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Irish, or Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is, in turn, a branch of the Indo-European language family. The Irish language is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was the population’s 1st language until the 19th century, when English slowly became prevalent, especially in the last decades of the century.
Irish is still used as a first language in a few areas of some counties, such as Cork, Donegal, Galway, and Kerry, and smaller areas of counties Mayo, Meath, and Waterford.
From the 18th century, the Irish language lost ground in the country’s east. The causes behind this came down to several key factors:
Refusals of its usage by the Anglo-Irish administration.
The Catholic church’s support of the English language over the Irish.
The spread of bilingualism from the 1750s onwards.
It has been assessed that there were about 800 thousand monoglot Irish speakers in 1800, which declined to 320 thousand by the end of the famine, and under 17 thousand by 1911.
The map below shows the decline of Ireland’s native Irish speakers over time.
The map below depicts the distribution of Irish speakers on the British Isles in 1900 and 2000. Dark Green indicates the Majority of Irish Speakers, and Light Green – a significant minority.
Today, the total number of individuals (aged three and over) who claimed they could communicate Irish in April 2016 was 1,761,420, representing 39.8% of respondents. Still, 418,420 said they never used it, while 558,608 said they only spoke it within the education process.
Linguistic research of Irish speakers is based mainly on the number of everyday users in Ireland outside the schooling system, which in 2016 was 20,586 in the Gaeltacht and 53,217 outside it, totaling 73,803.
Irish has constitutional status as the first official and the national language of the Republic of Ireland and is also the official language of Northern Ireland.
