Hi, Iam conducting a university linguistic research assignment and was wondering if anybody here maybe able to aid me in my quest. I have chosen Gaeilge, as my language to be studied and was wondering if someone could help me to determine a facts and gather some basic linguistic information.

First of all, does anyone know where i could find published information on the number of Irish speakers world wide but mainly in Ireland. And a map of where Irish is spoken in Ireland and help highlighting the official Gaeltacht areas.

What is the word order of Irish? does it follow the english Subject-Verb-Object format. ie The boy likes the dog...

The differences between the types of Irish(ie Munster, Donegal..etc.)

Also does the Irish government officially consider Irish a "Living" Language? Is it the official national language or does it share the status with english?

Does Irish have its own alphabet?

And Finally does Irish have any sister languages? ie Scots Gaelic? how closely related are they? do they share the same word order, alphabet etc..?

It would also be helpful if anyone who is nice enough to answer any of these questions to note either where they got the information ie book, website, published works or if the knowledge is anecdotal. I know this is a lot to ask but i would really help a lot towards my research as Information on Irish is hard to find out here in Australia!

Now i do not in anyway expect to have all these questions answered but any help would be extremely appreciated and i would like to sincerely thank anyone who can help in advance.

Damian

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What is the word order of Irish? does it follow the english Subject-Verb-Object format. ie The boy likes the dog...

99% of the time it's VSO.

quote:

The differences between the types of Irish(ie Munster, Donegal..etc.)

Exactly the same as differences between the Queen's English and South African English: Different accent, different phrases, different pronunciation, alternate forms of words.

quote:

Also does the Irish government officially consider Irish a "Living" Language? Is it the official national language or does it share the status with english?

The Constitution says that Irish is the first official language, and that English is a secondary language. In actuality, the vast majority can speak English, and the vast minority and speak Irish. The goverment tends to be lax about giving respect to the Irish language, for instance most of the road signs in Ireland have mistakes in the written Irish.

quote:

Does Irish have its own alphabet?

It uses the same alphabet as English (Roman, Latin, whatever it's called). Back in the day it used to be written with a different sort of font, but it was still recongisable as the alphabet we all know. The vowels can have acute accents over them, some consonants can have dot above them.

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And Finally does Irish have any sister languages? ie Scots Gaelic? how closely related are they? do they share the same word order, alphabet etc..?

As far as I know there are strong similarites between Ulster Irish and Scottish, you'd have to ask someone else about that though. While they might be slightly mutually intelligible, I think most people would have trouble communicating.

Got all this info straight from my head (born and bred Irish).

Probably the biggest area of difference is in verbal morphology; on Wikipedia, there is a professional linguist that puts up pages on Irish, and so there are references to works cited there

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language

Thanks for your replies guys. That really helps. Just wondering if you guys know any links to websites where i could more information on things like Language profiency, numbers of speakers and such?

Keep it coming guys all this really helps!

While you may get some comments on this one, the Irish Census dedicates a whole volume (vol. 11) to the Irish language. The problem seems to be that the question asked in the census is rather vague, and leaves room for incorrect information.

While the numbers are accurate, and can be quoted...the people who were surveyed might not have been totally honest.

The question was "Can you speak Irish? Yes or No"

The problem is that they are not asking a very effective question in order to get the information they are looking for. Since most Irish have had years and years of the language in school they might have checked "yes" because they have knowledge of the language and might "be able" to speak the language. However, that's not the intent of the question, and I say this is because the second part of the question then tries to establish how often one speaks Irish. So I think the question they should have asked is "Do you speak Irish? Yes or No"

It is my understanding that in the next census there is going to be a change and additional questions to establish more accurate informtion.

http://www.cso.ie/census/vol11.htm

Right now there is a little bit of a debate about the actual numbers of speakers and their fluency levels.

Part of this is due census problem I mentioned above.

I have seen numbers ranging from as low as 50,000 people to as high as 1.3 million people. While I would really like to say that the ladder is correct, I think you will find that the numbers are more likely in the 50,000-100,000 range. It really depends on the fluency level you are seeking.

(Message edited by do_chinniúint on March 18, 2007)