Irish is a distinct language of Celtic origin. It is similar in form to Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Manx and Breton. In the Irish Republic, Irish is the official language as defined by the Irish Constitution and English is used as a secondary language. It is also defined as an official language by HM Government of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

In practice, the use of Irish by both the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland differ greatly from their official status. Indeed, it was only recently (October 1996) that an Irish language television channel, Telifis na Gaeilge, was made available to the public. TG4, as it is now known is available widely throughout the Republic of Ireland and to many areas of Northern Ireland by both terrestrial and digital satellite broadcast.

LEARNING IRISH

There are many routes to learning the Irish language, although difficult it can be mastered. The Celtic and Irish Cultural Society are funding a number of Irish language classes throughout the year. If you would like to attend please contact John Nolan.

The BBC and RTÉ offer a number of online resources aimed at learners and many other sites, dotted around the globe, dedicated to promoting the Irish language. In addition, you can find a number of books and audio CDs at online retailers.

Useful Links:

Irish is a Celtic language and, as such, is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. Within the Celtic group, it belongs to the Goidelic branch of insular Celtic. Irish has evolved from a form of Celtic introduced into Ireland at during the great Celtic migrations between the end of the second millennium and the fourth century BC. Old Irish is the earliest variant of the Celtic languages, and the earliest of European vernaculars north of the Alps, in which extensive writings still exist.

During the modern era, the Norse settlement (from 800 onwards) and the Anglo-Norman colonization (1169 onwards) introduced periods of new language diversity into Ireland, but Irish remained dominant and other speech communities were gradually assimilated. During the early sixteenth century, almost all of the population was Irish-speaking. The main towns, however, prescribed English for the formal conduct of administrative and legal business.

The events of the later sixteenth century and of the seventeenth century for the first time undermined the status of Irish as a major language. The Tudor and Stuart conquests and plantations (1534-1610), the Cromwellian settlement (1654), and the Williamite war (1689-91) followed by the enactment of the Penal Laws (1695), had the cumulative effect of eliminating the Irish-speaking ruling classes and of destroying their cultural institutions. They were replaced by a new ruling class, or Ascendancy, whose language was English, and thereafter English was the sole language of government and public institutions. Irish continued as the language of the greater part of the rural population and, for a time, of the servant classes in towns.

From the middle of the eighteenth century, as the Penal Laws were relaxed and a greater social and economic mobility became possible for the native Irish, the more prosperous of the Irish-speaking community began to conform to the prevailing middle-class ethos by adopting English. Irish thus began to be associated with poverty and economic deprivation. This tendency increased after the Act of Union in 1800.

The actual number of Irish speakers increased substantially during the first decades of the nineteenth century due to the rapid growth in the rural population. In 1835, Irish speakers were estimated at four million. This number consisted almost entirely of an impoverished rural population that became decimated by the Great Irish Famine (1845-52) and by resultant mass emigration. By 1891, the number of Irish speakers had been reduced to 680,000 and, according to that year’s census of population, Irish speakers under the age of ten represented no more than 3.5% of their age-group.

When the position began to stabilize early in the twentieth century, Irish remained as a community language only in small discontinuous regions, mainly around the western seaboard. Today, these regions are collectively called the Gaeltacht. In the 1991 (Irish Republic) census, the population of the officially-defined Gaeltacht aged three years and over was 79,563, of whom 56,469 or 71% were returned as Irish-speaking. The number of Irish speakers is a decreasing proportion of the total because, for a variety of complex reasons, some of the indigenous population of the Gaeltacht continue to shift to English, and because new English-speaking households are settling there.

On the other hand, there are many Irish-speaking individuals and families throughout the rest of the island, particularly in Dublin. In 1991 just under 1.1 million people or 32.5% of the total population aged three years or over, were returned as Irish-speaking, but this figure does not distinguish differing degrees of competence and use.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy had begun to develop an academic interest in the Irish language and its literature. Academic interest later merged with a concern for the survival of spoken Irish as its decline became increasingly evident. Language-related activity grew throughout the nineteenth century and, following the establishment in 1893 of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), the objective of maintaining and extending the use of Irish as a vernacular fused with the renewed separatist movement which culminated in the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the division of Ireland.

The Irish Government has made various provisions for the maintenance and promotion of the language. Irish is an obligatory subject at primary and second level schools. The Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht has responsibility for promoting the cultural, social, and economic welfare of the Gaeltacht, and more generally for encouraging the use of Irish as a vernacular. The Department has two statutory boards under its aegis: Údarás na Gaeltachta (Gaeltacht Authority), some of whose members are elected by the people of the Gaeltacht, is a development authority for Gaeltacht areas; Bord na Gaeilge (Irish-language Board) has responsibility for the promotion of Irish as a vernacular throughout the country.

The Northern Ireland government has also made strides to support the provision of Irish Gaelic. TG4 has been made available to large areas of Northern Ireland and the BBC are increasingly making information available in the language.

The earliest known form of Irish is preserved in Ogham (or ogam) inscriptions that date from the fourth and fifth centuries. The linguistic information preserved in Ogham is sparse, as the inscriptions contain little more than personal names, but it is sufficient to reveal a form of Goidelic much older than Old Irish, the earliest well-documented variety of the language.

Old Irish was the language of Ireland’s ‘Golden Age’, and its classical phase is generally assigned to the period AD 700-850. Old Irish evolved into Middle Irish, the language of the late Viking and post-Viking period. In comparison with Old Irish, Middle Irish is characterized by a simplification of the inflections of noun and verb and of the system of pronouns.

By 1200 Early Modern Irish, or Classical Modern Irish, had begun to emerge. This is the language of the period of Gaelic resurgence when Old Irish, Norse, Norman, and Old English were largely assimilated into a new Irish-speaking society. This form of Irish lasted from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth as the literary norm for the whole Gaelic world, which comprised Ireland, Gaelic Scotland, and the Isle of Man. During the seventeenth century, as the influence of the old literary schools and learned classes receded, the forms of the written language became increasingly regional in character. In this period the autonomous forms of Modern Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx became established. Even so, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, as the Irish revival gathered momentum, there were many who felt that Classical Modern Irish was still the most appropriate norm for literary purposes. Since the advocates of this view not only used the older grammatical forms, but imitated the ornate and sometimes ponderous style of Early Modern prose, they brought a reaction from writers such as Peadár Ó Laoghaire, Pádraic Ó Conaire, and Patrick Pearse, who were developing a literary diction based on contemporary speech.

The ‘speech of the people’ movement triumphed but one result was that the written language for a time became quite diversified, as writers went their divergent ways in representing contemporary usage. It was necessary to redefine norms. A new spelling norm was published in 1945 with several later revisions. Modern Irish, whilst always changing, is codified in the official Irish-English dictionary, Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, which appeared in 1978.