Good to hear your point of view. In a way, I would argue that we're agreeing The dialects issue almost stopped you from learning Irish (whatever form you were interested in).

A person who's reading this and considering just learning some Irish should simply get started. Be it with Bitesize Irish Gaelic, or Rosetta Stone, or just free text lessons over at Erin's Web.

(I just had to add this following note, but I do recognise I'm not being highly constructive To say that making available a learning resource marginalises Gaeltacht native speakers is pushing it too far. Does Bríd, a Conamara native, feel marginalised by the existance of an additional service? Oh come on.)

For learning Gaoluinn, if you haven't already done so, I'd suggest investigating the services of Oidhreacht Chorca Dhuibhne. They pride themselves in teaching local Irish.

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Take the free email course Irish for Beginners by Bitesize Irish.

I agree that there is room for everyone.

When you grow up and learn Irish outside of the Gaeltacht in Ireland, the dialect thing seems very intimidating. Rightly or wrongly, there is a caighdeán (standard) that is the most commonly spoken Irish in Ireland today. It may seem ironic given how artifical the caighdeán itself is, but it seems artificial for someone who speaks standard Irish, who lives far from the Gaeltacht, to be told you should be selecting a dialect from an area other than your own. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of it, the caighdeán seems to be providing non-Gaeltacht areas with a common 'dialect'. Before someone quotes me saying the caighdeán is not a dialect, I know that, but it is performing the function for non-Gaeltacht areas. I also, of course, agree wholeheartedly that the dialects should be protected.

I think there should be learning programmes to accommodate all.

Anything that makes Irish accessible to learners and promotes Irish properly - be it dialectal or standard - is a good thing in my book.

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but actually most advanced learners, ie. non-native speakers who are more or less fluent, speak a blend of standard Irish and some dialect(s) because those who are more or less fluent often spent time in the Gaeltacht, where people don't speak standard Irish. And on top of that, there's no standard pronunciation so you are influenced by one dialect or another (or several ones) when pronouncing.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

To me, the standard itself is not a bad thing to have but quite a lot of people, including teachers, are confusing the standard with a creole of anglicised Irish. These are and should be recognised as two different things.

As I've mentioned several times, a standard based on the traditional sounds common to most of the native Gaeltacht dialects is possible, and has been done in Buntús Cainte and some other texts. I think the second Teach Yourself Irish was another and Linguaphone was yet another example (if somewhat out of reach to most users because of its expensive price.)

Unfortunately, far too many people are using the fact that the standard doesn't prescribe pronunciation as an excuse to make up an anglicised pronunciation based on their English dialect. Most of the cartoons on TG4 seem to be dubbed into this creole pronunciation.

Standard Irish based on traditional phonemes might be a binding and uniting force for the language and a stepping stone to the dialects but creole Irish is a step further away and is exacerbating the divide between the standard and the dialects.

Unfortunately, it is easier for second language learners to use the creole because it maps straight to English, phonemically and idiomatically.

And then you end up with situations such as in this video here where two creole Irish speakers are discussing how they can understand each other but not people from Spiddal or Gweedore. It reminds me of Japanese speakers claiming to understand each other's English, or even the English of other Asians, better than the English of native speakers (and also Gaijin who say the same about each other's Japanese.)

I understand that Bríd felt quite marginalised when she met the fellow in that video, Donovan Nagel, and he couldn't understand her, even though she doesn't have a particularly strong accent.


When I first took up your invitation, your pronunciation was very anglicised and there was a lot that needed correcting. In the end, I had quite a long list of things to fix and I got busy with other things.

As I have said, though, your pronunciation has been improving. I still don't believe it is quite at native level - despite your claim to be a native speaker, you still diphthongise your long vowels, for instance, as no native Gaeltacht speaker would do - but I do think it is showing signs of improvement nevertheless.


You have to be careful with TG4, because a lot of the material, cartoons especially, is dubbed or presented in creole Irish by non-native speakers with lots of mistakes, as we found with the dinosaur DVD here.

This DVD material was produced by a firm that does some of the cartoons for TG4 and was supposedly checked and approved by three teachers, yet besides mistakes due to anglicised pronunciation, we also found basic mistakes that were recognised as being wrong by even the most lenient members, such as replying to Dia duit with Dia duit instead of Dia's Muire duit. Such is the level on some of the "free resources".

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[hr]Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher[/hr]
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

Unless his Irish has substantially improved since that video was shot, I'm not surprised that he had a hard time understanding natural speech, though I think it has more to do with his experience level than with the dialect issue. Sadly, a lot of learners spend very little time training their ears to hear the sounds of the language spoken naturally. It's a little bit like trying to play trad music from the dots without having spent a lot of time listening to music played by good, traditional, musicians

"Speaking Irish" is a good program for that, by the way. Ear training for intermediate learners. Do we have a page for it yet?

Redwolf

By whose definition?

Personally, I've started using the term "native non-native" to describe this sort of situation.

Because while he may be a "native speaker" of something, what he's a native speaker of is not "Irish", but "non-native Irish".

This is only an emotive issue because we're talking about Irish. If my parents (one Irish, one Scottish) had chosen to learn Portuguese when they got married and they brought me up speaking Portuguese in my wee Scottish village, would you consider what I spoke to be "Portuguese"? It would be almost Portuguese, but it would be completely indistinguishable from the Portuguese of any sufficiently advanced adult learner. My parents have no links whatsoever to Portugal (well, they've visited it a few times, but the first time was after I left for uni) I would have no real emotional attachment to Portugal or the need to identify myself as Portuguese -- it would just be a personal curiosity. But for an Irish person living in Ireland, there is a natural desire to identify with "Irishness".

If we start down this road, we can justify any level of ability by saying that it's theorectically native equivalent, because if two adult learners started talking that way to a child at an early-enough age, the child would end up acquiring that broken language as a native language....


But equally, starting out by learning Hawai'ian isn't much of a hindrance to learning a dialect of Irish down the road. But you've still got to learn two languages. If you learn both standard and a dialect, it's not like you're learning two entirely distinct languages, but it's still more work.


The polar opposite is the position where learners are given a nice, safe, easy Irish, then get completely stumped when they try to deal with traditional, natural Irish.

It's easy to overlook the danger of this. If you build a big enough speech community of Gaeilge briste speakers, they'll eventually drown out the native speakers. And worse, you get an "identity war", where the learners have invested so much time and money in the learning process that they identify as "Irish speakers", even though the native speakers can't understand a word they say. Native speakers refuse the learners' self-identification as "Irish speakers" and the only way the learners can defend their identity is by belittling and dismissing the native speakers -- precisely the people whose help they need if they ever want to approach the status of a "speaker" of the language.


A person who's reading this and considering just learning some Irish or any other language should run screaming from Rosetta Stone. It's all style and no substance, and you've just made me highly unlikely to ever go anywhere near your commercial services if you've got such a low opinion of your own product that you'd mention it in the same breath as RS.


Pushing it too far? Not at all. Have you heard the one about the straw that broke the camel's back? Natural "heritage" Irish is under constant pressure from the standard. It's not just about the artificiality of the standard and its daft aims of "simplification", but it's also about the general culture of education. School teaches us that there is "good" and "bad" language, that is to say "correct" and "incorrect" grammar. Unfotunately, school generally teaches us grammar that can be statistically proven to be incorrect, in that the majority of us break the "rules". (eg We say "Can I have this?", the rules say "may I have this?") And school teaches us that errors are things that must be corrected.

Everything that elevates the nua marginalises the sean-nós. The same thing is happening to a lesser extent in Scotland.


On a somewhat off-topic note...


Diphthongs... now there's a question I've been meaning to ask. I'm told the standard was written by non-native speakers. I've also seen it said that they removed silent letters that are still used in Scottish Gaelic. My problem is, most of the so-called "silent" letters in Scottish Gaelic are lenitions that are realised as a a nasalisation or diphthongisation of the preceding vowel. The best example is -igh at the end of a word, where the GH becomes a slight Y-glide. Now I see the standard Irish has made that -í.

If an English ear can't hear the difference between a pure vowel and a diphthong in Scottish Gaelic, I'm not very keen to trust English-speaking sources that tell me there's no y-glide in the Irish either.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

Yes, there are certainly cases where native speakers diphthongise or nasalise that aren't represented in the current orthography.

These are different, of course, from the diphthongisation of long é, etc., in Irish by English speakers (/ei/ instead of /e:/) that arise because the pure vowel forms no longer exist in English (and the learner is inappropriately mapping the same sound directly to Irish.)

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[hr]Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher[/hr]
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

In which case, learning standard Irish can and does present an impediment to later learning of a dialect.

If the standard doesn't represent all the distinct sounds (phonemes) of a language, it's a problem. Let's get away from Irish for a second, to make it less personal.

I used to know a French guy who taught French privately in Edinburgh. Like most French people, he didn't pronounce his English TH sounds. But unlike most French people, he can pronounce TH sounds -- both of them. But because he spent so long pronouncing TH as D or T, he has now learned "this" as being the same as "diss" etc. In order to use TH in his everyday speech, he would essentially need to relearn every word containing a TH in it. Too much effort for too little reward.

I nearly suffered the same thing in Spanish. I started with a course that didn't make the distinction between S and Z, which is how they speak in Latin America and the south of Spain. But when I started hanging about with people from central and northern Spain, I tried to pick up their way of speaking. I constantly confused my Ss and Zs in speaking, even though I knew the spelling well enough to write them correctly.

Learning a version of the language with a reduced sound system can be a real problem when you try to learn a broader version later.

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A language belongs to its native speakers, and when you speak it, you are a guest in their homes.
If you are not a good guest, you have no right to complain about receiving poor hospitality.

This is anecdotal evidence at best. Let's say you spent 100 hours learning Spanish, and then to correct your phonemes it took 50 hours. That's 150 hours.

How can you be sure that if you tried learning spanish with the correct phoneme's from the start that it wouldn't take longer than that? Perhaps it would've taken you 170 hours, since the initial learner curve would have been so much greater. But you can never know that since you've already learned Spanish now...so really, your evidence is evidence of something being difficult, but not being *more* difficult, which is what we should care about. Same goes for the case of your French friend.

(I'm using completely bullshit and arbitrary numbers for the sake of argument, by the way)

I really don't have a lot of problems adjusting sounds. If I learned something one way and later learned it another, it's generally not been a problem making the switch. But then, I do the same thing in English. I'm one of those annoying people whose English shifts radically to mirror what I'm hearing around me, with the result being that I tend to acquire accents and local modes of speech very quickly, and without thinking about it.

The exception, though, is if I learn something in a song. There's something about music that fixes a pronunciation in my brain, and makes it very difficult for me to pronounce the word correctly in that particular song. That's why I never sing "Maidrín Rua"...I learned it from a recording by someone whose Irish was...er...questionable. She pronounced the word "maith" as "mee" (I don't know where she got that!), and when I hit that line "Is maith an cú thú, Bateman" I ALWAYS mispronounce it, even though I know darned good and well how to say it!

Redwolf