101 Things You Didn't Know about Irish History: The People, Places, Culture, and Tradition of the Emerald Isle by Ryan Hackney & Amy Hackney Blackwell

Author:Ryan Hackney & Amy Hackney Blackwell [Hackney, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, ebook
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2006-12-13T18:30:00+00:00

63 Irish Language

The Gaelic language of Ireland is one of the most distinctive in Europe. It’s one of the few Celtic languages that survived the onslaught of Germanic and Latin tongues. Some of the oldest vernacular literature in Europe was composed in Irish, and an extraordinary range of Irish stories survived into the modern day. Irish is a lyrical language that seems particularly well suited to poetry and metaphor. But it’s lucky to be around today. We have the efforts of many generations of stubborn Irish people to thank for its modern existence.

In 1500, the great majority of Ireland’s inhabitants still spoke Irish as their first language. The Anglo-Norman families like the FitzGeralds and Butlers spoke both English and Irish, but the farmers and laborers outside the Pale spoke predominantly Irish. With the plantations and conquests of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, the language trends began to change.

Thousands of English-speaking families moved onto Irish land. English policies actively promoted the adoption of the English language. There’s a story that schoolteachers would hang sticks from students’ necks and notch them every time they spoke Irish; for every notch the student would receive a beating. The most powerful force against Irish was the fact that all the wealthy and powerful people spoke English, so a person needed to speak English to have any opportunities for advancement. Between 1700 and 1900, Irish went from being the majority language of the island to a minor tongue spoken by disenfranchised groups in the West.

While the Irish were pressured to speak English, it was hard for them to learn to read it. The penal laws prevented most Irish children from attending school. But the Irish had a resourceful response to this problem; they created hedge schools—informal schools taught in the open or in barns by volunteer schoolteachers. These schools taught English, Irish, Latin, history, geography, and whatever else they could manage. They didn’t have many books and couldn’t meet all the time, but they did prevent the Irish people from becoming totally illiterate.

Although it suffered, the Irish language didn’t die out. It lived on in remote places with little English presence, particularly in the West. The English didn’t bother to put schools in backward outposts like the Blasket Islands off the Dingle coast. The province of Connacht, which Cromwell had seen fit to leave to the Irish, remained the bastion of the old Gaelic language. The area where Irish continued to be spoken as a first language was called the Gaeltacht.

Over the years, the Irish government has instituted a number of programs to preserve the Irish language. Irish is the official language of the Republic of Ireland and a mandatory part of the curriculum for all Irish schoolchildren. For a while, all civil servants had to pass examinations in Irish before they could take their posts. The government has provided a number of incentives to promote Irish-language initiatives in the Gaeltacht, such as Raidió na Gaeltachta, an all-Irish radio station.

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