Brian Ó Broin identifies in an Irish Times article that a potential schism is developing between Gaeilgeoirí, where ‘Gaeltacht and urban Irish speakers are finding each other increasingly more difficult to understand’. He outlines ways in which the spoken Irish of school and urban speakers differs in grammar, syntax and in-flection to that of Gaeltacht speakers and how they are increasingly disengaging with each other as a result.

The term ‘Gaeilge lofa líofa’ (rotten fluent Irish) is used by some Gaeltacht speakers to describe non-Gealtacht speakers, demonstrating that not only are the language groups disengaging from each other linguisti-cally, they are showing antagonism towards each other and engaging in negative stereotyping. While the recent census shows an increase in the use of Irish as a spoken language, it does not reveal these underlying currents of misrepresentation and disengagement between speak-ers. This is a process of sociolinguistic stratification and fragmentation with an already minority group and does not bode well for the future of the language.

GAEILGE LOFA LíOFARotten fluent Irish

THE

PRESENTSITUATION

NATIONAL FIGURES

>3s

CAN’T

CAN

<WEEKLY

WEEKLY

DAILY94,034

103, 132

Census 2011Conducted Sunday 10th, April 2011

Data mined from Ethnicity, Irish Language and Religion tables

Question 14 of the 2011 Irish census asks respondents aged 3 and over about their ability and frequency of use with regard to the Irish language. The question was framed as follows:

Can you speak Irish?

1 Yes 2 No

If ‘Yes’, do you speak Irish?Mark the boxes that apply.

1 Daily, within the education system2 Daily, outside the education system3 Weekly4 Less often5 Never

14

THE LANGUAGE QUESTION

Iris

h sp

oken

dai

ly

Irish spoken in

side t

he educ

atio

n sy

stem

outs

ide

educ

atio

n

Irish spoken outside the education system

57.4% 40.6%

10%

13.9%

11.9%

CAN’T CAN

NEVER

<WEEKLY

DAILY(education only)

2.4% WEEKLY

1.3% DAILY (outside education)

0.2% not-stated

0.9% DAILY(inside and outside education)

Number of respondents aged over 3 years of age

Number of respondents who indicated they can speak Irish

Number of respondents who speak Irish less often than weekly

Number of respondents who speak Irish weekly

Number of respondents who speak Irish daily

Number of respondents who indicated they can’t speak Irish

1 http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/census2011pdr/Pdf%208%20Tables.pdf 2 http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/documents/census2011pdr/Census%202011%20Highlights%20Part%201%20web%2072dpi.pdf

4,588,252POPULATION

TOTAL

94,034 DAILY SPEAKERS?The figures given here have been calculated directly from the published census table ‘Ethnicity, Irish Lan-guage and Religion’1, rather than using the figures as published in the census summary ‘This is Ireland’2 (the basis of most media reports). The summary document was found to be contradictory on a number of figures. For example, within the same page it states of the Gael-tacht population that ‘24.0 per cent indicated they spoke Irish daily outside the education system’ while further down the page it states ‘35%’. The published figure used to indicate the total number of daily speak-ers of Irish outside the education system is 77,185, yet the Ethnicity, Irish Language and Religion table states 55,554. This doesn’t take into account those who ticked both ‘Daily’ boxes (inside and outside the education system), who total 38,480. The total daily figure used here is 94,034, the addition of these two figures.

Irish spoken outside the education system

Irish spoken daily outside educationIrish spoken inside the education syste

m

68.5% 30%CAN CAN’T

15%DAILY(education only)

18.6%DAILY(outside education)

6.8%WEEKLY

16.7%<WEEKLY

4.8% NEVER

5.8% DAILY (inside and outside education)

0.8%not-stated

A new survey indicates that Gaeltacht and urban Irish speakers are finding each other increasingly more difficult to understand. Could this rift further weaken the language?

Recently, I’ve been meeting a lot of urban speak-ers of Irish, and was thinking about the Government’s plan to boost the number of daily speakers of Irish from the current 83,000 to 250,000 within 20 years. A threefold increase in daily speakers is a bold proposal, and there’s little doubt that these speakers are going to have to come from the towns and cities, rather than from the Gaeltacht, whose entire population (includ-ing several solidly anglophone suburbs of Galway city) is currently 91,000.

This got me thinking. Is there a city version of the Irish language? And if there is, how different is it from Gaeltacht Irish? A conversation I recently had with a speaker from Limerick, who is raising her daughter in Irish, revealed a fascinating fact. She never listened to Raidió na Gaeltachta. Was it that it was a Gael-tacht station and irrelevant to her, I asked? Only partly, she admitted.

It was actually because she found the presenters very difficult to understand. Yet this woman spoke flu-ent Irish. How could a fluent speaker of Irish have such difficulty with the national Irish-language radio station? What did she listen to?

‘Oh, the usual. RTÉ, Today FM, Live95.’ Surely she listened to some Irish-language media.

Maybe she watched TG4?‘No. Not TG4, sometimes Hector and the sports.’And she let her young daughter watch the

kids’ programmes. My conversations with Gaeltacht people met with a

similar bias, but in the other direction. When presenters with so-called ‘school Irish’ came on the radio, my Gaeltacht friends say they tend to tune out, finding the Irish unpleasant, or difficult to understand. They tolerate much of TG4’s output, but grimace or change channels when city speakers come on. As for the hordes of Irish-speaking teenagers and parents who descend on the Gaeltacht during the summer months, they absolutely prefer to speak English with them. They say that the city folks’ Irish is simply too strange.

As a linguist, I find this fascinating. The two groups, while nominally speaking the same language, have al-most no points of contact. They prefer to tune each other out or speak English with each other, rather than use Irish together. This seems to have all the hallmarks of a separation.

Brian Ó Broin, Irish Times

Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Incorrect phonetics • Gaeltacht: 0 to 7% of the time• Urban Irish: 21 to 66% of the time

Subclauses in sentences• Gaeltacht: 8 to 15 in every 10 sentences• Urban Irish: 5 to 6 in every 10 sentences

ScHISm FEARS FOR GAEILGEOIRí

250,000

200,000

150,000

100,000

50,000

02010

83,000/94,034

God be wiz you.How’s she cutting? We are here. It is vacation time. We will buy a house.

So how come you’re here? Is it because you’re looking for a holiday home?

as stated by Ó Broin, 2010

as calculated from Census 2011

Linguists tend to examine languages according to several criteria, and I decided to do a comparative analysis of the two types of Irish (Gaeltacht and non-Gaeltacht) using the most common of these criteria: pronunciation, word-order, word-formation, and vocabulary.

To do this, I transcribed recordings of news reports compiled and read by Gaeltacht speakers on Raidió na Gaeltachta, and then by urban speakers on the two urban Irish-language stations, Raidió Fáilte in Belfast and Raidió na Life in Dublin. Next I transcribed segments of chat shows from the different radio stations, in which the speakers were speaking freely. To avoid complicating matters, I chose the speakers at random, electing to ignore whether they were speakers who had learned Irish in the Gaeltacht or not.

A comparison of the recordings unearthed significant differences in all areas of analysis. Phonetics, or pronunciation, is a major feature of any language, and particularly so for Irish, which uses pronunciation to mark things such as the case of a noun or the tense of a verb.

Since Irish has very many distinct phonetic features, I chose only three for comparative analysis: slender dentals (the initial consonants of ‘teas’ and ‘tí’, for example), velar fricatives (the initial consonants of ‘chaisleán’ and ‘Chonnacht’, for example), and palatal fricatives (the initial consonants of ‘cheann’ and ‘chiseach’, for example).

Newsreaders on RnaG missed these features be-tween 0 and 7 per cent of the time (that is to say, not much), while newsreaders on the urban stations missed them between 21 and 66 per cent of the time, a fairly significant number.

This demonstrates differences in pronunciation between Gaeltacht and city, and suggests a significant difference in the grammar used by Irish speakers in urban areas.

Most linguists agree that syntactic sophistication can be partially marked by the presence of subclauses in sentences. So, one might argue that ‘Peter died because he was sick’ is more sophisticated than ‘Peter was sick and (then) he died’.

A count of subclauses in the texts shows that newsreaders on RnaG produce eight subclauses for every 10 sentences, while their counterparts in urban stations produce five. Gaeltacht speakers produce 15 subclauses for every 10 sentences, while their urban counterparts produce between six and eight. This is a considerable difference. Furthermore, urban speakers rarely nested subclauses within subclauses, while Gaeltacht speakers did so very frequently. The implications of this are quite serious, suggesting that the sentences of urban speakers are notably less sophisticated than those of their Gaeltacht counterparts.

Given all this, one might expect a lexical analysis of the texts to show that urban speakers have smaller vocabularies, but they actually seem to have much

the same vocabulary as their Gaeltacht counterparts. For every 100 words used by a Gaeltacht newsreader, 66 are discrete (that is to say, not repeated). For the urban newsreader, the number is 68. The Gaeltacht speaker has 46 discrete words per 100, while his urban counterpart has 42. The conclusion is that speakers within and without the Gaeltacht have a similar range of vocabulary.

Interestingly, although language activists often decry the presence of English in the utterances of all Irish speakers, the highest level of English for any of the speakers was 4 per cent, from a speaker who used in-terjections such as ‘níl aon, really, excitement’ and ‘you know, sin grand’.

This suggests, perhaps, that some (but not all) urban speakers are occasionally thinking partially in English, and translating what comes to mind on an ad-hoc basis.

Vocabulary • Gaeltacht: 66 non-repeated words in every 100• Urban Irish: 68 non-repeated words in every 100

morphology• Gaeltacht: missed 2 to 6% of expected mutations• Urban Irish: missed 40% of expected mutations

English interjections• Highest level of English used by any of the

speakers analysed was just 4%

‘Peter was sick and (then) he died’

2030

250,000

Arra, there’s a whole plethora of issues involved in buying a house. You might be gazumped yet!

Yes, a gamut of problems encompasses the process.

It’ll be really go hiontach for ye if you get it though.

Yes, b’fhéidir it will. You’ll have to get painting if you get the house for yourselves.

We will start painted the house when we receives the key.

Urban Irish doesn’t seem to be actually Anglicising, but it is different, particularly in the area of grammar.

Irish has a fairly sophisticated morphological sys-tem. That is to say, words can change form in several ways. The noun cainteoir, for instance, can mutate to gcainteoir, cainteora, chainteora, cainteoirí, and gcainte-oirí, depending on its grammatical function. As we saw earlier, if the pronunciation of these mutations alters or fails, the entire grammatical system of the language be-comes endangered.

When I analysed the expected morphological changes in the nouns of newsreaders, I found that news-readers on RnaG, reading the news and speaking off the cuff, missed a fairly unremarkable 2 to 6 per cent. Newsreaders on urban stations, however, missed 40 per cent of expected changes.

In terms of expected pronunciation, the relaxed ur-ban speakers missed almost every opportunity to len-ite or eclipse (‘séimhiú’ and ‘urú’), usually failing, for example, to mark any masculine nouns that were in the plural or genitive. This is an extraordinary develop-ment, and the urban dialect of Irish seems to have not yet developed any strategies to deal with it.

Urban Irish doesn’t seem to be actually Anglicising, but it is different, particularly in the area of grammar. Some experts might be tempted to call this new entity a Pidgin. Although the term has negative connotations, there is some justification for it. A Pidgin is a relatively unstable language with simplified pronunciation and grammar, created on the fly for purposes of practical communication. By definition, it has no native speakers. Should the Pidgin persist into another generation and further, it gains native speakers, becomes known as a Creole, and develops the hallmarks of an independent language, including a stable grammar.

The number of Irish speakers in Ireland is increas-ing, according to all census and survey data, and yet the number of Gaeltacht speakers is falling. However, the city dialect of Irish seems not yet to have progressed beyond the level of a second language spoken mostly outside the home by activists, while Gaeltacht Irish is, at least for its broadcasters, a medium through which they are working and thinking for most of the day without the undue influence of other languages.

Language purists may claim this as more evidence that Irish is dying, but it must be most vigorously noted that this small study shows quite the opposite. The lan-guage is being spoken in all corners of the country (and abroad), and while it might be changing radically, par-ticularly in this current generation, there is no evidence of it dying out. The good news is that there are urban Irish-language radio stations, and that they broadcast a wide variety of programmes directed primarily at young people. There were no such media 20 years ago, and this suggests that Ireland’s towns and cities are reaching a critical mass of second-language Irish speakers who want their own media.

If their language is to move beyond its current un-stable stage, however, they will have to consider making the decision to raise their children through Irish.

Some, such as my Limerick friend, are already do-ing so, and we can only wait to see what sort of Irish the next generation of urban speakers will have. Will the urban variety become its own dialect of Irish, or grow further apart from its Gaeltacht cousin, becoming a Creole or new language?

cREOLE

PIDGIN

Brian Ó Broin teaches linguistics and medieval literature at William Paterson University, New Jersey, US.

You know, I don’t want my kids to grow up with the same experience of Irish as I did. I want to change that. I want us to use the cúpla focal gach la agus nádúrtha, everyday and naturally. Where does it say that you have to be fluent to speak the cúpla focal?, it doesn’t. We can use it and just have fun with the language. We can be the generation that gets everybody using the cúpla focal. Bernard Dunne, Bernard Dunne’s Bród Club, RTÉ, Monday, March 12th, 2012.

250,000 OF?

2030

‘a real native speaker should have spent all his life in the same place speaking Irish

with the same neighbours’*

THE

NATIVEQUESTION

+ =A concept that is central to the debate within

the Irish speaking communities is that of the ‘native speaker’. This acts as a means of differentiating between speakers by defining the environment in which their language skills were acquired. In the context of the Irish language, ‘native speaker’ refers to people brought up in the Gaeltacht whos’ first language of communication is Irish. It is a term that carries a high status within the Irish language speaking communities and as such, it is narrowly defined and closely guarded.

‘Native speaker’ not only references the place of birth and the language of the family; it can also denote the linguistic difference between colloquial language and standardised language. Native and non-native be-comes a descriptor of the way in which you speak as much as where you were raised as a child and by whom. In this way, native and non-native become interchange-able terms with Gaeltacht and non-Gaeltacht.

For those not born of the Gaeltacht, the ability to speak like a native is highly prised in some quarters and derided in others. Taking on the terminology, pronun-ciation and inflections of a native is tantamount to real fluency for some, while seen as pretentious affectation by others. For some urban Irish speakers, it is important to speak the language keeping their own local accent rather than adopting Gaeltacht idiom. For those who do adopt a ‘native’ accent and approach, they can never truly be a native speaker simply because they don’t fit the defined criteria. Those born outside the Gaeltacht can be ‘fluent speakers’ or even ‘gaeilgeoirí’ (Irish speak-ers), but not ‘native speakers’.

+ NATIVE

Who can be a ‘native speaker’?

RAISED

+ =+ NATIVE

RAISED

mUm DAD

NATIVE GAEILGEOIR

+ =+ GAEILGEOIR

RAISED

+ =+ GAEILGEOIR

RAISED

mUm DAD

NATIVE NATIVE

mUm DAD

GAEILGEOIR GAEILGEOIR

GAEILGEOIR NATIVE

mUm DAD

NATIVE NATIVE

* Attributed to Reg Hindley in “How’s Dear Old Irish and Where Does it Stand: Stepping Stones into a Sociolinguistics of the Irish Language.” by Panu Petteri Höglund

http://gaeilgepanu.blogs.ie/2009/07/04/my-old-article-about-irish-sociolinguistics/

Gaeltacht

non-Gaeltacht

THE

DIVISIONSISSUE

Ó Broin’s Irish Times article identifies a linguistic schism developing between two groups, Gaeltacht and urban speakers. While this may be true, having just two categories of speakers is a simplification of a more com-plex reality. In practice, there are many groups and sub-groups within the Irish speaking population, each with its own practices, viewpoints and adherents. Each group is in effect a ‘clique’, a self-contained social group.

EVERYcLIQUE EXcLUDES.

Nowadays, the Irish language scene is as politically pluralistic as the Anglophone life in Ireland.*

EVERY HUmAN ENDEAVOUR HAS cLIQUES.

EVERY cLIQUE HAS INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS.

Höglund, Panu Petteri. “How’s Dear Old Irish and Where Does it Stand: Stepping Stones into a Sociolinguistics of the Irish Language.” Seo Panu ag labhairt.

http://gaeilgepanu.blogs.ie/2009/07/04/my-old-article-about-irish-sociolinguistics/*

cLIQUESTHE

There are many cliques within the communi-ties of people who speak Irish; some larger, some smaller, but all with their own character-istics and distinguishable cohorts. Importantly, there are also cliques within the English speak-ing communities of Ireland in their approach to the Irish language. How the Irish Anglo-phones feel about Gaeilge is highly influential on how the language progresses.

AS GAEILGE

CliqueA small and exclusive party or set, a narrow coterie or circle

CoterieA circle of persons associated together and distinguished from ‘outsiders’*

*Oxford English Dictionary

STANDARDSPEAKERS

LEARNERS/ImPROVERS ANGLOPHONES

URBANSPEAKERS

THE

PERcEPTIONISSUE

irrelevant unpleasant

too strange grimace

tolerate ignore

+

fíor Gaeilge (true Irish language)

- e

ndangered species

+ s

tand

ard

univ

ersa

l Gae

ilg

e

-

pass

able

lang

uage

skill

s

+ street G

aeilge

teen-friendly ‘Nua-Ghaeilge’

Gaeilge lofa líofa (rotten fluent Irish),

vacuous, linguistic prostitution

+–

proto-Gaeilge

irrelevant, fossilised fluency

(precious, snobbish)+

–

the source

, nati

ve-sp

eak

inaccu

rate,

local fl

uency

(elitis

t, para

noid)

+–

An Caig

hdeán (E

spera

nto Irish

)

fussy, fo

rmulai

c, drea

ry fluen

cy

(dogmati

c)

+–

optimistic new

comers

bad gramm

ar and vocabulary

+–achievable Irish, helpful

precise, preacher-teachers, no craic +–

mai

nstr

eam

Iri

sh

unco

ol, u

nins

pire

d, u

nori

gina

l + –

prog

ress

ive

Hec

tor

impe

rson

ator

fash

ion

vict

ims,

(too

coo

l for

sch

ool)

+ –

principledobstinate, narrow minded, lazy

courageousunrealistic traitors

+

normal

Irish

+ comm

ited learners

- grammarless

- Gaeilg

e tra

umat

ised

popularisingsacrilegious, defective fluency (cocky, presumptuous)

reference materialboring, meticulous fluency (stuck-up, judgemental)

honestunpatriotic, uncultured, soulless West-Brits

focussed, patriotic

Gaeilge obsessed, facist, wannabe natives

grammar

shy

unstructu

red, in

consis

tent (n

on-conform

ist)

potentia

l devo

tees

annoyin

g, sh

am im

itators

funding providers

Gallda (A

nglicsed), apatheitic, ambivilent, hostile

living museum

redundant, insular, funding spongers

the

livin

g la

ngua

gedi

scou

ragi

ng, u

nint

ellig

ible

,

sec

ret s

ocie

ty

infe

ctio

usly

ent

husi

astic

ince

ssan

t béa

rlac

has

(

Engl

ish

gram

mar

Gae

ilge)

Cliques get their sense of cohesion by defin-ing everything outside the clique as different. The various cliques within Irish hold distinct viewpoints and opinions about the language, about themselves and about the other cliques. The majority of the points of difference made between one clique and another are negative. They emphasise what is perceived as being wrong about how the other clique speaks or approaches the language.

ARcHETYPESTHE

While there are many cliques and many percep-tions within and about Irish, there are essentially just three archetypes within the language debate: the native speakers, the Gaeilgeoirí, and the Anglophones. These three archetypes have differing views about themselves and the others, and about how they relate to each other within the island of Ireland.

Ó Broin identifies that a schism is appearing be-tween Gaeltach and urban speakers of Irish, but this only displays part of a larger picture of discord between language groups. In practice, schisms can only happen where there is a lack of communication. Native speak-ers, Gaeilgeoirí and Anglophones all engage in negative stereotyping. Over time, this forces the groups to move further and further away from each other, decreasing the communication between them.

Ó Broin identified that a schism is in progress, in the present tense. This implies that it is not complete, and as such, it is not inevitable and may be reversed.

LANGUAGE IS cOmmUNITcATION

A ScHISm cAN BE HALTEDIT cAN BE REVERSED

BUT FIRST IT NEEDS TO BE AcKNOWLEDGED

NATIVE GAEILGEOIR ANGLOPHONE

The native speakers, whose first language is Irish. The Gaeilgeoirí, who engage with Irish to various ex-tents as a second language or chosen primary language.

The Anglophones who have no Irish, or who may have been taught Irish, but choose not to speak it.

GEOGRAPHY

Ní LIA DUINE Ná BARúILNíOR BHRIS FOcAL mAITH FIAcAL RIAmHNíL LUIBH Ná LEIGHEAS IN AGHAIDH AN BHáISAR ScáTH A cHéILE A mHAIREANN NA DAOINE

There are as many people as opinionsA good word never broke a tooth

There is no remedy or cure against deathUnder the shelter of each other, people survive