This idea does NOT necessarily lead to an arrogant position vis-à-vis the Irish spoken in the Gaeltacht, or a refusal to accept correction, or to try to improve - so why respond like this so belligerently to someone who is just trying to learn?

Ye were, to be fair, a bit hard on him. Most people believe the bollocks about it being their 'native language' and think no further about it but that doesn't mean they should be jumped for it at first sticks!


just keep shouting, and let this place become a soulless echo-chamber!

I could see you on the edge of a gargoyle, on a Gothic cathedral in the rain and lightening shouting at the sky!


it is asserted that Irish is - not "should be" or "should become" or "ought to have been" - but "is" the native language of all of Ireland and of all in Ireland.

Looked upon logically, it's mad and I suspect that if there were enough natives to make a difference the State would go after them, and hard


It's generally an innocent remark that is meant to denote the cultural or emotional resonances the language has for them.

Remarks are only 'innocent' until people start believing their own discourse. I mean, people tell themselves stories and can get to believing them even after their purpose is served


Irish will undergo changes as more and more non-natives learn to speak it, and that's just the price to pay if you want the language to survive.

I've said this before, and it seems to always fall on deaf ears -there are almost NO neo-natives so that the language is almost remade anew each generation in the schools. Without stable communities speaking some language, any language, complex grammars and idioms won't emerge so 'Irish' will only ever be an auxiliary language

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

"Hello everyone! Luke Ó Scolaidhe is my name and I am from Laytown in co. Meath. I have been learning Irish for two years. I didn't understand much Irish before then but always wanted to be able to speak it. One night when I was out with my friend and I was drunk we were talking about the Irish language and I said that I was sad. Why? Because I could not speak any Irish. After that I started learning my own language because I was embarrassed.

I went to an Irish class for six weeks in Geal Linn in Dublin but did not learn a lot from that. I have been teaching myself since then but I am afraid I am learning everything wrong. I have no teacher and it is hard. I hope that that is OK? I know my Irish is awful but I am really trying to learn!"


He's been to confession, has said his Hail Marys, and is fasting. Now maybe we can let him in!

Well Luke, I find reading this site useful and I hope you fin use out of it too.

Ádh mór ort!

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

There is nothing wrong with an apprentice carpenter talking about "our trade" or "my trade", even if it's not his first career.

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Táim ag foghlaim fós. Fáilte roimh gach aon cheartúchán.

Wow! I am really blown away by all of this and did not expect to see such a response. I am sorry if anyone is offended by me refering to Irish as 'my' language. It was not my intention to rub anyone up the wrong way. Certainly when only first entering a forum for ther first time. I am here to make friends not enemies. For that reason I held off responding. Everyone is entitled to their opinion afterall so these days I have been training myself to respect that. However I do feel the need to respond, as I do believe Irish is 'my' language even if I can not speak it very well just as I believe this is 'my' country even though I do not live in every part of it. The way I see it is of course it is my language. English is not 'My' language. It is the language of another nation that has been imposed on me by powers beyond my control. I did not ask to be born into a time where English had become the dominant language in this country. Nobody has any control over that. Some people are lucky to have been born into fluent Irish speaking families and they didn't even have to learn it. Bully for them! Congratulations and a pat on the back. That doesn't make them super human or in some way give them ownership of a language or a national identity. Am I to be told now that I am less Irish than they are now too?

The Irish Language belongs to the Irish people despite creed, religion ancestory or personal beliefs. It trancends all those barriers and belongs to the Irish nation. It is also a minority language that is sadly in danger of obliteration with modern pressures mounting year on year. For right or wrong it can not survive cultural eliteism in any form and while I should be mindful that I should be careful to refer to it as 'My' language, people of such persuasion as that should also be mindful that if a language is to flourish or be encouraged it should have a friendly face and not judgemental frown.

I was unlucky enough (as fate would have it) to grow up in a family that did not speak Irish and was only exposed to it in school. That environment for me failed to nurture very much learning in the subject despite my respect and interest in it.

Ireland needs to lose this nonsense attitude about the Irish language and cop itself on. We find ourselves in a very different position in Ireland learning Irish than we do in Ireland learning French for example. An Irish man can learn a bit of French, go to France and then walk into a shop, make a fool of himself, laugh and shrug it off with the knowledge that the locals expect him to not be able to speak the language properly and will cut him some slack. An Irishman speaking Irish in Ireland finds himself in a very differn't position because the moment he opens his mouth he is being judged or at least that is how he sees it. He is afraid prying ears will shoot him down. So what does he do? He refrains from using any Irish he has. Why? Because since the Irish revival and the formation of this state people have worn the language like a badge of honour and does nothing in modern Ireland other than push people out. Quite frankly it scares the shit out of people!

Just because someone is lucky enough to be graced with the language having been brought up in a gealtacht area that does not make them somehow an owner of the language. It certainly makes them a 'keeper' of the language in my view and deserves respect but certainly not an owner. Some people are born into families who are millionaires. Does that make them better than the rest of us? I seem to remember some nonsense about 'the devine right of kings' who's birth right entitled them to ownership of this Island? Is that not where all this problem started in the first place?

I have been quite shy about speaking Irish out loud for a long time purely for that reason but then came to the conclusion that I have nothing to prove to anyone. In fact, I probably have more Irish than most people as sad as that sounds! So why shouldn't I use it. For quite a while of being corrected it made me afraid to say anything but that is precicely the mistake made in school because no amount of sticking your head in a book alone is going to teach you a language. You need to speak it to remember it. So where do you start? You start by using what you have learned so far, make awful mistakes and learn from them. I can now communicate in Irish. I would be the very first to say in a lot of ways it is caveman Irish as I call it but I can communicate and having been someone who hadn't got a clue, I am now very proud of that fact. I am learning all the time although work life/home life etc. makes it much harder to apply myself as hard as I would like.

I enrolled my daughter in the local Gaelscoil 4 days after she was born and have been speaking Irish to her every day since day one. I do however realise that I will probably never be fluent but I do use Irish every day. So is it not my language? If I communicated every day with just coughs and farts would that not be my language? I realise English unfortunately is my 'first' language but I disagree respectfully when I say the Irish language does not belong to anyone. It belongs to Ireland.

In my view if the language is to survive attitudes need to evolve. Ireland is under pressures now with the growing power of media that with what started with the BBC imposing heavy influence on the youth of the East coast of Ireland has now morphed into Americanisation with the influence of Fox TV/Sky. Irish needs to be accessible and for that it needs to be spoken as an every day occourance. I use Irish all the time in shops etc. Simple things like go raibh maith agat etc. Things that do not intimidate people. Because that is what Irish does - it intimdates people for all the reasons stated above. That needs to change and the only way to do that is to get people to relax about it. IT IS OK NOT TO BE ABLE TO SPEAK IRISH NONE OF US CAN WE STILL LOVE YOU! That is the message the language needs to send. Get that accross and actually get schools to focus on speaking the language in class instead of parroting out of books and the language has a hope!

Again, I hope I have not offended anyone here. If I have I appologise. I love Irish and am eager to learn. I am quite aware that I merely have a toe both in the door of the language and this forum so please be kind and I look forward to any guidance anyone can give me. Mar sin, go raibh maith aguibh!

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

You are wrong there - that's the point. Not all opinions are equally correct. Ireland is your country - but the national language of Ireland, as stated in the Constitution - is English. Irish learning is bedevilled by people who claim that, because they are Irish, so therefore they are almost native speakers of it, and don't need to learn the language of the real native speakers "because I don't come from the Connemara/Muskerry/Rannafast, so why would I want to sound like I did?"

I would like the Irish language to be a freestanding academic interest - unconnected with extreme political viewpoints, and not in the slightest associated with political parties that support or have supported violence against innocent bystanders. When I read this thread and your post and An Braonach's post, I cannot interpret it in any other way than making the Irish language an adjunct of a political movement. That explains the depth of the hatred, and the automatic hate-filled response. Being Irish is not a licence to hate, and the Irish language should not be a vehicle for hatred - and if it becomes that, I hope the language dies out.

Luke, you can say until you're blue in the face that Irish is your language - but it's clear you don't mean what An Braonach said ("an innocent expression of cultural resonances"), but you are rather connecting Irish immediately with an extreme political agenda. What you are saying is commonly said in Ireland - but no truer for that.

*English is your language - your post demonstrated that your facility with Irish is near zero.
*The English language was not imposed on your ancestors. The Anglo-Irish community are descended from people who came in during English/British rule and who wouldn't have come if Ireland had been independent - but the Irish people decided themselves to abandon the Irish language to gain economic opportunities, as Daniel O'Connell and the RC Church told them to, in fact. This was because the towns were English-speaking, because of the ingress of the Anglo-Irish and some temporary floating population from England too that made the towns Anglophone, but nevertheless it is not possible to force a nation to abandon its language. Parents put pressure on schoolteachers (Irish parents and Irish schoolteachers, not people trucked in from England) to punish the children in the 19th century for speaking Irish. This was not British state policy - no one in England cared two hoots about Ireland and its language, if the truth be told, and they didn't have enough people on the ground to enforce a language shift had they wished to do so.
*Not speaking Irish doesn't mean you're less Irish - because Ireland is a country that is mainly, and overwhelmingly, English-speaking. I would guess that in 100 years' time there won't be any Gaeltacht and the language will have been wrapped up anyway.

You are quite right to point out the difference between learning Irish and learning French. As you say, the Irish are not meant to speak good French, or not meant to speak native French, and so are happy to make mistakes - AS THEY ACCEPT THE FRENCH WILL ALWAYS HAVE BETTER FRENCH THAN THEM. But the precise reason why it is different learning Irish is that people like you, Luke, will always claim that "Irish is your language" (ref: SF propaganda), and so you refuse, on principle, to accept that learning Irish is the same in that the Gaeltacht people should be regarded as the ones -- the only ones -- who speak it properly, just like the French are the ones who speak French properly (and the Quebeckers, Swiss, Belgians and others).

It is the very nature of the thing that a language belongs to its NATIVE speakers. No allusion to political propaganda can change that. I would recommend divorcing the language from any political package of views - although it is hard not to notice that views that can be described as broadly Sinn Féin are not only standard among Irish learners, but that any dissenting from them provokes immediate hysterical abuse. And you wonder why the communities live apart in Northern Ireland? Tolerance should not be a one-way street. Maybe you can tell me how the Ultach Trust (http://www.ultach.org) will manage to encourage Unionists to learn Irish, given the fact that if any of them do, they will face immediate verbal or physical abuse from the other Irish learners.

If you are seeking genuine advice - and I say "if" as I think it is the political campaign you're interested in - I would recommend you to pick up Teach Yourself Irish - the 1961 version by Myles Dillon, and start going through it chapter by chapter. I would certainly give you all the help you needed to do so. But I'm not interested in connecting the language with a nationalistic political agenda that seems to override the language and whose first plank is that "Irish is the native language of everyone in Ireland" and whose second plank is "there must be a committee-created Standard Irish in order to facilite the revival of Irish as a national language, and if Gaeltacht people don't use all the terms made by the committee that shows they are not educated enough to speak the formal and official version of the language".

I regard with horror the suggestion that the whole of Ireland be made Irish-speaking, specifically because the language would be unrecognizable. Actually, I only read Gaeltacht Irish - and I usually skip over all posts on this forum that are written in Irish, because I never agree to read the Irish of learners anyway, for fear of contamination therefrom - and I would like to see a Gaeltacht-only standard for Irish learning, with only native speakers used on TV and radio, only native speakers publishing books (slán leat, Titley! - and sling your hook!), only native speakers permitted to teach in Gaeilscoileanna - and those schools that can't find enough teachers as a result closed down. I would like to see the old spelling restored, all books in the Roman script pulped, all dictionaries giving IPA of pronunciation in three dialects, all children in the Gaeltacht reading numerous books writtn in the local dialect. Because for me it is the language itself that is interesting, and not the associated political campaign, which, if it means anything at all, would destroy (actually: continue to destroy) the real language.

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

What planet are you on?

Luke, if you want to learn the language for its own sake - as I am, as it is the language of many of my ancestors - then I think you could do worse than start with Teach Yourself Irish - which has audio files, and the text and MP3s are available for free on archive.org Good luck!

I would love to take part in a chapter by chapter thread learning from that book - and I think others such as An Lon Dubh would play a huge role - so why don't we focus on learning the language?

WHo said anything about a political agenda? I'm sorry, you seem like a very interesting and inteligent guy but I do believe you are adding 2 and 2 together and getting 5 here! I never said anything about political agenda???? I am interested in Irish because I am interested foremost in Irish history. Infact, Irish history from prehistory up until the 16th century for the most part. I am interested in Irish because it tells the story of the land itself. It is in the place names, it tells you about the outlook of the people themselves. The thinking that goes behind a sentance in Irish is very telling in that outlook. Patrick, I honestly think from what I am reading that you have issues yourself about the language and I am OK with that. A lot of what you are saying (and you have a great command of the English language) makes a lot of sense. But I think you fail by jumping to conclusions about people. You do not know me and know very little about me. Don't be so quick to start telling people they have a political agenda and that is their reason for learning Irish. Did I not say that part of the problem with people trying to speak Irish in public was the fact that people wear it as a badge post 1916? Yes I did. I do not believe associating the language as part of national identity suddenly makes you a political 'A' bomb waiting to go off!

I think that you are being rather insensitive by saying that my knowledge of Irish is zero. That is not true. I am sure I have made lots of mistakes but that is because I am only learning. I understand more than you think. But I do not have to justify myself to you or anyone else as I already stated. I am not looking for an argument here but I think maybe you are?

Hi Luke,

Listen, just enjoy this forum as a place to get questions answered and a little help along the way. You'll just have to ignore the nonsense that creeps up from time to time.

Patrick, for Christ's sake, pull yourself together, man!

Domhnall

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Ultach mé agus Gaeilg Uladh a labhraim go measardha maith!