language

language. Nothing is known of the pre‐Celtic language(s) of Ireland. By the first centuries of the Christian era the inhabitants of Ireland were speaking an early form of Irish. Colonists took the language to Scotland and constant maritime contact ensured that Irish and Scottish remained mutually intelligible until the 13th century. Christian missionaries in the 5th century brought a knowledge of Latin, which became the language of the liturgy. The Viking settlers of the 9th and 10th centuries brought Norse with them, though they seem to have learned Gaelic—albeit overlaid with Norse features—within a few generations. Nordic Gaelic was swamped everywhere in Ireland and Scotland though it survived in the Isle of Man.

The Cistercian reforms of the Irish church and the Anglo‐Norman invasion had a profound effect on Irish; native learning was no longer cultivated in the monastic centres. The secularization of Irish learning gave rise to the great bardic families and their standard and archaizing literary dialect, known by modern scholars as Early Modern or Classical Irish. This artificial literary diction common to Ireland and Scotland was taught in the native schools until the collapse of the Gaelic order after the battle of Kinsale (Dec. 1601). In western Scotland the literary medium survived until the early 18th century.

English was introduced by the Anglo‐Normans. Although some of the higher nobility may have spoken French, the bulk of the colonists must have been monoglot English speakers. There is evidence for French as a literary language but no clear indication that it was ever widely spoken. Indeed the total absence of French place names in Ireland suggests that French was never a vernacular in the country.

The weakening of the English colony and the Gaelic recovery of the 14th and 15th centuries eliminated English from much of Ireland. English was known in the larger towns at this period and in the Pale and south Wexford. Everywhere else Irish was spoken. As late as 1515 many of the nobility, Gaelic and Old English alike, knew no English. Nor did the Reformation alter the picture immediately; it is apparent from those involved in translating Anglican devotional works in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that many of the native literati had accepted the reformed faith while remaining Irish speakers.

English was reintroduced gradually following the Tudor conquest. Yet Irish remained the language of the majority of Irishmen and women until c.1745. Thereafter the language began its inexorable decline, as many monoglots learned English from the local hedge schoolmasters. Immediately before the Great Famine, however, Irish was still spoken by about half the population of 8 million. In the first decade or so after the founding of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, in 1795, a quarter of the students knew no English on arrival. Many more were bilingual. English was the everyday language of the college, however, and Latin was the medium of instruction. Daniel O's Connell himself was a native speaker of Irish but was dismissive of the language.

Irish was widely spoken in much of Ulster. Many of the planters were themselves Gaelic speakers from Scotland and a significant proportion of Ulster Protestants were of native Irish stock. As late as 1835 the Synod of all Presbyterian ministers. In 1841 the Presbyterian General Assembly published a handbook for teachers of Irish, which was described as ‘our sweet and memorable mother tongue’.

The shift from the indigenous language (Irish) to the language of the conquerors (English) weakened the attachment of the Irish to their own country. Indeed it can be argued that the loss of the Irish language is the decisive event in Irish history, since it altered radically the self‐understanding of the Irish and destroyed the continuity between their present and their past. This view was implicit in Hyde's project for the de‐Anglicization of Ireland, though Hyde was unable to distinguish modernization from the speaking of English. Although the revival has not been wholly successful, all surveys show that a majority of Irish people value the language as a mark of identity. There is some evidence that the weakening of traditional Catholicism is leading to a reassessment of Irish as a central element in the national identity.

Bibliography

de Fréine, S. , The Great Silence (1965)
Ó Snodaigh, P. , The Hidden Ulster (1973)
Tovey, H.,, Hannan, D.,, and and Abramson, H. , Why Irish? Irish identity and Irish Language (1989)

Nicholas Williams