The Irish
Language
The
Irish language is also called Gaelice. Irish is the "first" language of
Ireland's inhabitants. Almost 55.000 people speak Irish as their first
language.
These
people live in the Irish-speaking region of Western Ireland and are known as
"Native Speakers". Western Ireland is also known as the Gaeltacht. The counties
of Gaeltacht are Kerry, Clare, Galway, the Three Aran Islands, Mayo, Sligo and
Donegal.
Galway has a flourishing Irish speaking community. In Connemara, which
belongs to Galway, the inhabitants only speak Irish. On the Aran Islands time seems
to stand still. The inhabitants live in primitive houses and are all native
Irish speakers.
Irish is a member of the Goidelic group of the Celtic subfamily of the
Indo European family of languages. The history of Irish as a
literary language falls into three periods: Old Irish (7th-9th cent. A.D.), Middle Irish
(10th-16th cent.), and Modern Irish (since the 16th cent.). In the medieval
period a great Irish literature flourished. Grammatically, there are still four
cases for the noun (nominative, genitive, vocative, and, in some dialects,
dative). In pronunciation the stress is on the first syllable. An acute accent
is placed over a vowel to denote length, and a dot is placed over a consonant
to indicate aspiration. The alphabet employed today for Irish can be called a
variant or a derivative of the Roman alphabet that took shape about the 8thcent.
A.D. It has 18 letters: 13 consonants and 5 vowels. The oldest existing Irish
texts are inscriptions written in the ogham script. These texts date back to
the 5th cent. A.D. or perhaps earlier and differ as much from the early
literary Irish that follows them as Latin does from Old French. Native speakers
of Irish are now concentrated in the western counties of Ireland. The
government of Ireland is trying, so unsuccessfully, to revive Irish as the
primary language of the country; it is an official language, and the study of
Irish is required in preparatory schools.
Although many people say that the Irish language will become extinct
sooner or later, the Irish want to keep their language because it is very
important in the Irish history and works as a definer of identity.
When I
asked people on the street about the use of the Irish language I found out that
there is always a member in the family, which speaks Irish fluently. All the
people learned Irish at school and thought that Irish is important for
Ireland's identity. They didn't think that it is important to speak Irish
fluently in Dublin. I couldn't find out if Irish is a difficult language or not
because a few people said yes and the other bit said no. They told me that if
you want to study at university you must have learned Irish at school.
