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Irish Language: Northern Ireland
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Even though the Abbey Theatre playwrights wrote in English (and indeed some disliked Irish) the Irish language affected them, as it did all Irish English speakers. The version of English spoken in Ireland, known as Hiberno-English bears striking similarities in some grammatical idioms with Irish. In contrast to English as spoken in England, Hiberno-English offers a greater range of expression. Some have speculated that even after the vast majority of Irish people stopped speaking Irish, they perhaps subsconsciously used its grammatical flair in the manner in which they spoke English. This fluency is reflected in the writings of Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and more recently in the writings of Seamus Heaney, Paul Durkan, Dermot Bolger and many others.
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Irish (Gaeilge), a Goidelic language spoken in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, is constitutionally recognised as the first official language of the Republic of Ireland. On 13 June 2005, EU foreign ministers unanimously decided to make Irish an official language of the European Union. The new arrangements will come into effect on 1 January 2007.
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Attitudes towards the Irish language in Northern Ireland have traditionally reflected the political differences between its two divided communities. The language has been regarded with suspicion by Unionists, who have associated it with Catholic dominated Republic in the south, and more recently, with the republican movement in Northern Ireland itself. Many republicans in Northern Ireland, including Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, learnt Irish while in prison, a development known as the jailtacht. The language was not taught in Protestant schools, and public signs in Irish were effectively banned under laws by the Parliament of Northern Ireland, which stated that only English could be used.
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Today in Ireland the Irish language is far from being a quaint remnant of an ancient time. The language has its own radio stations, newspapers, a vibrant contemporary literature, and even a recently established television channel. The Irish language today is an emphatic statement of Irish intellectual independence and the indisputable vitality and richness of Irish culture.
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The Irish language belongs to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family of languages which comprises Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Celtic speech was most likely first introduced to Ireland in the sixth century BC. The earliest evidence for such a specifically Irish variety of Celtic, Goidelic, is preserved in OGHAM inscriptions dating from approximately the fourth century BC.
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The Irish language is the language of the community in Gaeltacht regions but is ... expanding in popularity in places outside the Gaeltacht. According to the Census of 2002, 1.57 million people in the Republic of Ireland can speak Irish and 10.4 per cent of the people in Northern Ireland claim to have some knowledge of Irish. A group of immigrants have recently formed an organisation called iMeasc to promote the Irish language amongst people coming to live in Ireland.
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