Irish mystery is deeper than whiskey & Scotch.
I am a new subscriber to this forum. I want to know why I cannot understand the speech in current Australian TV show "Corp and Anam". I am old enough to 'should know' but am perplexed with and fascinated with the language and dialect in this brilliant Irish thriller. I am Australian. Is the language/dialect used in this show Gaelic or Celtic? I don't know. I don't know the difference between the two terminologies and have probably inadvertently insulted someone by asking. Please educate me. I am prepared to interpret/explain my experience and knowledge of Aussie & Abo slang to anyone that asks !.

Corp + Anam is in Irish. It's a language...completely different from English. If you've never learned it, it's no wonder you wouldn't understand it. You wouldn't be expected to, any more than you'd necessarily be expected to understand French or German if you'd never studied them.

Unless Australia has some kind of agreement to reproduce an Australian version of Corp + Anam (Breandán, would you know anything about that?), it's an Irish TV show, not Australian. Produced by the Irish-language TV station TG4. I assume you're watching it on your computer, yes? Or does TG4 broadcast in Australia, perhaps over satellite?

As far as the name of the language goes, the usual term for it when speaking English is "Irish." Sometimes you'll hear the term "Irish Gaelic" in countries outside of Ireland, mainly so people don't get it confused with Hiberno-English (i.e., English as it's spoken in Ireland). It's not strictly incorrect to call it "Gaelic," but that term is usually reserved for the related language of Scotland. Both are members of the Celtic family of languages, which also includes Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. All of us here have some interest in learning or promoting the Irish language...it's why this forum exists.

The name of the series translates to Body + Soul.

Hope this helps

To supplement what Red told you, there are also traces of Irish in everyday Australian English (just as is the case in Britain and North America). For example, the typical Ozzie expression "Good on ya" is basically a translation of the Irish expression "Maith thú".

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

Thanks Redwolf & CaoimhínSF

Yes you have answered my queries thank you. I'm still fascinated but!. The TV show I mentioned is currently on SBS television in Australia. Australia has a lot of Irish immigrants and I have known a few over the years. I am used to the Irish speaking English with the typical Irish accent but the real Irish language is totally alien to me. What percentage of the Irish population speak irish. Silly question? Please don't give me a silly answer. It must mean Irish people can speak two languages ? Irish and English ? I love the Irish history, customs and strength in personality. Certainly influential in the world. Please feed me more info when time permits.
Fred

Irish used to be the main language of Ireland until about c. 1835, when the language began to decline rapidly.

In the early years, most of the Irish emigrants would have been Irish speaking; today their legacy still lives on. Australia has its own Irish Language Society, known as Cumann Gaeilge na hAstráile: http://www.gaeilgesanastrail.com/newsletter-en.php . They run classes and publish a fortnightly newspaper known as An Lúibín: http://www.gaeilgesanastrail.com/newsletter-en.php .

According to the most recent census by the CSO (Central Statistics Office) in 2011: http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census ... or,web.pdf , pg. 25 onwards), c. 77,000+ people speak Irish on a daily basis outside of school. Of which, c. 23,000+ reside in Gaeltacht areas, i.e. regions where the Irish language is still the main medium of communication, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaeltacht).

All Irish people have some knowledge of the Irish language though, since Irish is one of the core subjects at school.

The 1,000,000 plus who claim to be able to speak Irish in the CSO report is woefully inflated, due to the question on the CSO form being so ambiguous. Most of these people fall into the category of daoine le cúpla focal 'people with a few words' , most are certainly not able to speak Irish fluently or with any great deal of accuracy.

Irish is very much an endangered language however, as numbers of traditional native speakers decline every year; however, the percentage of those learning the language increases.

Cian

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

You are so lucky! I'd love to be able to watch Irish language TV on my regular television, without having to hook up the laptop to it.

Redwolf

Thanks again Cian & Redwolf

I now feel better having some background knowledge of the Irish language you have passed on to me. I will now send emails to my Irish acquaintances scattered around Australia and stir them up with their apparent lack of origin heritage.
If I may offer any assistance with Australian English language or slang and/or any Irish influence to the way or what we Australians speak- please don't hesitate to ask. I will try to assist.
Kind regards
Fred

I just read a review today of a book published in Australia which might interest you. It's title is "Sounds Irish: The Irish Language in Australia", and from the review the book sounds fascinating. The author is Dymphna Lonergan and the book was published by Lythrum Press in Adelaide. The review doesn't give an ISBN, but the review was in the publication Comhar, in its February 2006 issue, so I assume that the book came out not too long before then. The review itself is interesting, because it's in Irish, and was written by an Irish-speaking Australian named Colin Ryan, who learned Irish in Australia.

The book appears to be full of fascinating facts and stories about how many of the earliest Irish in Australia were Irish-speaking, with Irish-speaking "criminals" being transported to Australia starting in the late 18th century, and the author cites from ship's records where the captains reported that a number of the transportees could not speak any English at all. She goes on to discuss how the language survived as an everyday language for a generation or two in some places in Australia, before ultimately succumbing to the influence of English. Interestingly, she points out that Australia did not receive many refugees during the famine years, because they were so poor and it was cheaper to go to Britain or North America.

What was most fascinating to me was not so much the interesting Irish influence on Australian English (she does go into that, with a number of examples), but that Irish speakers were apparently the first Europeans with whom some of the Aborigines had much intercourse (possibly in both senses of the word), and there are apparently Irish loan words in some Aboriginal languages. An example given is the word pampuu, in the Ngiyampa language in New South Wales, which comes from the Irish pampúta. She discusses one particular expedition which the British undertook in 1839, where they encountered a group of Aborigines at the confluence of the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee Rivers, where the British found to their surprise that one of their men could communicate in Irish with some of the Aborigines (reported in "Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia", by Major T. L. Mitchell).

I'm going to try to locate a copy of the book myself, either online or when I go to Australia next year.

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I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.

That sounds very interesting.

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Just an update to say that the book is available online in Australia (just google the title), but not through Amazon or Amazon.uk. I was going to order it, but the postage to the US cost more than the book did, so I'll try looking for it in Oz.

_________________
I'm not a native (or entirely fluent) speaker, so be sure to wait for confirmations/corrections, especially for tattoos.