History of the Irish language

Old Irish was the first written vernacular language north of the Alps, and it first appeared in the margins of Latin manuscripts as early as the 6th century.

[11] One of the most notable Old Irish texts was the Senchas Már, a series of early legal tracts that are alleged to "have been redacted from a pre-Christian original by Saint Patrick.

[15][16] The grammar of Early Modern Irish is laid out in a series of grammatical tracts written by native speakers and intended to teach the most cultivated form of the language to student bards, lawyers, doctors, administrators, monks, and so on in Ireland and Scotland.

[21][22][23] A combination of the introduction of state funded, though predominantly denominationally Church delivered, primary education (the National Schools), from 1831, in which Irish was omitted from the curriculum till 1878, and only then added as a curiosity, to be learnt after English, Latin, Greek and French,[24][25] and in the absence of an authorised Irish Catholic bible (An Biobla Naofa) before 1981,[26] resulting in instruction primarily in English, or Latin.

[28] Economic opportunities for most Irish people arose with the Second Industrial Revolution in the English-speaking British Empire and United States.

Contemporary reports spoke of Irish-speaking parents actively discouraging their children from speaking the language, and encouraging the use of English instead.

[25] It has been argued, however, that the sheer number of Irish speakers in the nineteenth century and their social diversity meant that both religious and secular authorities had to engage with them.

Irish speakers insisted on using the language in the law courts (even when they knew English), and it was common to employ interpreters.

The initial moves to reverse the decline of the language were championed by Anglo-Irish Protestants such as the linguist and clergyman William Neilson, towards the end of the 18th century, and Samuel Ferguson; the major push occurred with the foundation by Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) in 1893, which was a factor in launching the Irish Revival movement.

Writers who have used Hiberno-English include J. M. Synge, Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and more recently in the writings of Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan, and Dermot Bolger.

[36] Hyde resigned from its presidency in 1915 in protest when the movement voted to affiliate with the separatist cause; it had been infiltrated by members of the secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood, and had changed from being a purely cultural group to one with radical nationalist aims.

The Catholic Church also replaced its liturgies in Latin with Irish and English following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and its first Bible was published in 1981.

There was some initial enthusiasm – a Dáil decree of March 1922 required that the Irish versions of names on all birth, death and marriage certificates would have to be used from July 1923.

[43] Those areas of the state where Irish had remained widespread were officially designated as Gaeltachtaí, where the language would initially be preserved and then ideally be expanded from across the whole island.

[citation needed] The government refused to implement the 1926 recommendations of the Gaeltacht Commission, which included restoring Irish as the language of administration in such areas.

If an Irish speaker wanted to apply for a grant, obtain electricity, or complain about being over-taxed, they would typically have had to do so in English.

As late as 1986, a Bord na Gaeilge report noted "...the administrative agencies of the state have been among the strongest forces for Anglicisation in Gaeltacht areas".

The principal ideologue was Professor Timothy Corcoran of University College Dublin, who "did not trouble to acquire the language himself".

These reforms were met with a negative reaction and many people argued that these changes marked a loss of the Irish identity in order to appease language learners.

In the 1950s, An Caighdeán Oifigiúil ("The Official Standard") was introduced to simplify spellings and allow easier communication by different dialect speakers.

[48] An ad-hoc "Language Freedom Movement" that was opposed to the compulsory teaching of Irish was started in 1966, but it had largely faded away within a decade.

Overall, the percentage of people speaking Irish as a first language has decreased since independence, while the number of second-language speakers has increased.

[57]) Smaller numbers of Irish speakers exist in Britain, Canada (particularly in Newfoundland), the United States of America and other countries.