I have an ancestor born in the Clogher parish of Tyrone in the 1820s. It is about one mile from the Monaghan border. Does anyone know how I can find out when Irish declined in that area? Is there any way to know? I think by the 1820s it had gone? But who knows?

I've a bit of an amateur interest in the decline of Irish in Ulster. As far as I know there was Irish in Tyrone up until
1950, and certainly in the 1900s. However it was mostly concentrated in the north of county. Garrett Fitzgerald's
(which give projections on the number of Irish speakers based on the 1901 census) maps give only 3-10% of the
population as Irish speaking for the Tyrone-Monaghan border in the 1850s.

Guth in Eag, a programme about Irish in Tyrone, has some good information. Although from the wrong area of the county:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5cvPskVm3Y

Coiscéim is currently producing a series of books on words gathered from the dialects which are no longer with us.
The first in the series is about the dialect of Oirialla. I believe there are ones planned for the dialect that encompassed Tyrone, Fermanagh and Northern Monaghan.

I'll see if I can find out more.

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

Well 3-10% is actually quite a lot! given that there was minimal/zero support for them in the education/media systems. I mean - they would have had the traditional Irish and if everywhere had 3-10% of people with traditional Irish, it would be quite an advance today!

ive always wondered if those figures show the true figures?
My Granny came from a place called Scraghy , in West tyrone, Just on the border with Donegal.
In 1901 54 people out of 143 recorded themselves as Irish speakers. ( some of them young)
in 1911 10 people out of 135 recorded themselves as irish speakers.
Did they forget Irish in those 10 years?

My granny was born there in the 1920's and would have gone to school in the 1930's , she recalls the children of a poorer family from "up the hill" being teased in school because they spoke dreadful English .

That would surely indicate that another language was spoken in the household? and this is 20 something years after there were almost no speakers recorded.

Were people apprehensive to declare an ability to speak Irish, given the negative opinions to it and that many in the community had switched to English over the last couple of generations?

_________________
Bíonn rudaí maithe mall

Well people were definitely afraid to declare themselves Irish speakers. It's well known that people used to claim on census forms
that they couldn't speak it. In Fitzgerald's original paper, he says the figures are a minimum of the number of Irish speakers.
I've heard they could be off by a factor of two in some areas. For example Fitzgerald's map gives 0%-3% for Irish in some areas of Southern
Donegal in 1850, but Mairtín Ó Cadhain collected material from those areas, from native speakers, in 1950. So there are some inaccuracies.

It's very difficult to guess at the real numbers.

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

Very inaccurate. That 3% figure is ludicrous, unless he only surveyed Presbyterians exiting services in Donegal town [corrected this to what I meant to say] on Sunday, and even then many of them would have been lying, since Protestants in the West could often speak Irish as well as English. In 1850, the true percentage of those able to speak Irish in the western half of the country would have been 90% or more, and even in parts of the East the percentage would still have been fairly high, although the percentages everywhere did start to decline dramatically after that, with the effect of heavier post-famine emigration from Irish-speaking areas and the effect of teaching English in the schools.

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

Caoimhín, we're not talking about Galway City. My query was specifically on the Tyrone border areas and then someone mentioned Southern Donegal.

I don't know if you have it patrick, but it might be worth getting "Ulster Gaelic Voices" by Roise Ni Bhaoill.
I got it because my great-grand uncle is in it (it was quite cool to hear him use mnaoi), it's full of very
good information on the Ulster dialects. I should say though about a third~quarter of the material is Donegal, it's
not purely the extinct dialects. However even there, it is nice to hear Seosamh MacGrianna's father.

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

Is all the material in Ulster Gaelic Voices on the Doegen website?

My mistake: I meant to say Donegal town, and I stand by what I said. The 3% figure is ludicrous.

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