I think we can safely strike a line through the town anyhow.



I don't have statistics for Connemara so these are guesses:

An Cheathrú Rua 80%
Cill Chiarán 50 %
Carna 50%
Árainn 90% especially on the two smaller islands
An Cnoc/Indreabhán 30% - more in the older generations, less the younger you get.

Leitirmóir 90% +
Rosmuc 90%+

An Spidéal 10%
Bearna 10%
Maigh Cuileann 10% or less

An Spideál and Bearna (and parts of Indreabhán) have become commuter town for Galway city so there are a lot of English speakers moved in there diluting the Irish speaking population. And also Irish is declining among the young. But the older people native to the area would still have very strong Irish.

People do speak in the town, maybe 20-25% would speak it everyday from what I can tell.

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Bíonn rudaí maithe mall

What would the average age be of good speakers in most of them? 50, 60, 70?

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

Do you mean i bParóiste an Daingin?

Generally the older you are the better the Irish, maybe 40+

It depends on the family they were raised in and how proficient they were obviously. You might have an English speaker married to a native Irish speaker for example, and English was the predominant language.

Even younger people who are fluent often don't have the blas.
My own Irish isn't as rich as my parents and grandparents either.

yeah Generally the older the better the Irish is, but there are still plenty of young fluent speakers around and people who use it regularly, Ive yet to meet anyone from the area who is not able to understand Irish .

Ive seen on many occasions people I assumed had no Irish ( they have stated so in the past), respond perfectly well to questions etc in Irish and speak quite competently , particularly when talking to older people. If a young person talks to them in Irish they will often just respond in Irish, but clearly understanding whats been said.

Some of the old people here with the most fluent Irish imaginable lament the loss of the Richness in the language that older speakers in their youth possessed.

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Bíonn rudaí maithe mall

Paróiste an Daingin's native speakers are really the older people from Lios Póil. The actual native speakers from An Daingean would have disappeared around 1870, according to Tomás Ó Criomhthain. (Of course I am not counting the native speakers from west of Dingle who now live in the town).


Depends on the area again. Dún Chaoin has very good speakers from age zero up. It's also hard to say what a good speaker is to be honest. For example my grandfather had hundreds of words for plants and animals in our local area (in English), but I wouldn't have a fraction of this particular vocabulary, does this make me a "poor speaker of English". I think there can sometimes be a conflation between the natural loss of vocabulary related to rural objects/events that has happened in several languages and the actual decline in the language when it comes to Irish.

However there is a tendency in my experience for younger speakers to not really have grammatical gender in their Irish and for lenition and eclipses to be quite hit or miss, a good few wouldn't have the blas as Bríd said. However there are "mistakes" in the Irish of people up to sixty years old. In Munster what I have heard is that those in the 40s-50s might not have the traditional genders that nouns had in the dialect, as well as slightly off stress on words and dialectal mispronunciations. Is this just being pedantic, I don't know. (They don't always have the Caighdeán gender either, sometimes the Caighdeán gender and the dialectal one are the same and they have a different one).

An interesting one is that I had noticed people don't tend to make use of the habitual past much in speech, instead of saying:

Théinn ar an mBuailtín = I used to go up to BallyFerriter.

They say:

Chuas ar an mBuailtín go minic = I went up to BallyFerriter often.

Apparently good speakers have used the former for one hundred years and other speakers have used the latter. Good speakers (even those in their 20s/30s) use the former today. So the distinction here isn't age related.

Hard to know!

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

Anyone who is comfortable and confident in expressing themselves in a language should really be described as a good speaker. Education levels can increase a persons vocabulary greatly, but you wouldn't call a English language native speaker with only primary education a poor speaker (vocab of 8,000- 10,000 words ) compared to a college educated person ( vocab of around 15,000 words). It only seems to happen with minority languages.

Some one just told me a story the other day of some Irish learners from Belfast going to Gweedore , where they pointed at a potato bed and asked a local boy what that was in Irish. He didn't know and the people from Belfast commented that he must not be a native speaker or very fluent due to not knowing it. its unfair to expect people to be walking dictionary's and encyclopedias of grammar. I am completely unable to explain English grammar and name most plants, it doesn't stop me from being fully fluent in my native language.

As for where is Irish actually spoken and how good are the speakers, in Dingle you will find a large number of people who are quite happy and often enthusiastic to converse in Irish, some of whom have parents/relatives who are native speakers from outside the town, others who picked it up in school and use it to converse with native speakers and other second language users like themselves. Some of these people even raise their children with their "non native Irish", which for the most part is a variety of the local dialect. Do they have an extensive vocabulary and as rich a blas as a 90 year old from Dun chaoin who only learned English properly when they went to England in the 1950's ? No, probably not, but their Irish is often comparable to a native speaker in their age category .

The language could defiantly be stronger in Dingle , but if the rest of the country used it as frequently (20-25%) the langauge would be in rude health

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Bíonn rudaí maithe mall

The next question would be how many viable speakers are there in Ireland?

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

I'd guess it would be impossible to know. The census data isn't very accurate and people can over and under sell themselves on their ability.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal

Being a good speaker is often (almost always in my experience) detached from formal education in both English and Irish, I'd say it has more to do with variety in your syntax and things like that, than raw word count. For instance I would not consider myself a good speaker of English, as although I might know a lot of words from working in a technical area, they're often placed in rather mundane sentences. Contrast this with, for example, characters in John Keane's The Field, the characters use a limited set of words, but to great effect. Anyway, just a nuance on what you said, which I'd agree with.

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The dialect I use is Cork Irish.
Ar sgáth a chéile a mhairid na daoine, lag agus láidir, uasal is íseal