This is no Linguistic Atlas and Survey of the Irish Dialects, having been pulled from usage data on the net, but it is a map, and we all love maps...

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mi ... kYVBfLLpw4

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Wow. Ní fhaca mé sin ariamh.

And here is the main page:
http://indigenous119.rssing.com/chan-60 ... ll_p2.html

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Would all Irish speakers accept that, let's say, Cois Farraige be chosen and be taught in all schools?

Normally artificial dialects are created because they can contain elements from all major dialects, so everyone's partly represented. They also have the advantage that the standard can be updated to reflect how its native speakers use it, which is important because languages evolve. If half a million people start speaking Cois Farraige (the dialect), it won't stay forever identical to what's heard on the roads of Cois Farraige (the place). But yeh, using one natural dialect as a starting point for The Standard would be fine, if everyone would accept the choice of dialect.


This shouldn't be a problem. In the Netherlands, Flanders, the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, and most of Germany people speak dialect at home and a standardised dialect at school and they've no problem maintaining their dialects.


Everything else I read says the language was at risk of going extinct. If we're to fix problems, we first have to accept that problems exist.

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Pages I made:
(These are unfortunately offline for the near future, but they'll be back!)

• Teaching Young Kids Irish (It's just my notes, a work in progress.)
• CD transcript and translations for the book Learning Irish

Well then the standard just needs to be reviewed. In other countries, the standard dialect chooses between things that exist already, and a preference is given to simpler grammar. (For example, there are three noun genders in Old Dutch, and some dialects maintain all three, but others use only two, so the standard decided to use two.)

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Pages I made:
(These are unfortunately offline for the near future, but they'll be back!)

• Teaching Young Kids Irish (It's just my notes, a work in progress.)
• CD transcript and translations for the book Learning Irish

Very interesting indeed! I'm of course not native, nor even fluent, and I agree that the Dublin dialect currently doesn't exist as a living language, but...

When I listen to Donegal people speaking Irish today, there's a lot in common to the way they speak English. So, if Donegal Irish had died out a hundred years ago and we weren't 100% sure what their dialect sounded like, would it be better today to organise a revival that teaches them all to speak Irish like they're from, for example, Cois Farraige?

If Irish made a big comeback in Dublin, would it be natural for Dubliners to speak Irish like they're from Cois Farraige or would it be more normal if their Irish sounded somewhat like how they speak English? (Or do recordings exist of an old Dublin dialect? And should that be used as a staring point? Or should we start with, say, Dessie Ellis's flat pronunciation, and apply whatever "fixes" are necessary according to native gaeltacht speakers?)

I don't have answers, but I'm not sold on the idea of "Dublin Irish is dead, and to avoid being artificial they should all learn to speak like one specific rural town in Galway".

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Pages I made:
(These are unfortunately offline for the near future, but they'll be back!)

• Teaching Young Kids Irish (It's just my notes, a work in progress.)
• CD transcript and translations for the book Learning Irish

I should have been more clear (and this is probably best discussed on the other thread highlighting Brian Ó Broin's recent work), but I was referring to what I believe most of you call Urban Irish, not the historical Irish dialect of Dublin.

I agree re 'forcing' Dubliners to use a subdialect of a different region.

However, people often get confused between accent and pronunciation; they are not the same thing. It is possible for a Dublin person to retain their Dublin accent - which may, or may not have been the traditional accent of the area when Irish was spoken there - while producing native Irish sounds. However, people cannot base their understanding of Irish pronunciation on their Hiberno-English accent and pronunciation; because Irish contains sounds that are not found in Hiberno-English, such as velar and palatal fricatives, the thrilled -r and broad and slender consonants, and as a result people just replace these sounds with the closest English equivalent- which is incorrect!

At the time when Irish was spoken natively in Dublin, e.g. 1700 early-middle 1800, etc... there would have been a dialectal continuum running from Munster to Ulster with the language gradually changing as you went along. Leinster Irish would have been in the centre of this dialectal continuum and thus it would of had features in common with all the dialects. South West and East Leinster, e.g. Kilkenny would have spoken a subdialect of Déise Irish for instance. West and central Leinster, would have conformed largely to what is spoken in Connacht, whereas North Leinster, e.g. Louth and Meath, would have spoken a dialect similar to Ulster Irish (Doegen records for Louth: http://www.doegen.ie/taxonomy/term/21984 ; the grammar is quite similar to Ulster Irish, e.g. rinn, instead of rinne; but the pronunciation is semi-Ulster and semi-Connacht).

Cian

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Please wait for corrections/ more input from other forum members before acting on advice

Do you know if there are any speakers who do this? I'd like to look around for recordings, out of interest.

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Pages I made:
(These are unfortunately offline for the near future, but they'll be back!)

• Teaching Young Kids Irish (It's just my notes, a work in progress.)
• CD transcript and translations for the book Learning Irish

Yeah, it's part of the 'Indigenous Tweets' program, which is associated with Kevin Scannell out of Saint Louis University http://borel.slu.edu/nlp.html

http://indigenoustweets.com/

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__̴ı̴̴̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡ ̡͌l̡*̡̡ ̴̡ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡|̲̲̲͡͡͡ ̲▫̲͡ ̲̲̲͡͡π̲̲͡͡ ̲̲͡▫̲̲͡͡ ̲|̡̡̡ ̡ ̴̡ı̴̡̡ ̡͌l̡̡̡̡.___