http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=2E-K9-GCJOk

An interesting lecture on urban Irish, he also goes into the differences between Gaeltacht Irish & urban Irish with statistics. Its quite interesting to me, given the growth of urban irish and decline of gaeltacht Irish, I wonder what the future of Irish is? What interests me is if Urban Irish forms a solid dialect , will this become a natural standard?

Has anyone heard Bernard Dunne talk Irish? Thats where we will be at in 20 years I think! And I dont think it will be bad for Irish, I can see it growing in urban areas if it is or becomes natural to hear as opposed to learning Conamara or Ulster Irish. Who knows..

Just a few questions:

How many languages change completely within a couple of years?
Are there traditional speakers of Urban Irish?
Are there languages whose standard form is the form spoken by learners only, while there are still families who've speaking Irish for centuries without interruption?

Urban Irish is just Irish spoken by learners, it's a bit like the English that's spoken by French people. Is "French people's English" the model to follow? Is it the reference form of English?


I wonder if the English spoken by French schoolchildren and students forms a solid dialect...


I know my opinion isn't politically correct but I don't care, I love Irish as it is and I don't want it to lose all what makes it as it is, its specific sounds, its specific grammar, its specific idioms etc. I don't want it to become English in disguise...

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

Urban Irish is also Gaelscoil Irish, and parents raising their kids with Irish when Irish isnt the community language, children are speaking it in Dublin with Dublin accents regardless of where there teacher is from or there parents and in turn Urban Irish is emerging as its own dialect, influenced by the English much more than Gaeltacht Irish, that means differences in pronunciation and grammar, but interesting not in vocabulary.

Not many languages will undergo a change so quickly, but in relative terms there are very few children raised where Irish is the primary spoken language, 3000 housholds according to the study, whereas there are 40000 kids in Gaelscoileanna all over the country.

The video explains it much better than I can with all the statistical analysis, and I subscribe to it, it is changing whether we want it to or not, the Gaeltacht is shrinking, Urban speakers are growing...

I think the future of the language is in such areas. If we try to keep Irish enshrined unsullied in the Gaeltacht, we will lose it entirely in another couple of generations.

Redwolf

ok, then the English spoken by French schoolchildren is a dialect too, then?
Btw, the Dublin accent is the accent people have when they speak English, right? But Irish isn't English. These languages don't use the same sound sets etc, so you can't use the same pronunciation for both languages without distorting one of them.



if the language is only spoken by learners it'll become a dead language spoken by learners, as are Manx, Cornish or Latin. If we could avoid it, it'd be cool, because when the transmission is interrupted, nothing remains the same.
And if the language loses its pronunciation, grammar, idioms and use, it won't be the same language. Have to find another name, but Irish itself will be dead - but well, that won't happen tomorrow, there will still be people like us who love the Gaeltacht language and who'll use it. Btw there's no book to learn Urban Irish so far. To speak Urban Irish you just need to learn a bit of Standard Irish and to make mistakes and Anglicisms and to pronounce everything as in English...

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

I am from Dublin. I have a Dublin accent - even in Irish. I am aware of this but prefer not to 'put on' an accent which is not mine, while at the same time I avoid obvious mispronounciations.

I feel quite jealous of those who come from Cork or Galway, for example, because even with poor Irish, the sound/tone of their Irish can seem more authentic.

I have a colleague who teaches French in my school. Her English is excellent, but her accent is unmistakeably French. She totally gets all the nuances/slang etc., but she wishes she could lose the French accent. I don't see why she should bother (given her excellent command of the language and the fact that she sounds very French after many years of speaking English and living in England then Ireland i.e if she still sounds French now, she probably always will!).

So, I am kind of in two minds about the whole thing. I think that urban Irish is a reality, but I agree with Lughaidh totally in saying that urban Irish is not a valid dialect in itself. It is the dialect of the learner - and in fact is no one dialect, therefore, given the wide variety of pronounciations amongst learners and Gaelscoil slang etc which varies even from school to school. I have always used French as an example to explain how current Leinster Irish (or Dublin Irish, or Gaelscoil Irish, or 'Republican' Irish or the likes is not a valid dialect - and can never be. If we take all the learners of French in Ireland and accept their 'dialect' (i.e. mispronounciations) as valid on the basis of their numbers giving it validity - do we have a new dialect of French? Obviously not.

Why am I in two minds then? Well, I have spent about 40 years learning Irish. I know quite a lot, but I certainly don't know it all. I make mistakes. I do in English too. In College I met native speakers (fellow students) and while I accept that the only 'real' Irish is native Irish, none of these individuals were way ahead of me, even 25 years ago, in terms of grammar - not at all - but even in terms of knowledge of general vocabulary, or sentence structure. Even then, it seems that the influence of English was taking its toll.

So, yes, I am in awe of those who know the etymology of words, those who are experts at phonetics, those who have Gaeilge ón gcliabhán (and let's be honest - there can't be many of those left whose Irish isn't very much influenced by the English they hear around them Daily) - but I just won't let myself feel inadequate about my ability at Irish despite my faults - what French learner of English would/should do that after many years of learning? Does it really matter that I pronounce teach incorrectly (/ iI'm not convinced) as tyeach in the overall scheme of things?

I don't normally write so much but that's a few beers for you! Not long back from France - had a great time. Vive La France!

I think it will matter if in say 20 years, nobody is able to pronounce Irish properly ie. more or less native-like. But if there still are people who know, then we won't have lost everything
The real set of consonants and vowels of Irish isn't that difficult to learn and to reproduce after listening to native speakers... It's not like Arabic sounds, like

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

I agree that if current trends continue it will change, but I dont agree that that means its a dead language, languages mutate all the time, urban Irish is primarily children growing up in the the gaelscoileanna and continuing to speak it, not adult learners, and it is happeneing naturally as school goers pick up a mix of dialects from teachers, combining it with their own accent and adding modern innovations as kids of all languages do. you might not view them as native speakers but I do in the sense that they are speaking it from the start. If your viewing native Irish as the language of the home and community unfortunately this is not even the case in many Gaeltacht areas today, only 3000 families have Irish as the home language.

Your right it will lose some if the richness that comes from Gaeltacht areas because it is a community language, but It wont die. Thats my opinion anyway, and Im quite excited to see how it developes. Brian Ó Broins research points to Urban irish as a rich 'pidgin' language at the moment and he thinks urban Irish will take hold as a creole and set as a standardised dialect in the future.

@redwolf couldnt agree more

@scooby i agree on accent, it would be wierd someone from Dublin putting on a Conamara accent, I am always going to have my accent when I speak Irish thats just the reality for 99.9% of people who learn other languages, I can only think of one person I know who Learnt Irish as an adult and sounds, to me, like a native (though they probably wouldnt fool a native).

Personally Im in two minds, on the one hand I love the fluency & beauty of Gaeltacht Irish but on the other Im happy the language is growing and still developing (sign of a living langauge) in other areas. Do you listen to Raidió na Life? I have to admit, while fearing Lughaidh's wrath, that I find Dublin Irish quite cool

What happens with natural languages is that they are transmitted from generation to generation by native speakers. If the transmission is interrupted, then it's not the same thing, because very few learners can know the language exactly as native speakers do. Your first language is something very special. And learning Irish from the start from people who aren't native speakers (and often, who don't speak it properly) doesn't make you the same as a natural speaker. If I raised my kids through English, will they know English and English/American culture as well as you do, for instance? Of course they won't.



yeah but still these families have transmitted the language for the beginning of times. No interruption since Irish exists.



well, to me, if you change something, it isn't the same If you change pronunciation, grammar, idioms, words, is it still the same language?



a pidgin isn't rich by definition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
Have to give it a different name then. Guadeloupe Creole isn't called "French" (and never was).



why would it be weird? when you learn a language you try to pick up the accent of native speakers (except if you don't care, but then if you don't care about pronunciation, why are you learning a new language?). When I speak English I don't want to keep my French accent, I do my best to pronounce like a native speaker. Same thing with Irish etc.



except if you do your best to get rid of it, like...
It's like "I don't make any effort to pronounce properly because anyway I'll never manage". Obviously if you don't make any effort you won't manage
But pronouncing properly the consonants and vowels of Irish isn't an impossible thing if you try.



not so sure...



don't fear my wrath, I accept all opinions even when I don't agree with them
To me, when Irish isn't pronounced according to the rule of some Gaeltacht dialect, it's simply unproperly pronounced Irish.
It's strange how all that is obvious for everybody, except for (some) Irish language learners... Actually I only saw that on Irish forums. When people learn other languages, they listen to native speakers and do their best to pronounce the same way... I wonder why it isn't always the case with Irish learners.

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

You made some good points there, I just dont see any other way forward for Irish, the Gaeltacht is shrinking, the only way for Irish to survive is speakers outside the Gaeltacht and luckily we have that now. In 1970 there were less than 10 Gaelscoileanna, today just over 200, if it werent for them an current trends continue and Irish dies as a community language in 20 years that is going to effect the level of Irish in people from te Gaeltacht and eventually it will die alltogether. That is why I am glad Urban Irish, if you believe the research, is emerging as a dialect, at least Irish will survive in some form.

On the point that you believe it will not be Irish if it mutates, I disagree to take the example Prof Ó Broin gives, Geoffrey Chaucer, he pioneered great literature in Middle English which only a couple of centuries old was regarded as rubbish English (by anglo saxon purists) that borrowed from French to form a new dialect as opposed to the 'beautiful' written Norman French that was used.and look at English today! If Irish takes on English features in Urban areas and it survives and eventually becomes the standard Irish spoken in 100 years with 10x speakers as speak Irish today, I for one will be happy (that it has survives at all)!