Irish is a very old language and one of the earliest in Europe to have a written script. It belongs to the family of Celtic languages and was once spoken across Europe. Celtic languages encompass the Gaelic branch of languages: Irish in Ireland, Gaelic in Scotland and Manx in the Isle of Man, and the Britannic branch: Welsh and Cornish in Britain, and Breton in Brittany, France. However, Irish is now barely, spoken. To find out more, we met with Professor Pádraig Ó Duibhir, an applied linguist and the deputy dean at Dublin City University Institute of Education, where he specialises in teacher education and the teaching of the Irish language. We began by asking him why the Irish language declined.

Pádraig Ó Duibhir (Irish accent): In the 12th century, there was an Anglo-Norman invasion in Ireland and that was the start of the conquest of Ireland, and Ireland became a colony of Great Britain, and there were efforts made to conquer Ireland, and part of that colonization was to wipe out Irish language, culture and customs, and replace them with English language and customs. So that was the plan, and that plan was repeated in other colonies throughout the world…

FLIGHT OF THE EARLS

The Irish initially fought back, but the elites had other ideas.

Pádraig Ó Duibhir: Over the 14th, 15th, 16th centuries, there was a lot of fighting and rebellion, but eventually in 1607 we have a thing called the Flight of the Earls, so the Earls are the Gaelic chieftains, fled Ireland, and that was really the start of the end so when you got to the start of the 19th century, the 1800s, Irish was still widely spoken, but more among the poorer classes than the merchants and the wealthy classes, so English had become the sought-after language for advancement. So, the start of the 17th century saw the decline, and that continued then throughout the 19th century. The Great Famine of 1845 to 1849 disproportionally affected the Irish speakers, so a million people died during the famine and another million emigrated. So two million people would have been disproportionally Irish speakers.

LINGUISTIC HIERARCHY

The Irish language survived among the poorer classes, as he explains.

Pádraig Ó Duibhir: Irish remained among the poorer classes, they probably weren’t educated. There wasn’t widespread education and schooling. So, in a sense, the educated classes learned English, whereas the uneducated didn’t; they spoke their native tongue. In 1831, the Irish national school system was set up by the British but no Irish was taught in the schools. The speaking of Irish was forbidden in schools, and then parents were encouraged to speak English to their children, so parents who had very poor English would have made an effort to speak English to their children.The parents saw that in order for the advancement of their children, they needed English. The emigration after the famine as well many people went to the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia... English-speaking countries and colonies, so again that would have strengthened the view that Irish isn’t much good to you in New York or Boston or Melbourne or Sydney, you’re going to need English there.

THE IRISH REVIVAL

It was not until the late 19th century that efforts were made to revive the endangered tongue.

Pádraig Ó Duibhir: In the late 19th century, around the 1880s. The Society for the Preservation of Irish was established, and Douglas Hyde, who became the first president of Ireland, wrote a pamphlet on the need for de-anglicising Ireland. The Gaelic Athletic Association was established in 1884, and the Gaelic League in 1891. Those movements were all sort of trying to revive the language, the culture, the sport and the music to some extent. Many of the people involved in the language movement, the Gaelic League, were part of the Irish rebellion, or 1916 rising, and there were a number of years of the War of Independence, and generally trying to gain independence from Great Britain, and we got that in the twenty-six counties of Ireland in 1922. So, when the new Irish Free State was set up then, the revival of Irish was a central plank in the policy of the government.

AN ACADEMIC LANGUAGE

And today, Irish is taught in schools, though it is generally not used in everyday life.

Pádraig Ó Duibhir: Irish is a compulsory subject throughout schooling, so typically from age four or five until seventeen or eighteen, people leave at the end of the schooling system. So, you have maybe a million people engaged in Irish, but in Irish education, about 40 per cent of people in the last census, in 2016, would have ticked the box that there’s an ability to speak Irish… But they are also asked then if they use it outside of the education system, and do you use it, and how frequently they use it. So, when you drill down into the figures, it’s less positive, as it were. 1.7 per cent of people, just around the 80,000 mark, speak Irish on a daily basis, and then a further 2.3 per cent speak it on a weekly basis, so if you look at daily and weekly together, then you have about 4 per cent of the population who you could say use Irish independently of the classroom and the school. So it’s quite a small minority.

FEELING IRISH

The language is a vital part of the Irish identity, and many people are coming to realise that, says Professor Ó Duibhir.

Pádraig Ó Duibhir: A lot of the discourse about Irish is people saying, “What good is it? What use is it?” And that’s the thing, it doesn’t really have a functional use. So I think it’s important for other aspects. For me, I feel it’s part of my identity, and it offers me a different worldview I think than I have as an English-speaker. And I think that’s partly its value, is that the language encompasses a different way of thinking and a different way of viewing the world. Other people have said, “I think I’m a different person when I speak Irish,” and I can kind of identify with that. And I think it enriches my life ‘cause I think I probably have a deeper understanding of Irish people and Irish society because it’s another insight into our history as well, having access to the language and the literature and Irish ways and so on, that maybe I wouldn’t have if I was entirely English-speaking…