The Irish language is full of cultural capital for us Yanks: a bit mysterious, seemingly incomprehensible, and very kitsch - what could more authentic, right? If you’ve been in Ireland for even an airport stopover you can’t help but see Irish versions of every sign, sometimes fairly close to what you’d expect - músaem for museum, for instance - and sometimes entirely foreign - an lár for the city center. And how on earth do you get Baile Átha Cliath for Dublin? Whether you’re interested in learning enough Irish to read literature in the original, or just want to know a bit more about this highly-regarded but infrequently spoken language, I’ve got a basic introduction for you.
Let’s start with what Irish is, and isn’t.
Irish is not related to English. Growing up next to the adopted isle of the Anglo-Saxons, and coming under various forms of English rule, the Irish language has many loanwords and some phrases translated word-for-word from English. However, Irish and English are from separate language families and follow extremely different grammar rules and sentence constructions. If you come to Irish thinking that it’s as foreign as Italian or Polish, you’ll be pleased to find some similarities to English, especially if you’re familiar with Hiberno-English. But if you assume that Irish is just a dialect or version of English, you’ll be overwhelmed immediately.
Irish is not synonymous with Gaelic. Many Americans use ‘Gaelic’ when talking about the language, but Irish people prefer to call it Irish. ‘Gaelic’ is a language family that includes Scottish Gaelic and Manx. (Scots is another language from Scotland but it is closely related to English and not Gaelic.) You could say Irish Gaelic, but that’s unusual. Scottish Gaelic, Manx, and Irish are all descended from the same language, and fluent speakers can understand each other with a bit of work, but for the beginner they are different languages. It’s easy to tell them apart when you’re reading: Irish accents all slant upwards, while Scottish accents all slant downwards, and Manx doesn’t use accents: Irish tír, Scottish tìr, and Manx çheer are the same word.
Irish is its own language with its own literature and history. While all Irish speakers today also know English (with a handful of remarkable exceptions), there are books, graphic novels, films, television shows, and music albums originally composed in Irish. They may be translated for English readers, but they lose things. There are jokes, innuendo, slang, and turns of phrase that only exist in Irish and cannot be conveyed in any other language. Furthermore, there are hundreds of thousands of lines of prose and poetry written in medieval Irish. Irish was the primary, even sole language for millions of people over many centuries in Ireland. It is not a backwards, fabricated, or deficient language.
Irish is complicated, but consistent. It’s easy to joke about how difficult it is to pronounce Irish, or how some words look like a random pile of letters to an English reader. But you learned how to say hors d’oeuvres and got used to it without claiming that French is insane, and Irish is the same! Irish also has a quality called ‘initial mutation’ that changes the first letter(s) of words due to the word in front of it or what part of speech it is. This leads to words like ‘hÉireann’, ‘gcónaí’, ‘dtréo’, and ‘mhatháir’ which complicate an already foreign orthography (way of writing). It can be mind-boggling, but everything has a purpose. Think of how contradictory English is in its spelling and orthography - ‘though, thou, thought, through, trough’? Irish doesn’t do anything like this, I promise!
Irish is an indigenous language. Ireland is a peculiar place that has Eurocentric/majority-white privilege, but is also recovering from an experience of language loss and trauma shared with other indigenous populations. Virtually all Irish would agree that native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, Austro-Indonesians, and other post-colonial peoples have the right to preserve their heritage and use their language, in particular as a balm against colonialism. But many Irish consider their language to be a lost cause, and fall back on their frustration with it in school as the reason why they don’t care for it. It’s hard to show people that they’re making excuses rather than acknowledging their own language was taken from them on purpose. Most countries in Europe have a native language (or several!) that they use in addition to English or another international language, and there’s no reason Ireland can’t resume its use of Irish.
Irish is alive. The history of Irish over the last few centuries has included direct and indirect attacks on it, nearly always due to a preference for using English. Right up to today, many people in Ireland think that using it is an exercise in romanticism or antiquarianism. As a consequence Irish often gets labeled as ‘dead’, ‘dying’, ‘revived’, ‘old’, ‘ancient’, ‘quaint’, or ‘unusual’; even by people not trying to belittle it. Nothing can undo Elizabethan legal statutes, An Gorta Mór (‘The Great Hunger’ or the famine of 1847), or the haphazard application of Irish language requirements in the Republic’s early years; so endless debates about what could have been are pointless. What we can do right now is learn it and use it as often as possible, in and outside of Ireland.
Some other things to know:
There are areas in Ireland where Irish is used as the first language; these are called Gaeltachtaí or Gaeltachts and with a few exceptions are found in the west. Not everyone there is a Gaeilgeoir or Irish-speaker but many are, and if you want you can carry out your entire day in Irish. These places attract curious tourists and fill with school students in the summer for immersive courses. Tourism thus is an important part of their industry but consequently their relationship with the rest of Ireland can be complicated.
The Irish language has three preserved dialect-groups, and a fourth one which is generated. The preserved dialects are Munster, Connacht, and Ulster, and with some exceptions they are spoken in that region of the country (south-west, mid-west, and north-west respectively). They have their own words and phrases but are mutually intelligible, such as a strong Yorkshire accent versus a strong Texas accent in English.
The fourth ‘dialect’ is Lárchanúint or Central Dialect which was generated in an attempt to unify and standardise Irish, and it’s what most speakers who don’t live in a Gaeltacht use. Lárchanúint has advantages and disadvantages: it’s popular and it’s not location-specific, but its artificiality lacks the organic creativity of the regional dialects. Sometimes Lárchanúint speakers look down on the preserved dialects, which is itself a form of linguistic privileging. Personally, I think anything that is being used in Irish is helpful, but I also try to use Munster Irish when I can, as my mother’s grandfather was a Gaeilgeoir from West Cork.
Irish can be written using a Latin alphabet (what you are currently reading). It also has its own alphabet, called seanchló, which is based on a Latin alphabet but has noticeable differences. The ‘g’ looks like an ’s’, the ’s’ looks like an ‘r’, and ‘r’ looks like an ’n’. ‘D’ can look like ‘o’, and sometimes a dot over a letter replaces the letter ‘h’ following it (ċat instead of chat). Many signs in Ireland use Latin alphabets for English and seanchló for Irish, and old printed documents in Irish often use seanchló exclusively.
The relationship between land names in Irish and in English is complicated. In many cases, a bizarre sounding place-name in English turns out to be the rendering of a fairly prosaic Irish description of the area: Clonskea for Cluain Sceach, Meadow of the Whithorns. Sometimes the English place-name is a direct translation of the Irish: Greystones for Na Clocha Liatha. And sometimes the name is entirely different in English and in Irish, which often indicates a troubled history for the area. Dublin is referred to as Baile Átha Cliath in Irish (often abbreviated to BÁC) as that was the name of the Irish-speaking settlement just north of the Norse town that eventually became the capital. It’s a long story.
What does Irish sound like, anyway? You may have noticed that I haven’t tried to approximate the pronunciation of any words I’ve given so far. That’s because there are sounds in Irish that aren’t in English, so I’d have to use an international phonetic alphabet to get it right. To my ears, Irish sounds a little like French, but with a lot of guttural (back-of-the-throat) and “sh” sounds. The inflection, or pattern of speech, of Irish has strongly influenced Hiberno-English, so if you’ve heard Irish people speaking English you’ve heard Irish inflection. Native Irish speakers also tend to speak fast and blend words together, so don’t be discouraged if you can’t match written to spoken Irish right away. Baile Átha Cliath, for instance, as written ought to sound like ‘BAHW-luh Aw-huh CLEE-ah’. But it is pronounced ‘BAHL-uh CLEE-ah’ and sometimes Irish speakers shorten it even further to something like ‘Blocklee’.
Hopefully this was a straightforward introduction to the Irish language for Americans who may not have encountered it before. Irish language instruction is available on Duolingo, on free and paid online courses, and in textbooks that come with audio recordings as well. I hope you get a chance to see it used, hear it spoken, read it, and maybe even try speaking or writing it yourself.
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This blog post was originally written for an Irish-language film night I hosted over the summer. It has been revised with considerable assistance from Gréagóir Ó Dáire. GRMA!
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