Why does ireland speak english

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Its poetic flow can be heard in schools across the country and throughout the shops, pubs, streets, fairs and festivals of the Gaeltacht Irish speaking regions.

Foras na Gaeilge , the public body responsible for promoting Irish on the island of Ireland, is a good first stop. In Northern Ireland, English is the first language. And what is Ullans? Have you heard of Scotsman Robert Burns?

Hiberno-English blends the grammatical styling of Irish into the English language. Here are a few phrases you might hear on your travels:. If you feel like having a go, here are a few phrases to get you started…. Author Felicity Hayes-McCoy who lives in the Gaeltacht area of Dingle in County Kerry, has this advice for visitors wanting to tune into the language:.

You can even sign up for a language course or check out one of the online sites like Bitesize Irish before you get here, just to give yourself a flavour of what to expect".

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There a lot of funding put in but its not working Is feider liomsa labhairt as Gaeige but most cant. Irish Translation — I have Irishheritage and speak some Irish. It is mandatory for children in Irish schools to learn Irish. All through out Ireland You will Irish road signs and Irish words everywhere, this article is misleading and misinforming people.

Would someone with half-decent Irish care to comment, mas e do thoil e? Marconatrix, yes, plural forms would have been in the fashion long time ago as a mark of respect also, cant say exactly how long ago, but not so common now — same as with the French….

You could visit most of the country and never hear it unless you visited a Gaeltacht which are the few regions where Irish is still spoken as the primary language but everyone in those areas speaks fluent English too as the article explains.

The topmost map is faulty. Perhaps the author might fix it? Thank you. Geographically you could say that Northern Ireland is in the north-east of the island. A separate country ya moron. No such country as northern Ireland. And must we have harsh criticism when people do make the effort to use Gaelic? I agree , obviously, that Northern Ireland is occupied territory. Speaking of languages I speak and write English, French and would love to learn the irish language!

My godson speaks English, French, Spanish, and German! My thoughts exactly!!! Hi Fred. To this day Irish is the most commonly used language in my local supermarket and other shops, credit unions and post offices. My three sons speak Irish, my neighbors are all fluent and Irish is their language of choice.

Mass is said in Irish. Still flying the flag for Irish here in Donegal. Agree Fred, misleading indeed. Number of Irish speakers are increasing and North of Ireland is in the process of trying to implement an Irish Language Act to facilitate Irish speakers.

New Bunscoils opening all the time in Belfast and the Liofa prog encouraging this. Irish is not dead and will not die out now. No thanks to the policies of the colonising British government. There is some funding fur Gaelic in Scotland, but, even in the Heilans an Islands, it disnae amount tae a major proportion o the budget, an is naething compared tae the fundin fur English eddiction an culture.

Furthermore it was banned in the court systems. TA eolas seo mi cheart. Tir gan tanga tir gan anam. Did you never hear of the Gaelic League and the Claidheamh Soluis, a newspaper that published in Irish?

How could they have promoted the language if Irish was banned? Well said, this is very true. The English did exactly the same in 19th-century Welsh schools with the Welsh Not.

Where they can use language to intimidate and oppress, they will. England is governed by a repulsive, bullying, imperialist culture that is continuing now with the thought police in mainstream education. For most people its not an easy language to learn because the rules you need to learn make little sense but you have to memorise lists of words rather than actually learning to use the language.

Language also functions as a mark of identity and gives you a way of communicating with a particular group of people. In this way a shared outlook and culture is established and maintained. Which makes them part of the near-universal Anglo-American culture, a culture which on the whole they have little chance of influencing. I have always thought that what we did was take over the English language and avenge ourselves by using it better than the English did.

We colonised English and grew some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. And that tradition looks set to continue. I think a lot of Irish have unfortunately internalized the British stereotype that Irish was an inferior language and are struggling to let that go. This was not a plot point, it was just treated as perfectly normal for anyone with a basic education to understand English.

Are your schools really that awful? Nevertheless, even though I had far far fewer French lessons than you would have had Irish less than 5 years of study , I can still read French if I have to, and could at least manage a basic conversation if the need ever arouse. And remember I had no love for French and no particular aptitude for languages I was a science type.

Most Irish people are able to manage a basic conversation, and a decent proportion are able read Irish to some degree. Why not tell the same thing to an English-speaking Australian, New Zealander, Scot, or American and see how far it gets you.

The native peoples of these regions, to the extent that they still survive, have their own identities. Scotland btw is a much more complex case, the nation was formed by the coming together of Scots, Picts, Angles, and Britons, with a later contribution from the Norse, and indeed many others. Well done, Marconatrix! Your last few comments sum up completely the situation in the island of Ireland. Those that argue that being Irish is more than the language are completely correct, in so far as it has completely nothing to do with the language at all at least, now anyway.

Ireland has been utterly colonised. Saying Irish merely means English 2. It merely denotes a location where you were born and that you may speak English with a funny accent, and speak with some crossover elements of Gaelic language grammar to make Hiberno-English. Now, you likely noticed I referred to the indigenous language as Gaelic.

The fact of the matter is that to be truly a native of the land of Ireland is to be an independent Gael, and speak An Gaeilge. The narrative that by having English as our expression makes us relevant is bunkum. As you well pointed out the rest of Europe laughs at us for being pseudo English.

However a Gael can be Irish if they chose. Essentially being Irish only denotes the political or geographic boundary you hail from, and then it is entirely up to that person whether they further differentiate themselves from the colonised Irish identity.

The native people from the ex-colonies of the British Empire were wiped out, and Ireland is no different. Yup, the English. While on the issue of Irish as reference to the language, this is a political stunt in my view, that has been played out over a number of decades, so as to closer align the native language with the political entity of Ireland. They are opposite sides of the same coin.

A spectrum from the tip of southern Ireland to the other side in Scotland. We have lost the native eastern Ulster dialects, which many attest to be the bridging dialect that connected the rest of Irish Gaelic and its northern neighbour in Scotland. When the language was crushed in the north east of Ireland it was well understood how it would change the face of the way the language would be considered.

Consider that Ulster before the plantation was THE most Gaelic region of the entire island with little Norman presence. Who would even contemplate this nowadays?

Now we have people telling us that we have the Irish language, that conveniently matched the borders of the land. Having to refer to An Gaeilge as Irish when discussing the issue in English plays the political labelling in my book. It removes the ability to think for yourself. Bear in mind people are arguing over the fact in the English language. I think I can shed some light on another thing people seem to forget. Up until recently we were still in the troubles, 20 years ago my mother was strip searched in a British airport while 8 months pregnant on me because she had an Irish sounding name and Irish was linked with the IRA attacks.

A lot of Irish people have internalised the British idea that Irish is an inferior language, and anyone who speaks it is more likely to have links to radical factions. It doesnt help either that those who identify with being a Gaeilgeoir tend to look down on Irish that dont speak it in everyday life, leading to a sabotage not only from colonisation but from other Irish themselves, leading to a lot of people wanted not to try to speak it at all.

Also I am Irish and I speak french and Italian better because I have a chance to speak them -because they are spoken languages. Speaking Irish is not essential to being and being bilingual is ideal. Yes,it is bizarre,as you would think that most people in Ireland,should be Bi-lingual at least,after all that effort and expense put into promoting the language,by well intentioned groups…But when i was young,i went to Ballingeary Gaeltacht ,co.

The same will apply in New Zealand if they try to teach Maori in all our schools and make it compulsory,it would be a total waste of time and money , in Ireland you can choose to go to an Irish only school and many do they learn all subjects through the medium of Irish. Thats the only way to keep the language going. The Irish are doing a great job in all schools but at a great cost.

Yes it really is that bad. About a third of everyday in primary school is spent on Irish and it is the second most taught subject in secondary school. I am one of the best people at it in my school, but I could not for the life of me hold a conversation. And actually I must confess it was mostly fun and more to the point a lot of the language stuck, became internalised.

So that yes, I could within the limits of my vocabulary etc. A third of every day, really? You ought to be dreaming in the effing language by the end of a mouth or two.

Or simply take the boat across to Wales. English because of the influence of the media and the internet- is essential for most people who want widen their sphere of influence-or learning- beyond their own country. We may regret the hegemony of the English language but you surely realise that what drives effective language learning is either necessity or desire and admittedly very good teaching can sometimes create the desire to learn.

I have met a few Scandinavians and they tell me that it was British and American films and then the internet that were their greatest teachers. I occasionally work with young exiled Tibetans in India and many of them tell me that they find English easier to learn than written Tibetan. Of course the Brits took it away from you.

Of course English predominates. So, I am a citizen of, and born in, the land of the USA. When we went to a shop selling tourist memorabilia a great deal of the stuff was in Welsh.

Then we saw a book shop selling only Welsh language books. Scotland take note! Well in comparison with the dying out of Irish, you could cite the reemergence of Hebrew. After the Jewish exile to Babylon in bc, the daily use of Hebrew died out and was replaced with Aramaic and Jidisch. Hebrew was then on only used for religious rituals, by with the emergence of zionistic ideals came the need to redefine jewish identity, and Hebrew was taught again and many people in Israel now talk a language that was deemed extinct.

The reintroduction of Hebrew was a fantastic achievement, but in that case a new common tongue had to emerge anyway — it could have been English, or Arabic, or something else — but it became Hebrew. Though those who wished Irish to reemerge as the first language of the nation did hold a lot of sway in the country the first President, Douglas Hyde, was the founder of the Gaelic League , when the people all already have a common tongue its difficult to convince them to swap to something else, no matter how romantic the idea may be.

Several of these nations had suffered considerable attrition of their traditional languages e. How far, I wonder, is this true, or simply a way of passing off the blame onto others? Israel is actually called Palestine and is land stolen from the Palestinian people murdered and tortured for half a century with hundreds of children in prison.

Jewish is fine, Israel exists due to genocide of the native inhabitants. Very good post! Me, not so much! Maybe just a word here and there, maybe a night out in the pub when someone takes it into their head to start speaking Irish. That I love — because it seems everyone enjoys it while it lasts! So perhaps something is lacking in conversational Irish, when taught?

So how do you explain that? Some people are very quick on the uptake with languages, for others the process is much more gradual, but 10 years ought to be enough for anyone to at least make everyday small-talk. So what exactly is going on here? Are you somehow excluded as a foreigner, or feel excluded? Do you or they have some sort of mental block or inhibition?

The future of Irish and many more small languages in a similar situation may depend on understanding the answer. Go raibh maith as do am.

I just happened to watch this item from Wales earlier today. I also like to compare Irish with the situation of Afrikaans, and a few other languages. There are quite similarities, some not. Such as war. Wealth used to be a factor, sometimes much more so than any political view. But three factors bringing the downfall of Irish, more so than French in Quebec: linguistic isolation, nowhere to go, and complexity. English has a much more simplified grammar than any European language.

If English would be considered the national language of say, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Denmark; those languages are too much complex to compete with English.

And that was a risk: No resources! A clean slate. Tabula rasa. English, in the Cape, were only restricted to the Cape Town area. More wealthy parents sent their offspring to the Netherlands to study. Being unable to write Dutch, they would automatically switch to English, which is much easier. And it worked, for a while. In the mean time, Transvaal [as product of the Great Trek] were Dutch, with Dutch teachers imported , Dutch used to be the government language, the legal language were written in Dutch, etc.

And then came the Anglo-Boer War. In fact, German used to be the No. Today it is China. But German could be bloody difficult for some: only the best will pass the C2-Zertifikat. Only the best would study German or French. While Ireland has its own language and distinct cultural identity, English is the universal spoken language and is one of the reasons why so many multinational businesses locate their European base here. It also makes Ireland a great choice for international students.

English is now the global language of business.