
Irish (''Gaeilge'' in Irish) is a Goidelic languages spoken in Ireland and constitutionally recognised as the first official language of the Republic of Ireland. On 13 June, 2005, EU foreign ministers unanimously decided to make Irish an official Languages_of_the_European_Union of the European Union. The new arrangements will come into effect on 1 January, 2007. The language is sometimes referred to in English language as Gaelic (International Phonetic Alphabet: ), or Irish Gaelic, but is more generally referred to in Ireland as the Irish language or simply Irish. Use of the term ''Irish'' also avoids confusion with Scottish Gaelic language (''Gàidhlig na h-Alba''), the closely-related language spoken in Scotland and usually referred to in English as simply ''Gaelic'' (IPA: ). The archaic term Erse, originally a Scots language form of the word ''Irish'', is no longer used and in most contexts is considered derogatory. ==Official status== Irish is given recognition by the Constitution of Ireland as the first official language of the Republic of Ireland (with English being a second official language), despite the limited distribution of fluency among the population of that country. Since the State was founded in the 1920s as the Irish Free State (see also ''History of the Republic of Ireland''), the Irish Government required a degree of proficiency in Irish for all civil service positions, such as postal workers (note: proficiency in Irish for entrance to the public service ceased to be a compulsory requirement in 1974); and also the wider public service such as teaching and policing and required Irish be a required subject of study in all schools within the Republic which receive public money (see also ''Education in the Republic of Ireland''). Most official documents of the Irish Government are published in both Irish and English. As a treaty language of the European Union, the highest-level documents of the EU are translated into Irish; in addition, the language has also recently received a degree of Irish language in Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, under the Belfast Agreement. Furthermore, Irish will become an official working language of the European Union beginning January 1, 2007. ==Gaeltachtaí== There are pockets of Ireland where Irish is spoken as a traditional, native language. These regions are known as Gaeltacht (sing. ''Gaeltacht''). The most populous gaeltachts are in Connemara (''Conamara''), including the Aran Islands (''Oileáin Árann'') in County Galway (''Contae na Gaillimhe''); on the west coast of County Donegal (''Contae Dhún na nGall''; in the part which is known as ''Tír Chonaill''); and the Dingle peninsula (''Corca Dhuibhne'') in County Kerry (''Contae Chiarraí''). Smaller ones also exist in County Mayo (''Contae Mhaigh Eo''), County Meath (''Contae na Mí''), County Waterford (''Contae Phort Láirge''), and County Cork (''Contae Chorcaí''). However, even within the Gaeltacht areas, the Irish-speaking populations have declined since the Gaeltacht boundaries were drawn up. The numerically and socially strongest ''Gaeltachtaí'' are those of Connemara and ''Tír Chonaill'', in which a significant proportion of residents use Irish as a community language and in which children often speak the language among each other. The highest concentrations of Irish speakers are found in Ros Muc, Connemara, and around Bloody Foreland (''Cnoc na Fola'') in ''Tír Chonaill''. ==Dialects== ''See main article Irish dialects.'' There are a number of distinct dialects of Irish. Roughly speaking, the three major dialect areas coincide with the provinces of Munster (''Cúige Mumhan''), Connacht (''Cúige Chonnacht'') and Ulster (''Cúige Uladh''). ===Munster dialects=== Munster Irish is spoken in the Gaeltachtaí of Kerry (''Contae Chiarraí''), Muskerry (''Múscraí''), Cape Clear (''Oileán Cléire'') in the western part of County Cork (''Contae Chorcaí''), and the tiny pocket of Irish-speakers in An Rinn 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. Some typical features of Munster Irish are: # 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"). "I was and you were" is ''Bhíos agus bhís'' in Munster but ''Bhí mé agus bhí tú'' in other dialects. # In front of nasals and "ll" some short vowels are lengthened while other are diphthongised. # A copula-construction involving ''is ea'' is frequently used. ===Connacht dialects=== The strongest dialect of Connacht Irish is to be found in Connemara and the Aran Islands. In some regards this dialect is quite different from general Connacht Irish but since most Connacht dialects have died out during the last century Connemara Irish is sometimes seen as Connacht Irish. Much closer to the traditional Connacht Irish is the very threatened dialect spoken in the region on the border between Galway (''Gaillimh'') and Mayo (''Maigh Eo''). The Irish of Tourmakeady (''Tuar Mhic Éadaigh'') in southern Mayo (''Maigh Eo Theas'') and Joyce Country (''Dúthaigh Sheoige'') are considered the living Irish dialects closest to Middle Irish. Also, the northern Mayo dialect of Erris (''Iorras'') and Achill (''Acaill'') is in grammar and word-building essentially a Connacht dialect; but shows an affinity in vocabulary with Ulster Irish, due to large-scale immigration of dispossessed people following the Ulster Plantation. Connemara Irish is very popular with learners, thanks to Mícheál Ó Siadhail's self-teaching textbook ''Learning Irish''. However, there are features in Connemara Irish outside the official standard—notably the preference for verbal nouns ending in -achan, such as ''lagachan'' instead of ''lagú'', "weakening". The non-standard pronunciation with lengthened vowels and heavily reduced endings give Connemara Irish its distinct sound. ===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. This dialect is essentially the same as that in Gweedore (''Gaoth Dobhair''= Inlet of Streaming Water), the same dialect used by native speaker Enya (''Eithne'') and her siblings in Clannad (''Clann as Dobhar'' = Family from the Water). Ulster Irish sounds very different and shares several unusual features with Scottish Gaelic, as well as having lots of characteristic words and shades of meanings. However, since the demise of those Irish dialects spoken natively in what is today Northern Ireland, it is probably an exaggeration to see Ulster Irish as an intermediary form between Scottish Gaelic and the southern and western dialects of Irish. Indeed, Scottish Gaelic does have lots of non-Ulster features in common with Munster Irish, too. One noticeable trait of Ulster Irish is the use of the negative participle ''cha(n)'', in place of the Munster and Connaught version ''ní''. Even in Ulster, ''cha(n)'', most typical of Scottish Gaelic, has ousted the more common ''ní'' only in easternmost dialects (including the now defunct ones once spoken in what is now Northern Ireland). The practice seems to be that ''cha(n)'' is most usually used when answering to a statement, either confirming a negative statement (''Níl aon mhaith ann'' - ''Chan fhuil, leoga'' = "It is no good" - "Indeed it isn't") or contesting an affirmative one (''Tá sé go maith'' - ''Chan fhuil!'' = "It is good" - "No, it isn't!"), while ''ní'' is preferred in answering a question (''An bhfuil aon mhaith ann?'' - ''Níl'' = "Is it any good?" - "No"). ===Other regions=== The extant dialects of Irish native to Leinster, the fourth province of Ireland, became extinct during the 20th century, but records of some of these were made by the Irish Folklore Commission among other bodies prior to this. The present-day Irish of Meath (in Leinster) 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 1930s, after a land reform campaign spearheaded by Máirtín Ó Cadhain (subsequently one of the greatest modernist writers 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?": * Ulster: ''cad é mar atá tú?'' ("what is it as you are?" Note: ''caidé'' or ''goidé'' are alternative renderings of ''cad é'') * Connacht: ''cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?'' ("what way [is it] that you are?") * Munster: ''conas taoí?'' ("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) 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. ==Shelta== There also exists a Cant (language) called Shelta, based partly on English language and partly Irish, in use by the Irish Travellers. ==Linguistic Structure== The most unfamiliar features of the language are the orthography, the initial consonant mutations, the Verb Subject Object word order, and the use of two different forms for "to be". However, initial mutations are found in other Celtic languages as well as in some Italian language and Sardinian dialects, as an independent development. They are also found in some West African languages. ===Syntax=== ''See main article Irish syntax'' One aspect of Irish syntax that is unfamiliar to speakers of other languages is the use of the copula (known in Irish as ''an chopail''). The copula is used to describe what or who someone is, as opposed to how and where. This has been likened to the difference between the verbs ''ser'' and ''estar'' in Spanish language and Portuguese language, although this is only a rough approximation. The copula, which in the present tense is ''is'', is usually demonstrative: :''Is fear é.'' "It is a man." :''Is Sasanaigh iad.'' "They're English." When saying "this is", or "that is", ''seo'' and ''sin'' are used: :''Seo í mo mháthair.'' "This is my mother." :''Sin é an muinteoir.'' "That's the teacher." One can also add "that is in him/her", especially when using an adjective, when it is desired to emphasise the quality: :''Is fear láidir atá ann.'' "He's a strong man." :(Literally: "It is a strong man that is there.") :''Is cailín álainn atá inti.'' "She's a beautiful girl." :(Literally: "It is a beautiful girl that is in her.") This sometimes appears in Hiberno-English, either translated literally as "that is in it", or as "so it is". ===Morphology=== ''See main articles Irish morphology, Irish nominals, and Irish verbs.'' Another feature of Irish grammar that is shared with other Celtic languages is the use of prepositional pronouns. For example, the word for "at" is ''ag'', which combines with the pronoun "me" (which is ''mé''), to form agam "at me". This is used with the verb ''bi'' ("to be"), to form the closest equivalent of the verb "to have".
This is similar to the use of the word ''du'' in French language, which is a compound of ''de'' (of) and ''le'' (the).
Compare with Breton language:
===Orthography and pronunciation===
''See main articles Irish orthography and Irish phonology.''
The written language looks rather daunting to those unfamiliar with it. Once understood, the orthography is relatively straightforward. The acute accent, or ''síneadh 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 or and ''á'' is in "law" but in Ulster Irish (Donegal), ''á'' tends to be .
Around the time of World War II, Séamas Daltún, in charge of Rannóg an Aistriúcháin (the official translations department of the Irish government), 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. Where multiple versions existed in different dialects for the same word, one or more were selected.
Examples:
* ''Gaedhealg / Gaedhilg(e) / Gaedhealaing / Gaeilic / Gaelainn / Gaoidhealg / Gaolainn'' => ''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 diacritic sign, the acute (á é í ó ú), known in Irish as the ''síneadh fada'' or simply ''fada''. The dot-above diacritic, called a ''ponc'', a ''sí buailte'', or simply ''buailte'' — a mark of aspiration (phonetics) — used over consonantal letters in the pre-Caighdeán orthography, has been ousted by the leniting h, added immediately after the consonantal letter. It can still be seen in use where a 'traditional' style is required, e.g. the motto on the University College Dublin coat-of-arms or the symbol of the Irish Defence Forces, and it has been provided for in Unicode and ISO 8859-14 character sets (see Latin Extended Additional chart [http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1E00.pdf PDF]).
===Mutations===
''See main article Irish initial mutations''
In Irish, there are two classes of initial mutations:
* Lenition (in Irish, ''séimhiú'' "softening") describes the change of stops into fricatives. Indicated in old orthography by a dot (called a sí bualite) written above the changed consonant, this is now shown by adding an extra -h-:
** ''caith!'' "throw!" - ''chaith mé'' "I threw" (this is an example of the lenition as a past-tense marker, which is caused by the use of ''do'', although this is now usually omitted)
** ''margadh'' "market", "market-place", "bargain" - ''Tadhg an mhargaidh'' "the man of the street" (word for word "Timothy of the market-place" (here we see the lenition marking the genitive case of a masculine noun)
** ''Seán'' "Seán, John" - ''a Sheáin!'' "O John!" (here we see lenition as part of what is called the vocative case - in fact, the vocative lenition is triggered by the ''a'' or vocative marker before ''Sheáin'')
* Nasalisation (in Irish, ''urú'' "eclipsis") covers the voicing of voiceless stops, as well as the true nasalisation of voiced stops.
** ''athair'' "father" - ''ár nAthair'' "our Father"
** ''tús'' "start", ''ar dtús'' "at the start"
** ''Gaillimh'' "Galway" - ''i nGaillimh'' "in Galway"
==History and politics==
===Stages of the Irish language===
The earliest form of the language, Primitive Irish, is found in ogham inscriptions up to about the 4th century. After the conversion to Christianity, Old Irish begins to appear as glosses in the margins of Latin manuscripts, beginning in the 6th century, until it gives way in the 10th century to Middle Irish. Modern Irish dates from about the 16th century.
===The Irish Language Movement===
The Irish language was the most widely spoken language on the island of Ireland until the 19th century. The first Bible in Irish was translated by William Bedell, Church of Ireland Bishop of Kilmore in the 17th 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 Irish Potato 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. This practice continued long after independence, as the stigma of speaking Irish remained very strong.
Some, however, thought differently. The initial moves to save the language were championed by Irish Protestants, such as the linguist and 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'') which started the Gaelic Revival. Leading supporters of Conradh included Patrick Pearse and Eamon 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 performance 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 the Abbey Theatre playwrights wrote in English (and indeed some disliked Irish) the Irish language affected them, as it did all Irish English speakers. The version of English spoken in Ireland, known as Hiberno-English bears striking similarities in some grammatical idioms with Irish. 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 Durcan, 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 Blythe (Earnán 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.
A Church of Ireland campaign to promote worship and religion in Irish was started in 1914 with the founding of ''Cumann Gaelach na hEaglaise'' (the Irish Guild of the Church). The Roman Catholic Church also replaced its liturgies in Latin with Irish and English for their liturgies following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
===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, were 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, struggling to pronounce passages of their speeches in Irish to their Ard-Fheis (party conference(s), pronounced 'Ord Esh-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 during his time 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') have been fluent in Irish; of the recent Presidents only Mary McAleese (Máire Mhac Ghiolla Íosa) and Mary Robinson/Máire Mhic Róíbín are fluent, though the latter studied the language to improve her fluency while in office. President of Ireland do take their inauguration 'Declaration of Office' in the language, but that too is optional.
Even modern parliamentary legislation, though ''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.
Many public bodies have Irish language or bilingual names, but some have downgraded the language. For example, Eircom (formerly Telecom Eireann) effectively dropped Irish from its telephone directories in 1999. An Post, the Republic's postal service, continues to have Place names in Irish in the language on its postmarks, as well as recognising addresses.
In an effort to address the half-committed attitude of Irish language use by the State, the Official Languages Act was passed in 2003. This act ensures that ''every'' publication made by a governmental body must be published in both official languages, Irish and English. In addition, the office of Official Languages Commissioner has been set up to act as an ombudsman with regard to equal treatment in both languages.
[[Image:Irish road sign.png|thumb|300px|Picture of a typical Irish road sign in Mullingar, County Westmeath, with placenames in English language and Irish.]]
In 2002, at the launch of what was to be a new traffic management system for Dublin, 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) 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. Compulsory Irish in schools remains a political shibboleth, with most politicians reluctant to raise the subject for fear of appearing unpatriotic.
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. TG4 has offered Irish-speaking young people a forum for youth culture ''as Gaeilge'' (in Irish) through rock and pop shows, travel shows, dating games, and even a controversial award-winning soap opera in Irish called ''Ros na Rún'' (featuring, among other characters, an Irish-speaking gay couple and their child). Most of TG4's viewership, however, tends to come from showing gaelic football, hurling and rugby 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===
The Irish language is a minority language in Northern Ireland, known in Irish as ''Tuaisceart Éireann'' or ''na sé chontae'' (the six counties).
Attitudes towards the language in Northern 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, a development known as the ''jailtacht''. Although the language was taught in Catholic secondary schools (especially by the Christian Brothers), it was not taught at all in state (Protestant) schools and public signs in Irish were effectively banned under laws by the Parliament of Northern Ireland, which stated that only English language could be used.
This was not formally lifted by the British Government until the early 1990s. However, Irish-medium schools, known as ''gaelscoileanna'', had already been founded in Belfast and Derry, and an Irish-language newspaper called ''Lá'' ('day') was established in Belfast. BBC BBC Radio Ulster began broadcasting a nightly half-hour programme in Irish in the early 1980s called ''Blas'' ('taste', 'accent'), 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 continued to ridicule it as a 'leprechaun language'.
Ulster Scots language, promoted by some loyalists, was, in turn, ridiculed by nationalists as 'a DIY language for Orangemen'.
Irish received official recognition in Northern Ireland for the first time in 1998 under the Belfast Agreement. A cross-border body known as ''Foras na Gaeilge'' was established to promote the language in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, taking over the functions of ''Bord na Gaeilge''.
The UK government has ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in respect to Irish in Northern Ireland.
It has been claimed that Belfast now represents the fastest growing centre of Irish language usage on the island - and the Good Friday Agreement's provisions on "parity of esteem" have been used to give the language an official status in the North. In March 2005, the Irish language TV service TG4 began broadcasting from the Divis transmitter near Belfast, as a result of agreement between the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Northern Ireland Office.
==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 by the Irish Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, only one quarter of households in Gaeltacht areas possess a fluency in Irish. 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.
The [http://www.usenglish.org/foundation U.S. English Foundation] has published analyses of the United States Census 2000, and states that 25,870 US residents [http://www.usenglish.org/foundation/research/lia/languages/irish_gaelic.pdf speak the Irish language at home (pdf file)].
Microsoft has worked with the Irish government and various Irish education bodies to enable the use of the Irish language in their products. [http://office.microsoft.com/search/redir.aspx?AssetID=XT011000641033&CTT=5 An Irish spell checker] is available for Microsoft Office XP, and an Irish Language Interface Pack for Windows XP has been [http://archives.tcm.ie/thekingdom/2004/07/15/story14065.asp announced].
==See also==
* Differences between Scottish Gaelic and Irish
* Irish dialects
* Irish initial mutations
* Irish morphology
* Irish orthography
* Irish phonology
* Irish syntax
* Irish words used in the English language
* Modern literature in Irish
* Place names in Irish
* List of Irish given names
* Common phrases in different languages
* Non-native pronunciations of English
* List of Ireland-related topics
* Céad míle fáilte
* Newfoundland Irish
== External links ==
*[http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaeilge/gaeilge.html Gaeilge ar an ghréasán Irish online recources]
*[http://www.bnag.ie Foras na Gaeilge]
*[http://www.daltai.com Irish Language Information and Resources]
*[http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=gle ISO 639 language code GLE]
*[http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Irish-english/ Irish - English Dictionary]
*[http://www.ceantar.org/Dicts/search.html Gaelic Dictionaries]
*[http://nualeargais.ie/gnag/gram.htm Braesicke's Gramadach na Gaeilge (Engl. translation)]
===Northern Ireland===
* [http://www.cinni.org/ultach/ Ultach Trust]
* [http://www.nuacht.com Lá]
* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland/irish/ BBC Northern Ireland Irish language]
Irish language
Goidelic languages
Irish culture
Languages of Ireland
Languages in the United Kingdom
Junior Certificate subjects
ga:Gaeilge
kw:Yeth Iwerdhonek
la:Gaëlicum Hibernicum
li:Iers
== Gaelic == I changed the mention of how the Irish language is not usually called gaelic because it can be mixed up with a variant of the language spoken in Scotland. The previous wording could have infuriated Irish language speakers by implying that the language ''could'' not be called gaelic because of the scottish version, which implicitly suggested the scottish version had 'first call' on the name. Such a claim (and it probably wasn't intentional) would have been like a red rag to a bull in terms of inflaming Irish gaelic speakers. I've toned it down somewhat to give a more accurate explanation why people call the language 'Irish' rather than gaelic in general discourse. :For what it's worth, though it is spelled "gaelic" in English whether referring to Scots or Irish gaelic, Scots gaelic is pronounced "gall-ic" (rhyming with "shall") and Irish gaelic is pronounced "gay-lic". At any rate, once mangled into a more British accent. PML. == Pronunciation and spelling of RTE == Just a note to say that ''ch'' is pronounced like the Greek χ, rather than a hard 'k' - most people would be familiar with the Scottish example ''loch'' User:Jimregan 13:31 Apr 26, 2003 (UTC) Please Note Well - RTÉ is spelt "Radio Telifís Éireann," not "Raidió Teilifís Éireann," in real life. These spellings do indeed go against modern stardardised versions, but I have checked this directly with RTÉ, which itself predates standardisation. ''Please'' do not change the version as included in the "Irish words commonly used in English" section. -- User:Kwekubo :It is ''Radio Telefís Éireann'' not ''Telifís'' but the word does not seem to occur in the article anyway. == Shelta == Some mentions should be made of Shelta language, the Irish Traveller's cant based on Irish. I just don't know how to fit it in this long article. User:Rmhermen 04:41 13 Jun 2003 (UTC) * Shelta_language (also called Gammon, or simply Cant), has an article. It's similarities to Irish are, as far as I understand, in the language's juxtapositioning of letters in Irish words - ''rodas'' (door) for ''doras'', ''laicín'' (girl) for ''cailín'', and so on. --- User:Kwekubo == Concern for the language among Irish == From the article: :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 monumental scale. This might be the politically correct thing to say, but is it actually true? Do people really care ''enough'' that they are prepared to ''do'' anything about it?--User:Robert Merkel 00:44 19 Jul 2003 (UTC) From what I can see, yes. Opinions polls have asked people about their attitudes towards Irish. Many admit to hating it because of the way it was taught, but would be horrified if it was lost. Kids in the tens of thousands are sent to all Irish-speaking schools and to the Gaeltacht to learn the language, while almost on principle because of their experience of it, the parents sending the kids don't speak the language even if they actually have a degree of fluency. And most people ''want'' the Irish language TV station, TG4 to survive through they don't actually watch it. So people don't want the language to go, but themselves don't want to use it, usually as a reaction to the bullying "by God I'm going to make you speak it" style of teaching they experienced at the hands of the language fanatics. User:Jtdirl 01:48 19 Jul 2003 (UTC) :Yeah, that rings true to me. From what I remember of school though, most people hated Irish for the same reasons that people of my father's generation hated Latin - being forced to learn a "dead language". I didn't mind personally, but I really took exception to being forced to use an Irish-ised version of my name - if my parents wanted me to be called "Séamas" they would have named me that. As for the Gaeltacht summer courses; they were great, and for most people they were just a great way of making new friends - the classes were just a necessary evil. And I think TG4 will probably survive, simply because it has a better selection of films (in English) than the other three channels, and because for teenage guys, the female presenters tend to have more visual appeal :) -- User:Jimregan 01:31, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC) You should hear my name ''as gaeilge''. It is a real tongue-twister. I remember when we finished the Leaving cert, we held a ceremonial burning of ''Peig'' on a bridge and swore we'd never speak "that fucking language" again. It took me a decade to get over the school experience of it. Now, with school a distant memory and my hair greying by the day (jeez, that makes me sound old, I'm only in my mid 30s, but in the last six months, they grey has been multiplying. I even went blond to see would it be less noticeable than in my 'normal' brown!) I have now forgiven Irish all the headaches it have me and am back caring about the language again and wishing I could speak it again. (Just a thought. I've been going grey for six months. I've been on wiki for just over six months . . . connection??? :-) ) Slan leat. User:Jtdirl 01:45, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC) :''Peig'' was before my time :) The Séamas thing really got to me, especially at the Gaeltacht. It quickly got exaggerated into "Haaaaymwish" and then, inexplicably, into "Haybob". Which caught on. Grr. I actually joined the Irish Society in college, though mainly because a friend started it, and needed support. The only meeting I attended featured about 4 students, all friends of mine, and about 10 members of staff, including the director of the college, who was trying to get us to take part in a céilidh - the last time I'd been at one was in the Gaeltacht, where we spent most of the time trying to hide, to avoid dancing, apart from the 5 facing 5 thing (not Walls of Limerick... umm... dammit!) - there's a part where the couple at the bottom end go through the other couple's arched arms, and we took the opportunity to kick seven shades of shite out of each other. Ah, the memories. Makes me wish I'd written to the people I met there. Oh well. At least I've learned from it, and figured out how to keep in touch with people - so the Gaeltacht taught me something! (apart from the Irish word for sex) -- User:Jimregan 00:55, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC) == Translation of greeting == Question: "A Chara" is defined as "A friend" (used as salutation to a letter). "Is Mise le Meas" is the ending of a letter but not defined. What mean? User: Mikehill55@AOL.Com 26 Sep 2003 :Basically "Yours faithfully". "Is mise" means "It's me" or "I am", "le meas" means "with thought", it's implied that the person writing is thinking about the recipient. I hope that was too much information :) -- User:Jimregan 00:55, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC) :"Le meas" here means "with respect". User:Meabhar 21:37, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC) :Actually, "A Chara" does not mean "A friend" but simply "Friend" - the "A" puts it in the vocative case, which is what you use when calling someone. re ''Is mise le meas'' - a humourous anecdote. In the Dublin-West by-election in 1982, the odds on favourite, Eileen Lemass, dramatically failed to win the seat. Part of the reason was a remarkable campaign run by the opposition Fine Gael party's campaign manager, Jim Mitchell. But she also lost hundreds of crucial votes because hundreds of letters had been sent out to social welfare recipients reducing their social welfare entitlements and signed by the writer ''Is Mise le Meas''. Many of those who received the letters thought they read ''Mrs. Lemass'' and blamed her personally for the cutbacks which had nothing to do with her, though they were the work of her party of government, just disastrously timed in the run-up to a sudden by-election that the government ''had'' to win. So poor Eileen was faced with irate voters all over the gaelic version of 'yours sincerely'! User:Jtdirl 19:21, 1 Nov 2003 (UTC) == Irish as a Slavic language? == Why is ther not a section on where the Irish language came from? The only mention that I saw, was about it being a slavic language. :What??? Where on Earth does it say that Irish is a Slavic language? I'll give you the decendance here: Indo-European family, Celto-Italic branch; Celtic languages; Goidelic family; Irish language. ::I was making reference to this from the page "In Irish, as in many Slavonic languages such as Russian, all consonants are either palatalised, soft..." which seems to imply that Irish Gaelic is Slavonic (?Different from slavic?). You seem to be knowledgeable about etymology. Could you possibly write a section about this, and correct the error if it is one ? ::-catskul :::Here's a passage from [http://www.gutenberg.net/1/2/1/1/12111/12111-h/12111-h.htm#T25 "The Glories of Ireland"], "Irish Language and Letters", by Douglas Hyde (this text is public domain in the US, but it isn't here in Ireland) : ::::"For centuries the Irish and their language were regarded by the English as something strange and foreign to Europe. It was not recognized that they had any relationship with the Greeks or Romans, the French, the Germans, or the English. The once well-known statesman, Lord Lyndhurst, in the British parliament denounced the Irish as aliens in religion, in blood, and in language. Bopp, in his great Comparative Grammar, refused them recognition as Indo-Europeans, and Pott in 1856 also denied their European connection. It was left for the great Bavarian scholar, John Caspar Zeuss, to prove to the world in his epoch-making "Grammatica Celtica" (published in Latin in 1853) that the Celts were really Indo-Europeans, and that their language was of the highest possible value and interest. From that day to the present it is safe to say that the value set upon the Irish language and literature has been steadily growing amongst the scholars of the world, and that in the domain of philology Old Irish now ranks close to Sanscrit for its truly marvellous and complicated scheme of word-forms and inflections, and its whole verbal system. ::::"The exact place which the Celtic languages (of which Irish is philologically far the most important) hold in the Indo-European group has often been discussed. It is now generally agreed upon that, although both the Celtic and Teutonic languages may claim a certain kinship with each other as being both of them Indo-European, still the Celtic is much more nearly related to the Greek and the Latin groups, especially to the Latin. ::::"All the Indo-European languages are more or less related to one another. We Irish must acknowledge a relationship, or rather a very distant connecting tie, with English. But, to trace this home, Irish must be followed back to the very oldest form of its words, and English must be followed back to Anglo-Saxon and when possible to Gothic. The hard mutes (p, t, c) of Celtic (and, for that matter, of Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Lithuanian) will be represented in Gothic by the corresponding soft mutes (b, d, g), and the soft mutes in Celtic by the corresponding, hard mutes in Gothic. Thus we find the Irish dia (god) in the Anglo-Saxon tiw, the god of war, whose name is perpetuated for all time in Tiwes-däg, now "Tuesday", and we find the Irish déad in the Anglo-Saxon "toth", now "tooth", and so on. But of all the Indo-European languages Old Irish possesses by far the nearest affinity to Latin, and this is shown in a great many ways, not in the vocabulary merely, but in the grammar, which for philologists is of far more importance,—as, for example, the b-future, the passive in-r, the genitive singular and nominative plural of "o stems", etc. Thus the Old Irish for "man", nom. fer, gen. fir, dat. fiur, acc. fer n—, plur. nom. fir, gen. fer n—, is derived from the older forms viros, viri, viro, viron, nom. plur. viri, gen. plur. viron, which everyone who knows Latin can see at a glance correspond very closely to the Latin inflections, vir, viri, viro, virum, nom. plur. viri, etc." :::HTH -- User:Jimregan 20:51, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC) == Connacht Irish as standard == "Connacht Irish is in many respects the most standard kind of Irish" Is that true? I always thought that the standardised form of Irish was most like Munster Irish. User:Markcollinsx 16:13, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC) :That's the thing about standards - you normally get a few to choose from :) -- User:Jimregan 20:51, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC) ::Modern Irish tends to refer to the decisions and the results of a standardisation from the mid-20th Century, known as "an Chaighdeán Oifigiúil", or "the Official Standard." It is mostly based on Connacht Irish, with a smattering of Munster, and the random murder of dative cases, old spellings and forms, as well as a simplification of verbs. It is associated in the Irish-speaking areas (or should I say former Irish speaking areas, and the minuscule pockets of extant Gaeltachtaí), with "Dublin Irish", something that no native really 'dug.' Also, around the same time the script was changed from a Gaelic script, based on latin letters, to a simple Latin script. Which led to some ill-feeling in the occasional reader, but now most of us accept the script, and much but certainly not all the grammatical changes. User:Meabhar 21:37, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC) == Gaelic Revival == Does anyone agree that the historical revival of the language shoul be put in the article Gaelic Revival rather than the main article Irish language? and keep the article purely about the languages non-historic characterstics? User:Djegan 10:37, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC) == Irish the third oldest written language? == Third oldest written language after Latin and Greek??? When Latin and ancient Greek were still spoken nobody was writing in Irish. Third oldest spoken European language maybe. :Again, from "Irish Language and Letters" (see above): ::"Of all these [Celtic] languages Irish is the best preserved, and it is possible to follow its written literature back into the past for some thirteen hundred years; while much of the most interesting matter has come down to us from pagan times. It has left behind it the longest, the most luminous, and the most consecutive literary track of any of the vernacular languages of Europe, except Greek alone." :and ::"The oldest alphabet used in Ireland of which remains exist appears to have been the Ogam, which is found in numbers of stone inscriptions dating from about the third century of our era on. About 300 such inscriptions have already been found, most of them in the southwest of Ireland, but some also in Scotland and Wales, and even in Devon and Cornwall. Wherever the Irish Gael planted a colony, he seems to have brought his Ogam writing with him." :See Ogham -- User:Jimregan 20:51, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC) :::Strictly speaking, a few Germanic languages came earlier(there are Runes stretching back into the beginning of the first millenium, but they're not particularly interesting). There are also scattered languages which are now extinct(Various celtic languages, Etruscan, Old Italic languages). If you don't mind, I'll change it to 'The second oldest surviving language with written texts of a reasonable length'. ::::I wouldn't even stretch it to that; I should have made it clear, but I was just trying to provide evidence for the idea that it's the third oldest written language. -- User:Jimregan 03:16, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC) Another ''dos centavos'' on this statement—wouldn't persons literate in the Chinese language or, say, the Hebrew language have something to say in this matter? :) --User:Ryanaxp 17:55, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC) == Cupla focal == I have heard that ''cupla focal'' ("couple of words") is a term used for ceremonial use of Irish. The speaker salutes or says something in Irish and then goes on with an English speech. Is it so? :No, I wouldn't call that a term as such. It's just that ::It's used regularly in English to describe someone who has some Irish, but is not a native speaker. Or for use the occasional use of Irish in conversation. as in "He is a great man for the ''cupla focal''. User:Filiocht | User talk:Filiocht 09:03, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC) == Status in the European Union == What is the status of Irish in the EU? Is Irish interpretation or translition provided by the European institutions? :Irish is a Treaty language, which means that high level legislation has to be provided; I think Irish has no other status in the EU, though this is only because no Irish government has insisted upon it. User:Evertype 17:27, 2004 Jul 4 (UTC) ::It also means that one can write to EU institutions in Irish and expect a response in the same language. And Eamon Ó Cuiv, the minister with responsibility for Irish, has seen a request submitted to the EU that Irish be made a full working language. The treaty language concept was more or less created for the case of Irish because the government didn't insist upon it bein made fully official when Ireland joined the EEC. --User:Kwekubo 23:56, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC) == Consistent Style == It would be nice if all the Irish was italic and the English translations of the examples was in quotes. It's a bit of both at the moment. Some IPA/SAMPA would be good too. I might even ''do'' some of this. :) User:Moilleadóir 00:44, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC) == Optimistic estimate of number of speakers? == Hate to say this, but ceapaim go bhfuil nios lu na 40,000 daoine sa tir ag baint usaid as an Gaeilge gach la. The figure for the number of people that use Irish daily needs to be revised downwards (I've seen recent figures of about 15-25,000, tops.) --User:Ce garcon 06:28, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC) :According to the Central Statistics Office (Ireland) there are 1,570,894 [http://www.cso.ie/statistics/irishspeakerssince1861.htm] irish speaking people in the state, may be this figure is grossly inflated but should it not be inclued as a fact? --User:Happy ga 14:26, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) :: It would be interesting to see what the criteria are used on the census as it appears just to be a matter of deciding weither or not you wish to tick a box, and could be that simple to define yourself as "Irish speaker". Thus as this type of ability is a attribute rather than a variable, and these things are difficult to measure in absolute terms in a meaningful way (i.e. breath of use, grammer, knowledge, expression,... as venacular are the only meaning full things) and any such figures should be taken as a pinch of salt. To be balanced their seams to be an endless que of people who claim to speak or have knowledge of Irish - in reality on and economic and social level the language is rarely used as a living language, in my experience. User:Djegan 18:00, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) == POV or not? == The following sentence was removed as POV, and then restored as "the universal view of academics", which seems very unlikely to me. :''In contrast to English as spoken in England, Hiberno-English offers a greater range of expression.'' If someone can provide a source of a single linguist making this claim in a peer-reviewed publication, we can put it back in as ''that academic's'' view (but certainly not "the universal view"). Otherwise it should not be included. --User:Angr/User_talk:Angr 04:44, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC) :Seems unlikely to me too, unless in the trivial sense that any dialect can be seen as supplemental to any given speaker's idiolect, and thus more providing extra expressivity. (And it's a fuzzy issue, I sometimes get confused as to where "Scots" stops and where "Scottish English" begins, likewise I'm sure the odd Cork/HEism is sneaking in there too (so).) User:Alai 07:10, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC) It is perfectly correct. Read Terence Dolan's ''A Dictionary of Hiberno-English'' for evidence. The Irish language had many more words for something than is found in modern English. (Many of the variables that used to exist in Old English have dropped out of usage, making modern British English quite restrictive linguistically.) Hiberno-English combines the greater variation in Irish words, suitably anglicised, with modern English expressions, and also with some surviving from Old English. Some Hiberno-Englishisms have now made it into British English (for example, ''galore'', from the Irish ''go leor'') but the nature, complexity and range of alternative expressions available in HE make Ireland the preferred location ahead of England for foreigners to come to learn English. For example, whereas BE has the word ''idiot'' HE has ''idiot'' and ''ejjit'' (with the latter being in effect a 'complete idiot'). Indeed it can be made stronger by calling someone a "right eejit'' which manages both to call someone and idiot and add a note of distain, contempt, sarcasm and ridicule that the BE word ''idiot' doesn't come close to mirroring. For example someone who left a car, unlocked, with its keys in it, in an area where there was a crime wave, and had it nicked, could be slated, sarcastically as "he was a right ejjit to do that". Other examples include adding the suffix ''een'' to a word to further stress the word. So a small girl can be called a ''girleen''. Some HE terms are direct translations from Irish, and directly disobey linguistic structure in BE. For example, ''I do be here every day'', through wrong in BE, is right in HE. It is a direct translation of the Irish phrase ''Bím anseo gach lá. Another example is the word ''bowsie'', meaning a 'quarrelsome drunk' or sometimes a 'right bastard'. Writers famous for their use of HE are Roddy Doyle, Sean O'Casey and James Joyce. Fear''ÉIREANN''\user_talk:Jtdirl 15:26, 26 May 2005 (UTC) == Irish-speaking communities in Argentina and Canada? == Can anyone confirm that, as stated in the info box, there is a small ''community'' of Irish speakers in Argentina? I've never heard this and suspect someone was confusing Irish with Welsh. I don't doubt there are people in Argentina who can speak Irish, but that's not the same thing as a community of speakers. --User:Angr/User_talk:Angr 08:45, 24 May 2005 (UTC) ---- I have the same question about Newfoundland. Can anyone tell me which towns had Irish speaking communities? User:IrishHermit 03:35, 26 May 2005 (UTC) ---- The Irish language in Newfoundland was (and is to a lesser degree) primarily spoken in towns along the Irish shore of the Avalon Peninsula, namely Ballyhack, St. Bride's, Trepassey, Ferryland, Patrick's Cove, St. Mary's and Skibereen. User:Jcmurphy 03:35, 11 June 2005 (UTC) ---- Indeed, as far as my search can determine there were never any communities of Irish speakers known in either Argentina or Newfoundland (other than perhaps modern-day learners of Irish as a secondary language), and the assertion that there were such communities is probably an erroneous crossover from Welsh. In my editing of this article today I removed these assertions accordingly. --User:Ryanaxp 17:48, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC) ---- The Irish language was historically spoken in parts of the Irish shore of Newfoundland in the early 20th century, and is still sporken by a small percentage of the population. See Newfoundland Irish for more info. There are no Welsh speakers in all of Newfoundland. --User:Bmpower 17:28, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC) :Quite interesting; that's a community I was never aware of. Thank you for the clarification. —User:Ryanaxp 17:36, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
===Removal of Newfoundland again===
On looking into the matter further, it seems Newfoundland does not ''currently'' have any Irish-speaking communities. The external link provided at the bottom of Newfoundland Irish simply discusses ''previous'' use of Irish in Newfoundland, but does not in any way establish such a community existing within the current century. Accordingly, I once again removed Newfoundland from the list of "spoken in" countries in the article. —User:Ryanaxp 22:27, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
:If you want to get areas wheres its -actually- spoken as a first language, and not as a con for the gaeltacht grants, you'll want to remove most of Ireland from that to. From a gaeltacht, can't speak Irish to save my life, same goes for most of my island... --User:Kiand 22:29, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
:::Mura féidir leat Gaeilge a labhairt chun do bheatha a shábháil, cén fáth a bhfuil an lipéad "ga-2" ar do lch úsáideora? ;-) --User:Angr/User_talk:Angr 06:09, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
::Sure, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish. There's little doubt a shockingly honest map of truly Irish-speaking areas in Ireland would encompass an area approximately equivalent to a few soccer fields strung together; but at least there's likely to be one or two old codgers left in your "gaeltacht" who can jaw about the price of socks to each other in the language.
On the other hand, I doubt there's been anyone running around who speaks Newfoundland Irish for at least the past five decades, based on what I read in the article at the bottom of the page. —User:Ryanaxp 22:42, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC) == EU == Since Irish has been made an officail working lang should the eu be listed in the box of offical Langs. --User:Happy ga 13:04, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC) :Which box? On this page, or on an EU page elsewhere? User:Evertype 17:29, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)
Irish language (''Gaeilge'') is a Goidelic languages spoken in Ireland. The language is sometimes referred to in English as ''Gaelic'' (International Phonetic Alphabet ), ''Irish Gaelic'', or ''Erse'', but is more generally referred to in Ireland as the Irish language or simply Irish. Goidelic languages Irish culture
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Words begining with Irish_language:
Irish_language
Irish_language
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Irish_language_in_Northern_Ireland
Irish language
Irish (''Gaeilge'' in Irish) is a Goidelic languages spoken in Ireland and constitutionally recognised as the first official language of the Republic of Ireland. On 13 June, 2005, EU foreign ministers unanimously decided to make Irish an official Languages_of_the_European_Union of the European Union. The new arrangements will come into effect on 1 January, 2007. The language is sometimes referred to in English language as Gaelic (International Phonetic Alphabet: ), or Irish Gaelic, but is more generally referred to in Ireland as the Irish language or simply Irish. Use of the term ''Irish'' also avoids confusion with Scottish Gaelic language (''Gàidhlig na h-Alba''), the closely-related language spoken in Scotland and usually referred to in English as simply ''Gaelic'' (IPA: ). The archaic term Erse, originally a Scots language form of the word ''Irish'', is no longer used and in most contexts is considered derogatory. ==Official status== Irish is given recognition by the Constitution of Ireland as the first official language of the Republic of Ireland (with English being a second official language), despite the limited distribution of fluency among the population of that country. Since the State was founded in the 1920s as the Irish Free State (see also ''History of the Republic of Ireland''), the Irish Government required a degree of proficiency in Irish for all civil service positions, such as postal workers (note: proficiency in Irish for entrance to the public service ceased to be a compulsory requirement in 1974); and also the wider public service such as teaching and policing and required Irish be a required subject of study in all schools within the Republic which receive public money (see also ''Education in the Republic of Ireland''). Most official documents of the Irish Government are published in both Irish and English. As a treaty language of the European Union, the highest-level documents of the EU are translated into Irish; in addition, the language has also recently received a degree of Irish language in Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, under the Belfast Agreement. Furthermore, Irish will become an official working language of the European Union beginning January 1, 2007. ==Gaeltachtaí== There are pockets of Ireland where Irish is spoken as a traditional, native language. These regions are known as Gaeltacht (sing. ''Gaeltacht''). The most populous gaeltachts are in Connemara (''Conamara''), including the Aran Islands (''Oileáin Árann'') in County Galway (''Contae na Gaillimhe''); on the west coast of County Donegal (''Contae Dhún na nGall''; in the part which is known as ''Tír Chonaill''); and the Dingle peninsula (''Corca Dhuibhne'') in County Kerry (''Contae Chiarraí''). Smaller ones also exist in County Mayo (''Contae Mhaigh Eo''), County Meath (''Contae na Mí''), County Waterford (''Contae Phort Láirge''), and County Cork (''Contae Chorcaí''). However, even within the Gaeltacht areas, the Irish-speaking populations have declined since the Gaeltacht boundaries were drawn up. The numerically and socially strongest ''Gaeltachtaí'' are those of Connemara and ''Tír Chonaill'', in which a significant proportion of residents use Irish as a community language and in which children often speak the language among each other. The highest concentrations of Irish speakers are found in Ros Muc, Connemara, and around Bloody Foreland (''Cnoc na Fola'') in ''Tír Chonaill''. ==Dialects== ''See main article Irish dialects.'' There are a number of distinct dialects of Irish. Roughly speaking, the three major dialect areas coincide with the provinces of Munster (''Cúige Mumhan''), Connacht (''Cúige Chonnacht'') and Ulster (''Cúige Uladh''). ===Munster dialects=== Munster Irish is spoken in the Gaeltachtaí of Kerry (''Contae Chiarraí''), Muskerry (''Múscraí''), Cape Clear (''Oileán Cléire'') in the western part of County Cork (''Contae Chorcaí''), and the tiny pocket of Irish-speakers in An Rinn 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. Some typical features of Munster Irish are: # 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"). "I was and you were" is ''Bhíos agus bhís'' in Munster but ''Bhí mé agus bhí tú'' in other dialects. # In front of nasals and "ll" some short vowels are lengthened while other are diphthongised. # A copula-construction involving ''is ea'' is frequently used. ===Connacht dialects=== The strongest dialect of Connacht Irish is to be found in Connemara and the Aran Islands. In some regards this dialect is quite different from general Connacht Irish but since most Connacht dialects have died out during the last century Connemara Irish is sometimes seen as Connacht Irish. Much closer to the traditional Connacht Irish is the very threatened dialect spoken in the region on the border between Galway (''Gaillimh'') and Mayo (''Maigh Eo''). The Irish of Tourmakeady (''Tuar Mhic Éadaigh'') in southern Mayo (''Maigh Eo Theas'') and Joyce Country (''Dúthaigh Sheoige'') are considered the living Irish dialects closest to Middle Irish. Also, the northern Mayo dialect of Erris (''Iorras'') and Achill (''Acaill'') is in grammar and word-building essentially a Connacht dialect; but shows an affinity in vocabulary with Ulster Irish, due to large-scale immigration of dispossessed people following the Ulster Plantation. Connemara Irish is very popular with learners, thanks to Mícheál Ó Siadhail's self-teaching textbook ''Learning Irish''. However, there are features in Connemara Irish outside the official standard—notably the preference for verbal nouns ending in -achan, such as ''lagachan'' instead of ''lagú'', "weakening". The non-standard pronunciation with lengthened vowels and heavily reduced endings give Connemara Irish its distinct sound. ===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. This dialect is essentially the same as that in Gweedore (''Gaoth Dobhair''= Inlet of Streaming Water), the same dialect used by native speaker Enya (''Eithne'') and her siblings in Clannad (''Clann as Dobhar'' = Family from the Water). Ulster Irish sounds very different and shares several unusual features with Scottish Gaelic, as well as having lots of characteristic words and shades of meanings. However, since the demise of those Irish dialects spoken natively in what is today Northern Ireland, it is probably an exaggeration to see Ulster Irish as an intermediary form between Scottish Gaelic and the southern and western dialects of Irish. Indeed, Scottish Gaelic does have lots of non-Ulster features in common with Munster Irish, too. One noticeable trait of Ulster Irish is the use of the negative participle ''cha(n)'', in place of the Munster and Connaught version ''ní''. Even in Ulster, ''cha(n)'', most typical of Scottish Gaelic, has ousted the more common ''ní'' only in easternmost dialects (including the now defunct ones once spoken in what is now Northern Ireland). The practice seems to be that ''cha(n)'' is most usually used when answering to a statement, either confirming a negative statement (''Níl aon mhaith ann'' - ''Chan fhuil, leoga'' = "It is no good" - "Indeed it isn't") or contesting an affirmative one (''Tá sé go maith'' - ''Chan fhuil!'' = "It is good" - "No, it isn't!"), while ''ní'' is preferred in answering a question (''An bhfuil aon mhaith ann?'' - ''Níl'' = "Is it any good?" - "No"). ===Other regions=== The extant dialects of Irish native to Leinster, the fourth province of Ireland, became extinct during the 20th century, but records of some of these were made by the Irish Folklore Commission among other bodies prior to this. The present-day Irish of Meath (in Leinster) 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 1930s, after a land reform campaign spearheaded by Máirtín Ó Cadhain (subsequently one of the greatest modernist writers 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?": * Ulster: ''cad é mar atá tú?'' ("what is it as you are?" Note: ''caidé'' or ''goidé'' are alternative renderings of ''cad é'') * Connacht: ''cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?'' ("what way [is it] that you are?") * Munster: ''conas taoí?'' ("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) 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. ==Shelta== There also exists a Cant (language) called Shelta, based partly on English language and partly Irish, in use by the Irish Travellers. ==Linguistic Structure== The most unfamiliar features of the language are the orthography, the initial consonant mutations, the Verb Subject Object word order, and the use of two different forms for "to be". However, initial mutations are found in other Celtic languages as well as in some Italian language and Sardinian dialects, as an independent development. They are also found in some West African languages. ===Syntax=== ''See main article Irish syntax'' One aspect of Irish syntax that is unfamiliar to speakers of other languages is the use of the copula (known in Irish as ''an chopail''). The copula is used to describe what or who someone is, as opposed to how and where. This has been likened to the difference between the verbs ''ser'' and ''estar'' in Spanish language and Portuguese language, although this is only a rough approximation. The copula, which in the present tense is ''is'', is usually demonstrative: :''Is fear é.'' "It is a man." :''Is Sasanaigh iad.'' "They're English." When saying "this is", or "that is", ''seo'' and ''sin'' are used: :''Seo í mo mháthair.'' "This is my mother." :''Sin é an muinteoir.'' "That's the teacher." One can also add "that is in him/her", especially when using an adjective, when it is desired to emphasise the quality: :''Is fear láidir atá ann.'' "He's a strong man." :(Literally: "It is a strong man that is there.") :''Is cailín álainn atá inti.'' "She's a beautiful girl." :(Literally: "It is a beautiful girl that is in her.") This sometimes appears in Hiberno-English, either translated literally as "that is in it", or as "so it is". ===Morphology=== ''See main articles Irish morphology, Irish nominals, and Irish verbs.'' Another feature of Irish grammar that is shared with other Celtic languages is the use of prepositional pronouns. For example, the word for "at" is ''ag'', which combines with the pronoun "me" (which is ''mé''), to form agam "at me". This is used with the verb ''bi'' ("to be"), to form the closest equivalent of the verb "to have".
| ''Tá leabhar agam.'' | (''ag'' + ''mé'') | "I have a book." |
| ''Tá deoch agat.'' | (''ag'' + ''tú'') | "You have a drink." |
| ''Tá ríomhaire aige.'' | (''ag'' + ''é'') | "He has a computer." |
| ''Tá páiste aici.'' | (''ag'' + ''í'') | "She has a child." |
| ''Tá carr againn.'' | (''ag'' + ''sinn'') | "We have a car." |
| ''Tá teach agaibh.'' | (''ag'' + ''sibh'') | "You (plural) have a house." |
| ''Tá airgead acu'' | (''ag'' + ''iad'') | "They have money." |
| ''Ur levr zo ganin'' | "I have a book." |
| ''Ur banne zo ganit'' | "You have a drink." |
| ''Un urzhiater zo ganti'' | "He has a computer." |
| ''Ur bugel zo gantañ'' | "She has a child." |
| ''Ur c'harr zo ganomp'' | "We have a car." |
| ''Un ti zo '''ganeoc'h''''' | "You (plural) have a house." |
| ''Arc'hant zo ganto'' | "They have money." |
Irish language
== Gaelic == I changed the mention of how the Irish language is not usually called gaelic because it can be mixed up with a variant of the language spoken in Scotland. The previous wording could have infuriated Irish language speakers by implying that the language ''could'' not be called gaelic because of the scottish version, which implicitly suggested the scottish version had 'first call' on the name. Such a claim (and it probably wasn't intentional) would have been like a red rag to a bull in terms of inflaming Irish gaelic speakers. I've toned it down somewhat to give a more accurate explanation why people call the language 'Irish' rather than gaelic in general discourse. :For what it's worth, though it is spelled "gaelic" in English whether referring to Scots or Irish gaelic, Scots gaelic is pronounced "gall-ic" (rhyming with "shall") and Irish gaelic is pronounced "gay-lic". At any rate, once mangled into a more British accent. PML. == Pronunciation and spelling of RTE == Just a note to say that ''ch'' is pronounced like the Greek χ, rather than a hard 'k' - most people would be familiar with the Scottish example ''loch'' User:Jimregan 13:31 Apr 26, 2003 (UTC) Please Note Well - RTÉ is spelt "Radio Telifís Éireann," not "Raidió Teilifís Éireann," in real life. These spellings do indeed go against modern stardardised versions, but I have checked this directly with RTÉ, which itself predates standardisation. ''Please'' do not change the version as included in the "Irish words commonly used in English" section. -- User:Kwekubo :It is ''Radio Telefís Éireann'' not ''Telifís'' but the word does not seem to occur in the article anyway. == Shelta == Some mentions should be made of Shelta language, the Irish Traveller's cant based on Irish. I just don't know how to fit it in this long article. User:Rmhermen 04:41 13 Jun 2003 (UTC) * Shelta_language (also called Gammon, or simply Cant), has an article. It's similarities to Irish are, as far as I understand, in the language's juxtapositioning of letters in Irish words - ''rodas'' (door) for ''doras'', ''laicín'' (girl) for ''cailín'', and so on. --- User:Kwekubo == Concern for the language among Irish == From the article: :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 monumental scale. This might be the politically correct thing to say, but is it actually true? Do people really care ''enough'' that they are prepared to ''do'' anything about it?--User:Robert Merkel 00:44 19 Jul 2003 (UTC) From what I can see, yes. Opinions polls have asked people about their attitudes towards Irish. Many admit to hating it because of the way it was taught, but would be horrified if it was lost. Kids in the tens of thousands are sent to all Irish-speaking schools and to the Gaeltacht to learn the language, while almost on principle because of their experience of it, the parents sending the kids don't speak the language even if they actually have a degree of fluency. And most people ''want'' the Irish language TV station, TG4 to survive through they don't actually watch it. So people don't want the language to go, but themselves don't want to use it, usually as a reaction to the bullying "by God I'm going to make you speak it" style of teaching they experienced at the hands of the language fanatics. User:Jtdirl 01:48 19 Jul 2003 (UTC) :Yeah, that rings true to me. From what I remember of school though, most people hated Irish for the same reasons that people of my father's generation hated Latin - being forced to learn a "dead language". I didn't mind personally, but I really took exception to being forced to use an Irish-ised version of my name - if my parents wanted me to be called "Séamas" they would have named me that. As for the Gaeltacht summer courses; they were great, and for most people they were just a great way of making new friends - the classes were just a necessary evil. And I think TG4 will probably survive, simply because it has a better selection of films (in English) than the other three channels, and because for teenage guys, the female presenters tend to have more visual appeal :) -- User:Jimregan 01:31, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC) You should hear my name ''as gaeilge''. It is a real tongue-twister. I remember when we finished the Leaving cert, we held a ceremonial burning of ''Peig'' on a bridge and swore we'd never speak "that fucking language" again. It took me a decade to get over the school experience of it. Now, with school a distant memory and my hair greying by the day (jeez, that makes me sound old, I'm only in my mid 30s, but in the last six months, they grey has been multiplying. I even went blond to see would it be less noticeable than in my 'normal' brown!) I have now forgiven Irish all the headaches it have me and am back caring about the language again and wishing I could speak it again. (Just a thought. I've been going grey for six months. I've been on wiki for just over six months . . . connection??? :-) ) Slan leat. User:Jtdirl 01:45, 28 Aug 2003 (UTC) :''Peig'' was before my time :) The Séamas thing really got to me, especially at the Gaeltacht. It quickly got exaggerated into "Haaaaymwish" and then, inexplicably, into "Haybob". Which caught on. Grr. I actually joined the Irish Society in college, though mainly because a friend started it, and needed support. The only meeting I attended featured about 4 students, all friends of mine, and about 10 members of staff, including the director of the college, who was trying to get us to take part in a céilidh - the last time I'd been at one was in the Gaeltacht, where we spent most of the time trying to hide, to avoid dancing, apart from the 5 facing 5 thing (not Walls of Limerick... umm... dammit!) - there's a part where the couple at the bottom end go through the other couple's arched arms, and we took the opportunity to kick seven shades of shite out of each other. Ah, the memories. Makes me wish I'd written to the people I met there. Oh well. At least I've learned from it, and figured out how to keep in touch with people - so the Gaeltacht taught me something! (apart from the Irish word for sex) -- User:Jimregan 00:55, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC) == Translation of greeting == Question: "A Chara" is defined as "A friend" (used as salutation to a letter). "Is Mise le Meas" is the ending of a letter but not defined. What mean? User: Mikehill55@AOL.Com 26 Sep 2003 :Basically "Yours faithfully". "Is mise" means "It's me" or "I am", "le meas" means "with thought", it's implied that the person writing is thinking about the recipient. I hope that was too much information :) -- User:Jimregan 00:55, 1 Oct 2003 (UTC) :"Le meas" here means "with respect". User:Meabhar 21:37, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC) :Actually, "A Chara" does not mean "A friend" but simply "Friend" - the "A" puts it in the vocative case, which is what you use when calling someone. re ''Is mise le meas'' - a humourous anecdote. In the Dublin-West by-election in 1982, the odds on favourite, Eileen Lemass, dramatically failed to win the seat. Part of the reason was a remarkable campaign run by the opposition Fine Gael party's campaign manager, Jim Mitchell. But she also lost hundreds of crucial votes because hundreds of letters had been sent out to social welfare recipients reducing their social welfare entitlements and signed by the writer ''Is Mise le Meas''. Many of those who received the letters thought they read ''Mrs. Lemass'' and blamed her personally for the cutbacks which had nothing to do with her, though they were the work of her party of government, just disastrously timed in the run-up to a sudden by-election that the government ''had'' to win. So poor Eileen was faced with irate voters all over the gaelic version of 'yours sincerely'! User:Jtdirl 19:21, 1 Nov 2003 (UTC) == Irish as a Slavic language? == Why is ther not a section on where the Irish language came from? The only mention that I saw, was about it being a slavic language. :What??? Where on Earth does it say that Irish is a Slavic language? I'll give you the decendance here: Indo-European family, Celto-Italic branch; Celtic languages; Goidelic family; Irish language. ::I was making reference to this from the page "In Irish, as in many Slavonic languages such as Russian, all consonants are either palatalised, soft..." which seems to imply that Irish Gaelic is Slavonic (?Different from slavic?). You seem to be knowledgeable about etymology. Could you possibly write a section about this, and correct the error if it is one ? ::-catskul :::Here's a passage from [http://www.gutenberg.net/1/2/1/1/12111/12111-h/12111-h.htm#T25 "The Glories of Ireland"], "Irish Language and Letters", by Douglas Hyde (this text is public domain in the US, but it isn't here in Ireland) : ::::"For centuries the Irish and their language were regarded by the English as something strange and foreign to Europe. It was not recognized that they had any relationship with the Greeks or Romans, the French, the Germans, or the English. The once well-known statesman, Lord Lyndhurst, in the British parliament denounced the Irish as aliens in religion, in blood, and in language. Bopp, in his great Comparative Grammar, refused them recognition as Indo-Europeans, and Pott in 1856 also denied their European connection. It was left for the great Bavarian scholar, John Caspar Zeuss, to prove to the world in his epoch-making "Grammatica Celtica" (published in Latin in 1853) that the Celts were really Indo-Europeans, and that their language was of the highest possible value and interest. From that day to the present it is safe to say that the value set upon the Irish language and literature has been steadily growing amongst the scholars of the world, and that in the domain of philology Old Irish now ranks close to Sanscrit for its truly marvellous and complicated scheme of word-forms and inflections, and its whole verbal system. ::::"The exact place which the Celtic languages (of which Irish is philologically far the most important) hold in the Indo-European group has often been discussed. It is now generally agreed upon that, although both the Celtic and Teutonic languages may claim a certain kinship with each other as being both of them Indo-European, still the Celtic is much more nearly related to the Greek and the Latin groups, especially to the Latin. ::::"All the Indo-European languages are more or less related to one another. We Irish must acknowledge a relationship, or rather a very distant connecting tie, with English. But, to trace this home, Irish must be followed back to the very oldest form of its words, and English must be followed back to Anglo-Saxon and when possible to Gothic. The hard mutes (p, t, c) of Celtic (and, for that matter, of Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Lithuanian) will be represented in Gothic by the corresponding soft mutes (b, d, g), and the soft mutes in Celtic by the corresponding, hard mutes in Gothic. Thus we find the Irish dia (god) in the Anglo-Saxon tiw, the god of war, whose name is perpetuated for all time in Tiwes-däg, now "Tuesday", and we find the Irish déad in the Anglo-Saxon "toth", now "tooth", and so on. But of all the Indo-European languages Old Irish possesses by far the nearest affinity to Latin, and this is shown in a great many ways, not in the vocabulary merely, but in the grammar, which for philologists is of far more importance,—as, for example, the b-future, the passive in-r, the genitive singular and nominative plural of "o stems", etc. Thus the Old Irish for "man", nom. fer, gen. fir, dat. fiur, acc. fer n—, plur. nom. fir, gen. fer n—, is derived from the older forms viros, viri, viro, viron, nom. plur. viri, gen. plur. viron, which everyone who knows Latin can see at a glance correspond very closely to the Latin inflections, vir, viri, viro, virum, nom. plur. viri, etc." :::HTH -- User:Jimregan 20:51, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC) == Connacht Irish as standard == "Connacht Irish is in many respects the most standard kind of Irish" Is that true? I always thought that the standardised form of Irish was most like Munster Irish. User:Markcollinsx 16:13, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC) :That's the thing about standards - you normally get a few to choose from :) -- User:Jimregan 20:51, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC) ::Modern Irish tends to refer to the decisions and the results of a standardisation from the mid-20th Century, known as "an Chaighdeán Oifigiúil", or "the Official Standard." It is mostly based on Connacht Irish, with a smattering of Munster, and the random murder of dative cases, old spellings and forms, as well as a simplification of verbs. It is associated in the Irish-speaking areas (or should I say former Irish speaking areas, and the minuscule pockets of extant Gaeltachtaí), with "Dublin Irish", something that no native really 'dug.' Also, around the same time the script was changed from a Gaelic script, based on latin letters, to a simple Latin script. Which led to some ill-feeling in the occasional reader, but now most of us accept the script, and much but certainly not all the grammatical changes. User:Meabhar 21:37, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC) == Gaelic Revival == Does anyone agree that the historical revival of the language shoul be put in the article Gaelic Revival rather than the main article Irish language? and keep the article purely about the languages non-historic characterstics? User:Djegan 10:37, 28 Mar 2004 (UTC) == Irish the third oldest written language? == Third oldest written language after Latin and Greek??? When Latin and ancient Greek were still spoken nobody was writing in Irish. Third oldest spoken European language maybe. :Again, from "Irish Language and Letters" (see above): ::"Of all these [Celtic] languages Irish is the best preserved, and it is possible to follow its written literature back into the past for some thirteen hundred years; while much of the most interesting matter has come down to us from pagan times. It has left behind it the longest, the most luminous, and the most consecutive literary track of any of the vernacular languages of Europe, except Greek alone." :and ::"The oldest alphabet used in Ireland of which remains exist appears to have been the Ogam, which is found in numbers of stone inscriptions dating from about the third century of our era on. About 300 such inscriptions have already been found, most of them in the southwest of Ireland, but some also in Scotland and Wales, and even in Devon and Cornwall. Wherever the Irish Gael planted a colony, he seems to have brought his Ogam writing with him." :See Ogham -- User:Jimregan 20:51, 22 Apr 2004 (UTC) :::Strictly speaking, a few Germanic languages came earlier(there are Runes stretching back into the beginning of the first millenium, but they're not particularly interesting). There are also scattered languages which are now extinct(Various celtic languages, Etruscan, Old Italic languages). If you don't mind, I'll change it to 'The second oldest surviving language with written texts of a reasonable length'. ::::I wouldn't even stretch it to that; I should have made it clear, but I was just trying to provide evidence for the idea that it's the third oldest written language. -- User:Jimregan 03:16, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC) Another ''dos centavos'' on this statement—wouldn't persons literate in the Chinese language or, say, the Hebrew language have something to say in this matter? :) --User:Ryanaxp 17:55, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC) == Cupla focal == I have heard that ''cupla focal'' ("couple of words") is a term used for ceremonial use of Irish. The speaker salutes or says something in Irish and then goes on with an English speech. Is it so? :No, I wouldn't call that a term as such. It's just that ::It's used regularly in English to describe someone who has some Irish, but is not a native speaker. Or for use the occasional use of Irish in conversation. as in "He is a great man for the ''cupla focal''. User:Filiocht | User talk:Filiocht 09:03, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC) == Status in the European Union == What is the status of Irish in the EU? Is Irish interpretation or translition provided by the European institutions? :Irish is a Treaty language, which means that high level legislation has to be provided; I think Irish has no other status in the EU, though this is only because no Irish government has insisted upon it. User:Evertype 17:27, 2004 Jul 4 (UTC) ::It also means that one can write to EU institutions in Irish and expect a response in the same language. And Eamon Ó Cuiv, the minister with responsibility for Irish, has seen a request submitted to the EU that Irish be made a full working language. The treaty language concept was more or less created for the case of Irish because the government didn't insist upon it bein made fully official when Ireland joined the EEC. --User:Kwekubo 23:56, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC) == Consistent Style == It would be nice if all the Irish was italic and the English translations of the examples was in quotes. It's a bit of both at the moment. Some IPA/SAMPA would be good too. I might even ''do'' some of this. :) User:Moilleadóir 00:44, 21 Aug 2004 (UTC) == Optimistic estimate of number of speakers? == Hate to say this, but ceapaim go bhfuil nios lu na 40,000 daoine sa tir ag baint usaid as an Gaeilge gach la. The figure for the number of people that use Irish daily needs to be revised downwards (I've seen recent figures of about 15-25,000, tops.) --User:Ce garcon 06:28, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC) :According to the Central Statistics Office (Ireland) there are 1,570,894 [http://www.cso.ie/statistics/irishspeakerssince1861.htm] irish speaking people in the state, may be this figure is grossly inflated but should it not be inclued as a fact? --User:Happy ga 14:26, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) :: It would be interesting to see what the criteria are used on the census as it appears just to be a matter of deciding weither or not you wish to tick a box, and could be that simple to define yourself as "Irish speaker". Thus as this type of ability is a attribute rather than a variable, and these things are difficult to measure in absolute terms in a meaningful way (i.e. breath of use, grammer, knowledge, expression,... as venacular are the only meaning full things) and any such figures should be taken as a pinch of salt. To be balanced their seams to be an endless que of people who claim to speak or have knowledge of Irish - in reality on and economic and social level the language is rarely used as a living language, in my experience. User:Djegan 18:00, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC) == POV or not? == The following sentence was removed as POV, and then restored as "the universal view of academics", which seems very unlikely to me. :''In contrast to English as spoken in England, Hiberno-English offers a greater range of expression.'' If someone can provide a source of a single linguist making this claim in a peer-reviewed publication, we can put it back in as ''that academic's'' view (but certainly not "the universal view"). Otherwise it should not be included. --User:Angr/User_talk:Angr 04:44, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC) :Seems unlikely to me too, unless in the trivial sense that any dialect can be seen as supplemental to any given speaker's idiolect, and thus more providing extra expressivity. (And it's a fuzzy issue, I sometimes get confused as to where "Scots" stops and where "Scottish English" begins, likewise I'm sure the odd Cork/HEism is sneaking in there too (so).) User:Alai 07:10, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC) It is perfectly correct. Read Terence Dolan's ''A Dictionary of Hiberno-English'' for evidence. The Irish language had many more words for something than is found in modern English. (Many of the variables that used to exist in Old English have dropped out of usage, making modern British English quite restrictive linguistically.) Hiberno-English combines the greater variation in Irish words, suitably anglicised, with modern English expressions, and also with some surviving from Old English. Some Hiberno-Englishisms have now made it into British English (for example, ''galore'', from the Irish ''go leor'') but the nature, complexity and range of alternative expressions available in HE make Ireland the preferred location ahead of England for foreigners to come to learn English. For example, whereas BE has the word ''idiot'' HE has ''idiot'' and ''ejjit'' (with the latter being in effect a 'complete idiot'). Indeed it can be made stronger by calling someone a "right eejit'' which manages both to call someone and idiot and add a note of distain, contempt, sarcasm and ridicule that the BE word ''idiot' doesn't come close to mirroring. For example someone who left a car, unlocked, with its keys in it, in an area where there was a crime wave, and had it nicked, could be slated, sarcastically as "he was a right ejjit to do that". Other examples include adding the suffix ''een'' to a word to further stress the word. So a small girl can be called a ''girleen''. Some HE terms are direct translations from Irish, and directly disobey linguistic structure in BE. For example, ''I do be here every day'', through wrong in BE, is right in HE. It is a direct translation of the Irish phrase ''Bím anseo gach lá. Another example is the word ''bowsie'', meaning a 'quarrelsome drunk' or sometimes a 'right bastard'. Writers famous for their use of HE are Roddy Doyle, Sean O'Casey and James Joyce. Fear''ÉIREANN''\user_talk:Jtdirl 15:26, 26 May 2005 (UTC) == Irish-speaking communities in Argentina and Canada? == Can anyone confirm that, as stated in the info box, there is a small ''community'' of Irish speakers in Argentina? I've never heard this and suspect someone was confusing Irish with Welsh. I don't doubt there are people in Argentina who can speak Irish, but that's not the same thing as a community of speakers. --User:Angr/User_talk:Angr 08:45, 24 May 2005 (UTC) ---- I have the same question about Newfoundland. Can anyone tell me which towns had Irish speaking communities? User:IrishHermit 03:35, 26 May 2005 (UTC) ---- The Irish language in Newfoundland was (and is to a lesser degree) primarily spoken in towns along the Irish shore of the Avalon Peninsula, namely Ballyhack, St. Bride's, Trepassey, Ferryland, Patrick's Cove, St. Mary's and Skibereen. User:Jcmurphy 03:35, 11 June 2005 (UTC) ---- Indeed, as far as my search can determine there were never any communities of Irish speakers known in either Argentina or Newfoundland (other than perhaps modern-day learners of Irish as a secondary language), and the assertion that there were such communities is probably an erroneous crossover from Welsh. In my editing of this article today I removed these assertions accordingly. --User:Ryanaxp 17:48, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC) ---- The Irish language was historically spoken in parts of the Irish shore of Newfoundland in the early 20th century, and is still sporken by a small percentage of the population. See Newfoundland Irish for more info. There are no Welsh speakers in all of Newfoundland. --User:Bmpower 17:28, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC) :
On the other hand, I doubt there's been anyone running around who speaks Newfoundland Irish for at least the past five decades, based on what I read in the article at the bottom of the page. —User:Ryanaxp 22:42, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC) == EU == Since Irish has been made an officail working lang should the eu be listed in the box of offical Langs. --User:Happy ga 13:04, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC) :Which box? On this page, or on an EU page elsewhere? User:Evertype 17:29, 2005 Jun 13 (UTC)
Irish language
Irish language (''Gaeilge'') is a Goidelic languages spoken in Ireland. The language is sometimes referred to in English as ''Gaelic'' (International Phonetic Alphabet ), ''Irish Gaelic'', or ''Erse'', but is more generally referred to in Ireland as the Irish language or simply Irish. Goidelic languages Irish culture
See other meanings of words starting from letter:
I
IA | IB | IC | ID | IE | IF | IG | IH | IJ | IK | IL | IM | IN | IO | IP | IR | IS | IT | IU | IW | IX | IY | IZ |Words begining with Irish_language:
Irish_language
Irish_language
Irish_language
Irish_language_in_Northern_Ireland
Irish_language_in_Northern_Ireland
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