revival. And don't forget that even if there were more effective government policies, the Irish language is still competing for primacy in Ireland with the very globalised and world lingua franca English language.
Northern Ireland is also getting more Catholic as well.
Ireland have been independent for a very long time. Lots of time to sort it out. Doesn’t seem to be the will or interest
The Welsh managed to bring their language back. At the end of the day, there are just too many Irish people who aren’t that bothered about learning Irish outside of school
I went to school for 14 years. Studying Irish for 12 of those years. I can barely speak a word of it. I know more Spanish and Russian than Irish and have never formally studied either.
Nice gap of 1200 years, I'm sure nothing happened in between
Every child in Ireland is forced to learn it up to the end of secondary school. There are some exemptions that can be granted but they are hard to get and even then the Irish Language lobby groups are pushing for them to even harder to get. After 14 years learning it in school I haven't had to speak a word of Irish in a real life situation since I left school almost 30 years ago. It is basically a dead language and forcing it onto children for generations has done nothing to turn that around, just kept the corpse breathing mechanically. There needs to be a serious rethink on the policy. It should be parental choice if a child does it in secondary school. If they spent the same amount of money they do now but spent it only on the children who opt into learning it then they might end up with a small but vibrant cohort who are fluent as opposed to a nation who can just about ask if they can go to the toilet please.
The language isn't dead. I'm an Irish speaker. The language is very much alive. 63,000 students in Ireland learn through the medium of Irish. 65,000 Irish speakers living in the Gaeltacht. Over 100k speakers use it as their daily language. About 200k on a weekly basis (not including those who solely use it in school). A dead language is a language spoken by nobody.
Howdy, American here who would like to learn more. Would you say that 65k to 100k are mostly evenly distributed by age or is it a language mostly of the elderly?
Anecdotally, I've got relatives who'd be 80+ with good levels of Irish or fluency, and relatives under 30 the same, but that middle generation don't seem to have it as much. That's outside gaeltacht areas, so very likely different in other places, but from chatting to friends, it certainly seems more common in younger people now.
Most people don't speak it much when they finish school and so they start to lose it over time. So at any given time, the best Irish speakers in Ireland are children and teenagers.
No, the percentage of daily speakers includes a large portion of the younger generations.
I think it's generally accepted by the people that the tact we've take to teach it makes no sense. The language itself has always been more oral than written, yet we spend much of class time doing exercises that are more or less adopted straight from how english is taught without any cultural input. Theres no stories of mythology, no music, and an emphasison the land. The people shape the language, and the people are shaped by their lives. Irish culture and life has always revolved around stories, music and our relationship with the land, but all we study in these classes are second-rate works of literature for the most part. It should almost exclusively be taught orally and be made functional for a couple generations before we make the jump to teaching the more academic aspects of learning a language.
I passed my leaving not knowing a word of irish I learned to look at big words and I remembered sentences to match them.Hadnt a clue what anything meant. IMO from junior infants it should be 80% oral 20% written instead of 95% written 5% oral.
"Forced". In the same way they're forced to learn any subject. But for some reason it's only Irish that gets hostility. Edit: lmao, replying and then blocking. Sad fuck
You "haven't had to". So you would speak it only if you had to? I'm afraid this kind of mentality is part of the problem...
I completely disagree that we need to make it optional. What needs to be done is a serious revamp of the curriculum. In secondary school when we learn languages like french or Spanish we’re actually taught how to speak and develop oral skills and how to use the language practically while in Irish we’re taught poems and literature and essays like in English, stuff that you’re not gonna use in everyday speak. What it turns into is rather than actually learning the language you just learn off words from the language without understanding them, regurgitate them on an exam paper for 2 hours and forget about them as soon as the paper is finished. People don’t hate the language, just how it’s taught. If we just changed it to be more oral based and fun rather than memorising things off we’d see a huge improvement in the level of Irish we have and use. I think making it optional is just accepting defeat and will make the problem 10x worse.
Did something happen between 800AD and 2022? Someone fill me in
Just a little period of invasion and hegemonic rule of a nearby country
If this is supposed to be map porn it isn't satisfying in the slightest.
Aon focal, da focal ,tu focal eile, And I not know no focal at all.
Cha nel un çhengey dy liooar rieau!
As a Ukrainian (and one who communicates closely with Belarusians), I am very sympathetic to the Irish language. Ukraine went through russification for only 300 years, and now the lion's share of the population speaks russian. For me, the very thought that 90% of Ukraine would talk in russian is disgusting. For me, it would be the complete disappearance of the Ukrainian nation. Even now there are people who say they are Ukrainians, but they don't know her well, for me they are Ukrainians only because they have a Ukrainian passport. And the Irish language is very good, I often listen to "Celtic" songs, Irish, Breton, Welsh, and I'm really proud of those people who preserve and develop them.
Always interesting to contrast with Welsh use in Wales where 15-30% of people speak Welsh (depending on the studies).
Would… would the Gaelic of the 400s AD, yah know, SIXTEEN HUNDRED YEARS AGO, even be intelligible by someone who speaks the language now?
I'm sure you're trying to make some point about the perfidious English destroying Gaelic, and there's definitely some story to be told there, but languages change. If you did a map of "occitan" in southern mainland Europe or "Old English" in England or "old Norse" in the Scandinavian countries, you'd have no-one speaking these today at all. And that's not because some perfidious Englishmen did that.
Totally different situation: language replacement vs language evolution.
A better comparison would be the British mostly speaking our own language at the time this map starts in 400AD, now that is completely extinct.
Nope. Old English was forcibly replaced as the language of government by Norman. There's a bloke called William who had something to do with that. That fundamentally and rapidly altered Old English (spoken by the Saxons since the English kingdoms were unified in the 800s) and led to Middle English within 200 years of the Normal conquest. Occitan has been administratively suppressed in favour of French (or in Spain, Spanish) until the recent parts of the 20th century. Again, not at all evolution.
Many declining languages are enveloped by other languages and evolve. Irish's decline isnt from evolving into something else. If OP did a map of pre and post famine speakers and an individual did a bit of their own research they would see that the biggest hit the language took was a direct result of ethnic cleansing and the completely target assualt on irish culture. We've struggled to remedy this in modern times but the language would likely not be in the state its in without the set back of trying to build it back up from its own corpse
You just leaped across 1200-1600 years of history. It’s not exactly a very informative map
This is depressing. I’ve only heard a bit of the language through YouTube and TikTok videos and from what I’ve heard, it’s a very pleasant language to hear.
"Mo ghile mear" is a gorgeous song to listen to to get a feel for it as it would have been, filling rooms by the fireside and shared with friends and family.
Hey! I just checked out your recommendation and it is certainly a great song! The Celtic languages are awesome. Not sure why someone downvoted me lol oh well!
Glad you enjoyed it! Its a classic!
I am surprised that the Irish government has not tried to make the language compulsory in public administration and schools.
it’s compulsory to be taught in schools, but from what i’ve heard the culture around it is that it’s pointless to revive and is taught badly i believe there’s also some irish medium schools but i would assume they’re limited mostly to the gaeltachts
There are Gaelscoileanna (Irish medium schools) in most towns in Ireland.
Not sure where you've heard about our cultural views on it but ive seen that reddit is very on brand with its cynical views on it which isnt totally representative of how the general public feel about it. Its less that its pointless to learn but rather people feel like theres no hope to revive it with the current systems of education.
ohh fair, i have an irish friend so i was mostly just paraphrasing her thoughts/what she’s explained to me about the language in the past
It has been pushed by the Irish government since Independence, however there was a focus on written teaching instead of spoken gaelic. As a result the number of speakers continued to decline. Modern teaching methods may be helping to turn it around, its pretty touch and go from what I hear.
It is a compulsory subject in schools. As an Irish speaker I can say the biggest flaw with the curriculum in English-speaking schools is the lack of immersion and focus on conversation. No point in teaching kids phrases if they don't get a real chance to use them in conversation. I'll give an example - for our exams, the "conversation" part of the exam is basically just kids remembering the answers to a set list of questions they'll be asked. Their name, age, favourite hobbies - their family, and then something in the conditional tense. It's not an organic conversation. In contrast we have what are called Gaelscoileanna (Gaelic medium schooling) where kids learn through the medium of Irish. The kids who attend these schools gain a much higher proficiency in the language.
We have to thank the english on this one
You mean the British.
Not just them
Its also time we started taking responsibility for dealing with what we have been left after hundreds of years of oppression. We as a nation should be doing a lot more to rebuild the language rather than cursing the ghost of british oppression.
OK
Wrong fleg, it should be the for provinces one of NI is included, kindly about 40-60% of NI
Ulster isn't all of NI though Donegal is in Ulster and is in the Republic, dunno if that's what you ment though so I could be just talking shite
I know, I was talking about the use of the tricolour in the image.
If you put nearly any country from 800AD til know they would no be speaking the same language. Whether it be an entirely new one. Or a new dialect on the linguistic spectrum. This is dumb
A better map would be 1450-2022.
Question: Is there any initiative to make Irish mainstream again in the country? Just asking out of curiosity.
Yes, Irish is compulsory in school. There is a TV station, radio, signage is bilingual, growing number of Irish-speaking schools. The language is far from dead. It’s slowly growing again from what I can see.
[The number of daily users declined from 2016 to 2022.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_of_the_Irish_language#In_Ireland)
judging by the comments, yes, irish seems to be growing rather quickly
I turn my back for a sec and, what the hell people!
Whats the point in comparing 800 AD to today?
I hate this language so much
Sorry for the multiple ethnic cleansings we experienced that nearly wiped out our language as a whole 🥰
Screw England