I don't wish to be starting threads unless I absolutely have to, but I can't think of anywhere else to put this.

When we learn Irish, either at school or as adults, we tend to learn the still-spoken native speaker dialect closest to the area in which we live. So people in Derry and Belfast, for example, learn Donegal Irish.

What happens in places like Tipperary, where there are three native speaker dialects (Corca Dhuibhne, Muscraí and An Rinn) nearby to choose from? Is serious thought given to which of these is closest to what Tipperary Irish would have been, or is it simply a case of 'any Munster Irish will do'?

Likewise, what do classes in Leinster teach, where there is little evidence of what the Leinster dialect was like? Do some classes teach Galway Irish, others Kerry Irish and still others, say, Mayo Irish? Do any use Donegal Irish?

I could see odd aspects with this in places like north Louth which are administered as part of Leinster but which spoke a dialect of Ulster Irish historically. Are people in Louth made to learn Connacht Irish or do they too learn Ulster Irish?

What about Kilkenny, where a dialect close to Waterford was used? Do they, as part of Leinster these days, use the 'default' of Galway Irish too?

Are you in Northern Ireland? In N.I. they may indeed be learning Donegal Irish, but in Tipperary they will be learning Standard Irish - and in Cork, Kerry, Galway, Donegal, Waterford, Mayo and Meath, the Galltacht schools will be teaching Standard Irish only. In fact, in the Gaeltacht schools... they are also learning Standard Irish only!

I think you people in the North have a special enthusiasm, which ought to be infectious...

Er.. in all schools in the 26 counties, they teach Standard Irish only... The school curriculum for the non-Gaeltacht schools used to require 11 pages of Munster Irish to be read (3 pages of Peig and 8 pages of Fiche Blian ag Fás if I remember correctly), but that syllabus has been cancelled, and now the requirement is zero.

As for the Gaeltacht schools, I can't find any specific syllabus online, but as there are only three books in print in Cork Irish...we can draw our own conclusions.

(Message edited by corkirish on December 14, 2010)

My family is in Donegal so they speak Donegal Irish however I live in the USA so there aren't any native dialects in my area. I take a class through DnG and they teach the classes using Connemara Irish. I think it would be nice if I could learn Donegal Irish but from what people have told me it won't be difficult communicating with people in Donegal while speaking Connemara Irish. It would be nice though to learn the same dialect that my grandparents spoke and my family that still lives in Ireland speak.

Sorry that wasn't really adding to the conversation here but I thought I'd put in my input about dialects.

Corkirish,

I'm from the north, yes.

I haven't really had much experience of this 'Standard Irish' - I know it's pilloried (and perhaps rightly so) but when I learnt Irish as a teenager (from a book, unfortunately enough, which made my pronunciation a complete mess) I suppose it was the CO that I was learning. No one understood anything I said so I switched to Donegal Irish which obviously is dramatically different. Like I said in my introduction, I speak a mixed dialect - probably Connacht grammar with Donegal Irish pronunciation and lexicon.

On TG4 I notice they use dialect pronunciation (i.e., I know 'nuairt' for 'nuacht' is common to Donegal and Conmara, and one hears 'inniubh' more than 'inniu')as a rule, even if I am not entirely sure if they are otherwise speaking in local dialects i.e., grammatically, idiomatically and so forth.

I've heard people who went to school in Waterford use specifically Munster Irish (they refered to Irish as 'Gaoluinn') so are you suggesting they picked it up at a coláiste shamradh in Rinn? Perhaps all my life I've only been speaking to people who went to Gaeltacht colleges!

(Message edited by GRMA on December 14, 2010)

Dia dhuit a phaploo!

Your contribution was very interesting. I think anyone who doesn't learn Irish via the school system will inevitably find Connacht Irish being treated as the default that they should learn should they attempt to do so in later life.

You can hear Donegal Irish fairly often often on TG4 (www.tg4.ie - they have a player that you can watch a library of programmes on, and live feeds) or Raidió na Gaeltachta. RTÉ's Nuacht programme is also a good source.

Having switched from Connacht Irish to Donegal Irish I can assure you it's no great leap if you've already taken to learning Irish. The main difficulty I had was that Donegal Irish used a lot of very specific dialect terms that aren't known elsewhere, e.g., 'goitse' for 'come' and 'tábla' for 'table' etc. There's many more, but my mind has gone blank...

Anyway, it's very interesting to hear your experience.

quote:

I take a class through DnG and they teach the classes using Connemara Irish. I think it would be nice if I could learn Donegal Irish but from what people have told me it won't be difficult communicating with people in Donegal while speaking Connemara Irish.

It wouldn't be difficult with Munster Irish either! So any dialect works, there's no reason to teach Connemara Irish rather than another dialect, except Connemara Irish has more speakers, but if you prefer another dialect or if you intend to go to Donegal or Munster, you may prefer to speak the local dialect. It's a pity you must learn Connemara Irish because no other dialect is taught where you live.
Maybe you could try to learn as much Donegal Irish as you can, from books and online resources (BBC Ulster etc), so that you know both what you're taught in your classes and what Donegal people would say :-)

quote:

In fact, in the Gaeltacht schools... they are also learning Standard Irish only!

That's a shame. I remember hearing a young girl from Gortahork (Donegal) who had native Irish and she said she had difficulty with Irish at school. If she were taught stuff in her dialect, she wouldn't. You can speak an excellent Gaeltacht Irish and have bad marks at school at Irish if you don't use the Standard stuff. That's stupid. Looks as if they want to kill Gaeltacht Irish.
If in 2060 years, Ireland will have lost all its native speakers and has only people who jabber Standard Irish (learnt at school), the country will have lost much of its interest, in my opinion.

"Grma", Gaoluinn is the most famous word in the Southern dialect and so even people who learned Standard Irish at school probably know this word. But I thought the l was slender in Waterford: Gaeilinn?

quote:

If in 2060 years, Ireland will have lost all its native speakers and has only people who jabber Standard Irish (learnt at school), the country will have lost much of its interest, in my opinion.

Do you mean in 2,060 years' time, or in the year 2060? Yes, I agree. I would prefer Ireland to go monoglot Sacs-Bhéarla than to have no native dialects of Irish and teach Standard Irish. But I am not Irish, and so my opinion does not count...

I meant "in the year 2060", sorry.

Hi Lughaidh

I've heard that anecdotally before, about the effects of teaching 'Standard Irish' on Gaeltacht schoolchildren. I think I read somewhere that it was one of the (many) reasons many of them switch to English as teenagers (as well as the usual teenage rebelliousness). I think a number of petitioners to the Gaeltacht Commission report(s) over the years have repeatedly mentioned it as a contributory factor to the alienation from Irish in the Gaeltacht.

Sad.

I've met a fair few people from the Gaeltacht who were raised with Irish who simply refuse to speak it now. I should have asked them why, but generally they got extremely defensive or hostile at any mention of Irish, so I didn't chance it.

I've only been to a Gaeltacht region (Arranmore, Co. Donegal) twice before in my life and both times when I went I had little to no Irish so I don't really have much Gaeltacht experience but I have a question about monoglots in the Gaeltacht. To my knowledge they don't exist. I've heard that the Gaeltacht is where Irish is spoken on a daily basis (I'm sure to what extent changes from region to region) but when I was there everyone spoke to me in English since I didn't have any Irish.

If a family raises a child with Irish as the household language and on a daily basis the child is speaking Irish around town with friends and family and the child attends a gaelscoil (even if they are teaching standard Irish), how come they all pick up English? Also, at what age do they begin to pick up English if they were raised as above?

Is it just through the media that they learn English like TV, radio etc.? Is it something that is a necessity in order to get a job and have a successful career? Would it be possible to live without speaking or having knowledge of any English in Ireland?

Corkirish,

You may be right. I think 'Gaoluinn/Gaelinn' is a badge of difference for them, so they may be just saying that one word rather than actively using the dialect - I can't remember whether their actual Irish was Munster dialect or 'Standard' as I got distracted by listening to the very different phonology, particularly consonantally.

I have no idea which is the 'correct' pronunciation. I heard it as /gwe:lən/ but am probably completely wrong. I can't say I was really paying that much attention at the time, alas, and my Irish is really very limited.

Grma, some of the teachers in the Gaeltacht areas could do with a few lessons in the language themselves.

When I contacted Gaeltalk, based in the Cork Gaeltacht, and asked them to provide an audio version of Peadar ua Laoghaire's Mo Sgéal Féin, they did chapter one for me. Apart from the fact that the audio file, http://www.gaeltalk.ie/scealta/stories/mp3s/msf1.mp3 , is all in Standard Irish, and a company based in the Gaeltacht could not work out if the book being read was the original Cork Irish or not (they sent me PDFs of a few pages from a couple of versions, saying "is this Cork Irish or not?"....er.... if you are in Ballingeary and don't know... time to go into receivership, I think!) the version, read by a local teacher, contained mistakes.

Feall i riocht dlí - deceit in the guise of law

this was read by the "teacher" (someone who gets an extra high salary from the state for teaching through Irish) as

Fearll i ríocht dlí (deceit in the kingdom of law)

listen to around the 53rd second for that.

Also the file is introduced as "Mo Scéal Féin leis an tAthair Peadar Ua Laoghaire" - with t-prefixation...

Paploo, it is not possible to live in Ireland and only ever speak Irish. All the Gaeltacht areas are bilingual. The children watch TV in English and hear their parents speaking English - and apparently the strongest Irish speakers among the children speak it well till they go to school at age 5 and come into contact with the many "Gaeltacht natives speakers of Irish" children who have only poor Irish, and then their Irish gradually deteriorates... A certain amount of cynicism about the Gaeltacht is more than justified, but I understand the Donegal areas are stronger than Cork, so your experience of Arranmore should be better than this...

I don't have any real direct experience of the Gaeltacht, so anything I say must be heavily caveated, and I would defer to other posters either from there or who spend a lot of time there, but my understanding was that everyone in all Gaeltacht areas is entirely bilingual. In 'category A' Gaeltacht areas such as Gort a' Choirce there are probably lots of people who prefer using Irish to English, but I get the sense from studies and from anecdotal evidence that even this group is increasingly rare. I would love it to be otherwise and hope I am wrong - as I say, I have no experience of the Gaeltacht beyond the odd day trip.

A lot of Gaeltacht people work outside the Gaeltacht now and as there is no Irish-language university or college in any Gaeltacht region they all undertake third level education in the Galltacht, via English (a few will take courses via Irish at, say, Galway, but the majority won't).

The Gaeltacht Commission report(s) also point out that English is used in the Gaeltacht by state bodies which in theory should be monolingually Irish-speaking, i.e., many workplaces (even Udaras-funded) are de facto English-speaking. Many people in the Gaeltacht resort to English to speak to local government bodies because in all Gaeltacht areas the county council uses English practically exclusively. So the state is still an anglicising force in the Gaeltacht, that's pretty clear.

Your question about how people pick up language is an interesting one. I speak Norwegian and English in the house as my partner is Norwegian and I have often noticed in Norway that children raised to non-Norwegian speaking parents pick Norwegian up 'out of the air'. I suppose friendship groups, television, etc are the key factors here as most speak Norwegian even before they attend school. I really don't know. Perhaps a linguist on the board who specialises in language transmission at an early age could explain.

Corkirish,

Thanks for your link. I notoiced Mo Sgéal Féin on Wikimedia and didn't realise you were responsible for its recording. Comhghairdeas.

On television in Irish I must correct you, if only pedantically - you say that children watch television in English. This is true, but it is *possible* to watch children's television (unsubtitled) entirely in Irish on TG4. (CO again, I'm afraid though.) Obviously no child would sit and watch just one channel but it IS possible.

One gripe I have with TG4 is that they subtitle every Irish-language programme in English, which utterly defeats the purpose of watching it in Irish. It would be far better if they subtitled it in Irish so that learners could learn the correlation between what they see and what they hear.

When I learnt Norwegian, Norwegian subtitles were a must. Does anyone know why TG4 has this policy? It makes no sense to me whatsoever.

quote:

(CO again, I'm afraid though.)

?

From what I have seen, the speakers dubbing the cartoons are drawn from all dialects and some Galltacht speakers.

The standard is a written standard.

Okay, Aonghus, thanks for that clarification!

Apologies for the mistake (I will make many more). It's good to hear that I was wrong! I thought CO was a written standard but other posts on here seem to suggest some sort of 'standard spoken Irish' is around too - I've never had any experience of it - my experience is of spoken Donegal and Connacht Irish and written Donegal and Connacht Irish. I tend to confuse the CO with Connacht Irish as it's so similar.

Tá brón ormsa.

Ná bíodh.

Is amhlaidh go spreagann CO vs canúintí caint thar a bheith teasaí sna bólaí seo!

I think I just saw that happen myself, Aonghus!

The audios of all 32 chapters of Mo Sgéal Féin are on my site (www.corkirish.com), but I uploaded some of them onto Wikipedia. Anyone who wants to grab the rest and upload them there can do so.

Programmes are subtitled in English so all Irish people can watch them - including those not interested in Irish. As you say this is of no help to learners.

I am interested in audio material where I can see the text too, and that is why I went to Coolea to record Mo Sgéal Féin. I would like to record the 4 gospels and also Niamh, but there are only a handful of people nowadays who can read seanachló with ease - at least to the extent to reading it out fully fluently. Maighréad Uí Lionáird was unusual in that she picked up Mo Sgéal Féin with no preparation, in a seanachló edition, and just read it out over an 8 hour period with one coffee break. And she read so fluently, I didn't need to splice files together or edit out sentences that were attempted over and over again - as you hear it in the MP3 files - that is how she read it out.

I am thinking of asking her to do some more things, but I would like a range of speakers, that's the problem. You can find all the audio files on my site at http://www.corkirish.com/wordpress/audio-files-on-this-site - the six chapters of St Matthew's Gospel in Peadar ua Laoghaire's translation as read by Dr Seán ua Súilleabháin of the University College Cork are particularly fine pronunciation-wise - I love his pronunciation!

Eight hours speaking from a text? I don't think there's many native English speakers who could manage that with English, so it's a real rare skill Bean Uí Lionáird has.

quote:

Programmes are subtitled in English so all Irish people can watch them - including those not interested in Irish.

This is not the case for childrens programmes, or current affairs.

>Eight hours speaking from a text? I don't think there's many native English speakers who could manage that with English, so it's a real rare skill Bean Uí Lionáird has.
------------

yes, i have tried reading English out loud and I stumble over the words of even prepared texts frequently. I believe she used to be a schoolteacher and is used to reading Irish aloud - and also reads in church frequently. Such people are golddust.

quote:

This is not the case for childrens programmes, or current affairs.

Do you mean that children's programmes and current affairs don't have subtitles or that they have subtitles for for a reason different than "so all Irish people can watch them - including those not interested in Irish"?

They don't have subtitles.

Paploo, Aonghus is right - children's programming and news programmes are only in Irish, with no subtitles at all. Other programmes in Irish have English subtitles.

PS: there was also a bizarre bilingual programme with subtitles on RTE a while back in which the presenter code-switched between Irish and English with the subtitle then switching to the other language underneath. It was the only time I have ever seen Irish-language subtitles, ever.


(Message edited by grma on December 14, 2010)

Obviously I am as interested in this topic as everyone else here so I'll just make a few brief comments.

I know the Gaeltacht. It is bilingual. Much of the geographical area is either depopulated or English-speaking. The rest consists of pockets of Irish speakers. Galway, Donegal, and Corca Dhuibhne have larger populations of Irish-speakers than any of the other areas.

The nature of the bilingualism varies from house to house. Returned emigrants and their foreign born wives and families generally have little Irish although -- if they value education -- they may make a deliberate effort to learn it. Houses with an aged granny or grandpa will generally speak Irish as a first language... In houses where the grandparents have long passed away the language may be much weaker. Then there are "na strainséirí / stróinséirí". These may have jobs in the factories or nearby colleges and may or may not choose to identify with Irish. Others may have just happened to buy a cheap house with a view of the sea and never realised there was anything different about the area.

Some areas are so strongly attached to Irish that they can conduct public meetings through Irish. Others use the token introductory cúpla focal and then switch to English for the important stuff. They have forgotten that it is possible to conduct a meeting entirely through Irish. I

If both Mama and Deaide are working outside the home the child-minder at the creche or naíonra may address the children in Irish but more than half the children will hear nothing but English at home. And so on.

Is it possible to rear children through Irish only? Yes if Mama and Deaide and Mamó, Deaideo, and all the close relatives agree to play the game. Neighbours, delivery "persons" and authority figures such as teacher, priest, and politician will have an aura of English about them even today. It is possible but not easy. The box in the corner ensures that English pervades every house no matter what language the parents speak. I wish it were otherwise.

Gaeltacht schools are not necessarily Gaelscoileanna. They are mirror images of each other with different objectives. Paradoxically with the decline of spoken Irish in the homes the Gaeltacht schools may well become more like Gaelscoileanna.

Ní hi gcónaí a bhíonn na tithe le radharc ar an bhfarraige saor sa Ghaeltacht, go mór mór i gCorca Dhuibhne...

Is the bilingualism in the Gaeltacht stable? I've read lots of reports and studies on this that depend on the optimism or pessimism of the author. Certainly the 'category A' Gaeltacht areas seem to have Irish as the community language and exhibit the kind of bilingualism that one finds in Scandinavia - everyone knows English near perfectly, and English is 'cool', but Irish is clearly the normal language of the place. Not so the category B and category C areas, as far as I know (which is not much).

Returned emigrants are an amorphous group, I'd say - there are plenty of people born in Glasgow, for example, who moved 'back' to Irish-speaking parts of Donegal with their Gaeltacht-origin parents as a young child and who speak Irish at home. (Same with English-born in Kerry, Cork and Mayo.) I don't think that's the case if the child is a teenager, whereupon they were socialised abroad and are likely to reject Irish - although they probably become more 'into' the language when they're older. There were a lot of returnees during the boom, and a lot of marry-ins moving in too.

(Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was born in Lancashire, for example, and there are many other examples. Too numerous to list here, really.)

Likewise there are plenty of marry-ins and 'blow-ins' who learn and use Irish - often they're more 'into' Irish than those born and raised in the area.

Gaeltacht sociolinguistics is a complex matter and very much tied to local history, economics, migration patterns, peripheralisation and a whole host of others factors. The Gaeltacht isn't a museum any more than it is a reservation - it's a living, local group of otherwise ordinary rural areas that exhibit a greater marginalisation than some comparable places, and less marginalisation than others. These areas just 'happen' to also speak Irish.

(Message edited by grma on December 14, 2010)

I agree it is complex and that my views being based on personal experience would be superficial. I knew one peripheral area very well some twenty years ago and I visit some part of the Gaeltacht every summer. Irish in the west Galway Gaeltacht seems to be stable. My last visit was to Kerry where I found I could converse with everyone I met in the town of Daingean Uí Chúis without difficulty. Admittedly holding a fistful of €50 notes is a great incentive for shopkeepers to display fluency in the customer's preferred language, in my case Irish.

Sadly on the Uíbh Ráthach peninsula which I have visited every year for the last few years I can find very few opportunities to speak or hear Irish. I am sure there are good Irish speakers among the older population but there is no dominant community of Irish speakers there. There may be no Irish-speaking families left there now.

Inis Meáin remains almost totally Irish-speaking and is likely to continue so unless the community fails to renew itself through young families and children.

Those were three areas I spent time in last summer.

I know it angers some people here to even mention it but our local Gaelscoil has almost 400 children learning all through Irish and most speak "Gaeilge sa chlós" most of the time. Many of their parents were reared in the Gaeltacht and are glad to have assistance in passing the language on to their children. Two or three generations have gone through the school and it is not uncommon for people to speak Irish to me in shops and banks and other occasions telling me they can speak Irish too. When you are known to speak Irish you get to hear it all the time. So there is hope.

Where is this Gaelscoil, a Thaidhgín, if you don't mind me asking?

I completely agree that there's plenty of hope in the Irish language wherever you look at it, and I presume that applies to the Gaeltacht just as much as the Galltacht. Unfortunately Irish people and people talking about Irish seem to love a bad news story more than a good one.

(Message edited by GRMA on December 14, 2010)

(Message edited by GRMA on December 14, 2010)

Suffice to say it is west of the greater Dublin area and an area with the highest concentration of Irish speakers outside the Gaeltacht according to the last census.