Irish Language Loss And Restoration

0:00It's the leg that is doing behind my head. Need a new focus, a sky high, Don't make me all in way. Yeah. Yeah, it's not the Brian Lairer Show theme. It's a young Irish artist named Seamat that song is from her album, Euro Country, which came out last year. I don't make out the lyrics. That's because they were in Irish. I have a translation here that says, What am I to do if I'm not meeting you? I have an empty head and a new personality. I become more invisible. You're gone from my life. There's nothing left in the mirror. Will I be beautiful bold? So, for St. Patrick's Day, we're going to talk a little bit about the history of the Irish language, including a decline in speakers that many in Ireland are working now to reverse. And we're going to invite you to call up

1:00and say something in Irish. If you have a favorite word or phrase, joining us today is Nicholas Wolfe, Associate Director for Research and Publishing Initiatives at Gluxman, Ireland House. That's NYU Center for Irish and Irish American Studies. Nicholas, happy St. Patrick's Day. Thank you for spending a little bit with us. Many thanks, Brian. And Bannocktean, the failure of Puerto Rico. Whatever that means. What does it mean? That means happy St. Patrick's Day. So, listeners, here we go. Our phones are open. This may be a needle in a haystack in New York these days. But if you speak Irish, not just if you are Irish, but if you speak the actual language of Irish at all, call up and say any word or phrase in Irish that you enjoy saying or that you think our other listeners would enjoy hearing. 2-1-2-4-3-3-W-N-Y-C. 2-1-2-4-3-3-9-6-9-2. Again, if you speak Irish,

2:00call up and say any word or phrase in Irish that you enjoy saying or that you think our other listeners would enjoy hearing. 2-1-2-4-3-3-W-N-Y-C. This time I'm not saying call or text. We want your calls. We want to hear your voice. 2-1-2-4-3-3-9-6-9-2. Or maybe you have a story about learning the language or not learning the language, because this is different generation by generation for people living in Ireland. 2-1-2-4-3-3-9-6-9-2. So can you tell us first how widespread is use of the Irish language in Ireland and why that has changed over the last couple of generations? Sure. So surveys done in recent years still continue to show that between 40% and 50% of the population would claim a knowledge of Irish

3:00or would have used it recently. Many of them learned it in school. And so it's kind of a school in parted skill. Whereas the, and that's the good news, the bad news is that in terms of native speakers or speakers who use it daily, many of whom are located in the Gail Talked, which is the region of Ireland that are designated officially as places where the language is spoken as a native language. It's something like 30,000 individuals in that category and maybe another 50,000 outside the Gail Talked who claim to use it on a daily basis. So in terms of a living language, a language you use daily, even in Ireland, it is something that is under under pressure for sure. By the way, I'm following your lead here, but why do we say Irish instead of Gaelic? That is the official way that it is referred to in the English language, interestingly, in Irish it is known as Gaelgah, right? So obviously there's a similarity there between Gaelic and Gaelic.

4:01But that is the official term that is used in legal terms and whatnot for the Irish language in English, interestingly enough. Fiona in Madison has a phrase in Irish she would like to say on the radio. Hi, Fiona, happy St. Patrick's Day. Happy St. Patrick's Day, Brian. My favorite Irish phrase to say to people is Salon Awalia, which means get home safely when they're leaving. And then the other thing I'd like to share, my husband has a t-shirt that says, it's far Gaelgah, Breista, not Barrelaclista, which means broken Irish, broken, is better than clever English. Oh, very good. That get home safe, that was your first one, then that assumes there wasn't an Irish goodbye, where people leave without telling anybody. That's not a thing in Ireland. That's really only a thing here.

5:03Thank you for your call. Here's another one, Bill and Manusquan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bill. Hi, how are you? How are you? Hi, how are you? My favorite saying is, well, cut-a-glom-del-a-mock-machida-holy. Which means? Which means, please may I use the bathroom when you're a kid in an elementary school in Ireland, in national school. If you want to be excused, you have to ask it in Gaelic, and I grew up in London and spent all my summers in Ireland on a farm. And if I wanted to join my cousins in their school classroom, I had to learn, well, cut-a-glom-del-a-mock-machida-holy. Yes, you may, and thank you for calling. There's one Nick I didn't expect to come up.

6:05No, that's a good one, though. Yeah, that's useful. And there are so many more people on the board who will have some fun listening to some more callers with their favorite Irish words or phrases. But by way of history, am I right that the language experienced a severe decline during British rule over Ireland? It did. It's not necessarily a question of any single year or single event, but rather an erosion over many centuries. You recall that in the 16th century, Tudor, a conquest of Ireland, removed a lot of the Irish-speaking ruling class, both Gaelic and Anglo-Norman, and a lot of the patronage that would have been for Irish language arts, particularly the poetry that was written at the time, beautiful poetry, often carried today in manuscripts that you can find in archives. And certainly it didn't help that in subsequent years, in the 18th and 19th century, Irish did not have a official status

7:06within the education system. In fact, it was frowned upon to being structing anybody in Irish. All the instruction was through English in Ireland. And even other port units of fostering language, such as the church or the media, neither of those were strongholds of Irish language speaking. So during all those years, up until independence in the 20th century, Irish language fortunes were under certain duress. And is there a global context for that, of like language and danger, globally as a function of colonialism? Yeah, absolutely. You see adoption of English in a lot of places around the world and the subject of British Imperial's reach. The only thing that we also have to keep in mind though is that there were high hopes that independence for that to change. Obviously, you have a post-colonial society in Ireland throwing off that rule. And yet, it's continued to be a struggle

8:08in the 20th and 21st century, right? That you, despite this national project to restore the language since the 1930s, it's been one of the official languages of at least the Republic of Ireland. And yet through, you know, problems of resource allocation and just certain attitudes have sometimes undermined that project that was such bold statement at independence for Ireland to do that. Megan Jackson Heights here on WNYC. Hi, Meg. Hi, did which. I'm just calling. I'm a third generation part of the diaspora and I am so excited to be connecting to my heritage learning Irish. I think it's so important. I'm sorry, I'm getting so emotional. And of course, talking out loud. It would love to see the United Ireland in my lifetime. Did, in your family, did the language fall out of use and you're recovering it? Well, so it's interesting. I have 32 cousins that I know

9:10that live in Dublin and a smaller city called Dundalk. And so I've visited them. They came to my wedding in New York. I've been to their weddings. So in my, like, in the part of the diaspora, yes, it definitely fell out. But my cousins in Ireland all speak. That was their galgor. Yeah. And we hear how much it means to you. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Bruce and Les Chester here on WNYC. Hi, Bruce. Hey, Brian. How are you? Good. What's it got? So, so I'm not Irish. But back in the 70s, I was a video producer in New York. And I had a client in the, I was tourist board. And I learned what is my favorite Irish expression, which I'm sure I'm going to pronounce it wrong. But it went something like Cade Milafolta, which means a hundred thousand welcomes. And I just thought that was such a nice way to greet somebody. Nicholas, you want to take that greeting

10:11and talk to Bruce for a second? Sure. Well, Cade Milafolta, leave a fresh one. So, a hundred thousand welcomes, right as they often say. It's wonderful phrases. One of many that are in the Irish language that are great to learn. Bruce, thank you very much. And I think Jack and Neptune has an anecdote for us. Jack, you're on WNYC. Hi. Good day. I'm going to talk to a friend. Thanks for taking my call. I was born and raised in Hudson County. And just about everybody I knew as a kid seemed to have someone at home, a grandparent, usually, who spoke another language. And so most of my little friends work to some degree by lingual. I'm a hundred percent of Irish ancestry. My grandparents did not speak anything but English. And one day I asked my grandmother why it was that we didn't have a home language like everybody else. And she said, oh, what we did. But the English stole it. And I was about ten years old and I decided right then and there,

11:13dammit, I'm going to get it back. And thanks be to God's new personal study through summer school in two wonderful institutions in County Donegal. Anish Tameh. I'm able to get a good watch. Grace until why? Thank you very much. Thank you very much. And the last thing I should do. Thank you. And just kind of, we don't order so, I shouldn't do that. That's amazing. Someone from Grodoro who could be there. Welcome. That's right. That's a great place to learn Irish. Yeah. Thank you so much for your call. So we hear from our listeners that there seems to be a trend Irish language. Is that sort of the headline here? Absolutely. And this is like the golden age, I think, for doing it, you know, despite obviously the challenges of maintaining the language in Ireland. But we have Irish, you know, spoken

12:15twice at the Oscars last night. It was amazing to hear that on that stage. And it's part of movies currently, Kelly Kuhn, the Banshees of Inner Sharon, you hear it there, you hear it in musical groups like kneecap, right? It's a very amazing time, presence for the language in media and with learning resources as well. Yeah, kneecap, there's dairy girls. And as if you thought, we didn't watch the Oscars and pull this two-second clip of Jesse Buckley. Gerv Miele-Miele-Miele-Mahogat Sloan. Saying thank you for the award for her role in Hamnet. And there we leave it with Nicholas Wolff, Associate Director for Research and Publishing Initiatives. At the Gluxman, Ireland House, that's NYU Center for Irish and Irish American Studies. Thank you and happy St. Patrick's Day. Go to the Ligat brain. Sloan? Sloan? Did I say that right? Sloan? Thank you for joining us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC, Stay Tuned for Allison.

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