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.

The Irish language is believed to have arrived in Ireland around 2,000 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 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. By the turn of the renaissance Irish was beginning to evolve to a more modern form, the neuter gender was lost, the grammar was simplified and Scottish Gaelic began to split off along with Manx