Category:Irish

Overview

Irish, Irish Gaelic or simply just Gaelic, is a Goidelic language spoken on the island of Ireland by about 70,000 daily speakers, of which about 20,000 live in areas, known as Gaeltachtaí (singular; Gaeltacht), where Irish is officially recognised as the language of a significant plurality of inhabitants (officially 25% but some areas, such as the Iveragh peninsula, or "Uíbh Ráthaigh" in Irish, can drop to figures as low as 9% native speakers).

The Irish language consists more broadly of 3 dialect groupings, northern (Ulster), central (Connacht-Leinster) and southern (Munster), for the most part these dialects share very similar grammatical structures with minor vocabulary differences, however, where they differ the most is matters of pronunciation. the same word can also be pronounced wildly differently between dialect groups to the point where spoken intelligibility can be quite difficult and frustrating, even for native speakers although with time you can learn to understand and parse differences in speech between dialects. Irish is also a mandatory subject until the leaving-cert in Ireland, however most students in this system do not attain any appreciable understanding of or ability in the language.

History

The Irish language is believed to have arrived in Ireland around 500 BC with the arrival of Celtic culture and language from the continent, likely through Britain, the language they spoke can only be inferred through comparison with the various other Celtic languages but it's likely not to have distinct from the original Celtic language, this point onward is considered the primitive Irish period and lasts until the 6th century, in the 4th century and alphabet was created for the language called "ogham" and used letter names taken from the Irish names of various trees.

By the 6th century Irish had changed drastically, it lost much of its Indo-European [1] character in this time period and the first traces of initial mutations (otherwise known as séimhiú and urú to veterans of the Irish school system, as well as a third mutation type called gemination in English) and infected prepositions (le; liom, leat, leis etc) appear in the language, this period marks the switch over to a Latin alphabet spelling system based on British Latin, as such it has quite a different but also familiar character compared to the modern spellings of words in the Gaelic languages, this form of the language, Old Irish, was spoken across Ireland, the Isle of Mann, Galloway and the Scottish Highlands and short-lived colonies on the Welsh coast, particularly the North.

At the turn of the renaissance Irish was beginning to evolve into a more modern form, the neuter gender was lost, the case system was simplified and Scottish Gaelic began to split off along with Manx, it was also during this period that the dominance of English began to take hold in Ireland as the language of the people, however it should be noted that despite the long period of coexistence with English there is a relatively low amount of influence from the language contrary to popular belief among the Irish people of today, with languages like French (see terms; gasúr, eaglais, seomra) and Latin (see terms; múr, saighead, póg) taking centre stage.

This brings us to the comtemporary period where the language shift to English has largely been completed in most localities aside from those pockets of Gaeltacht on the Western seaboard, however within these communities the language can often be quite vibrant and alive in its use among all generations and while the number of daily speakers by and large has declined over the years this is not a consistent trend, with some years (eg. 2011) registering an increase in daily use. At least there is the potential for optimism towards the future, although it will by and large stay a minority language.

Difficulties for Learners

While the Irish language is not by any means a language that stands out in any appreciable capacity difficulty-wise, this is not to say it doesn't pose its fair share of challenges for those who wish to learn it.

Pronunciation

The Irish language has about 11~12 distinct vowel sounds depending on the dialect and 19 consonant sounds, these can be categorised based on two axes, palatalised vs velarised and lenited vs unlenited.

A palatalised sound is a sound that's produced with your tongue also raised up to the front of your palate (as if to make a y sound) while you're also producing the main sound and a velarised sound is one that's made with your tongue raised to the back of your palate instead (to roughly the area the hard k and g sounds are made in English), every consonant in Irish except the sound /h/ (written th) has one palatalised and one velarised version, no sounds are pronounced without these extra features. Velarised, or broad, consonants are pronounced whenever there's an adjacent, written a, o, or u, these don't have to be pronounced as an a, o, or u sound for this to take effect; and palatalised, or slender sounds are pronounced whenever a consonant has an adjacent, written i or e, again this doesn't necessarily mean the vowel will be pronounced at all.