Welsh and Irish languages.?
I am a native Welsh speaker and I often hear Irish complimenting us Welsh on how we preserved our language and what have you . Bt really doesn't Irish have more speakers than Welsh. The reason i say this is because around 1 600 000 people in Ireland said they could speak Irish to some extent. And only 750 000 in Wales said that they could speak read and write Welsh. I am confused. They say welsh is the most robust celtic language used by thousands but how is this if Irish has this many speakers?>
Diolch
go raibh math agat.
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Tagged with: celtic language • extent • ireland • math • native welsh speaker • speakers • wales • welsh
Filed under: Written and Spoken Welsh
Welsh is the language of the home. Gaelic is not, apart from some very remote areas. There was an additional dimension as far as Welsh was concerned in that it was the language of religion. This caused it to flourish even in the days of "Welsh not", whereas the Anglicisation of Ireland during a comparable period was highly successful.http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/language/pages/education.shtml
http://multitext.ucc.ie/d/Anglicisation_and_De-Anglicisation
Thanks to the efforts of Bishop Morgan, the Welsh were able to read the Bible in their own language and Bibles were accessible because of the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society http://www.christianodyssey.com/history/biblesociety.htm.
Much of the country’s culture was Christian based — Eisteddfodau, cwrdd adrodd, inspiring hymns, rich poetry. The language of religion in Ireland was Latin, which very few people understood. There was no hymn singing tradition and while poetry and drama flourished, it was written in English.
When a language is taught as an academic subject, there is a reluctance to speak it. There have been attempts to instil European languages into British children, but the results are notoriously poor. You’d expect that after several years of learning French, German or Spanish at school, for example, people would be able to speak those languages. In fact, very few can. Where people don’t build on what they know and practise their language skills, these diminish. If there were a general enthusiasm in Ireland to speak Gaelic as much as possible, it would flourish and people would speak it to their children. Children would use it in the school playground. Writers would be inspired to produce poems and novels in it. It is that will to make Gaelic the dominant language which is missing, whereas the enthusiasm for Welsh appears to be unabated.
There’s twice as many people in Ireland than Wales (6 mill vs. 3 mill in the 2008 census estimates). That would make those numbers about equal. That’s not including N. Ireland. Maybe the Welsh just present it better.
Good question. The majority of us Irish have some knowledge of the language because we do it in school all the way through to the leaving cert (Same as your gcse’s). The fact is though that its very rarely spoken day to day only in certain pockets of the country. I had a very good grasp of Irish when i was in school i could go through a full day speaking Irish but now 15 years on my vocabulary is a lot smaller because I’m so out of practice
You have to live here to understand that.
Irish is compulsory in primary and secondary school, so everybody in the Republic should be able to speak and write Irish fluently. That’s the theory.
In reality the curriculum is so bad that hardly anybody outside the gaeltacht areas can have a lucid and fluent conversation in Irish. People in Wales probably tell the truth when they say they have Welsh, most Irish people don’t. They are ashamed that they are so bad at their own language and don’t want to admit that they never got above the "cúpla focla".
Our new taoiseach said a few sentences in Irish in his maiden speech as taoiseach in the Dáil, and it was commented on by the media no end. Do you think that’s a sign of the health of the language? It should be unremarkable.
I’m an Irish primary teacher and use Gaeilge every day for most of my instructions, and when talking to the kids (I teach 4-6 year olds) I use a lot of Irish words. They absolutely love it, and pick it up really quickly. I’ve had kids coming into school from other countries and learning more Irish than English!
I think the problem starts – as with teaching any language- when grammar rules are introduced. They’re so boring for any age, child or adult. There should be much more focus on Gaeilge as a living language, and means of conversation, than forcing rules down people’s throats.
I’ve always loved Irish, and been encouraged by my parents to love it, but I can understand how a lot of people have a fear of speaking Irish, because they’re afraid of getting it wrong – due mostly to the secondary school curriculum. Completely not the fault of secondary teachers, it’s the curriculum that they have to teach.
There needs to be a complete rethink of the content taught in the Irish curriculum from the senior years of primary school, through all of secondary school. It’s such a beautiful language, I can’t imagine how terrible it’d be if we lost it.
Everyone in Ireland learns Irish in school, so I’m not surprised this many people said they could speak it to some extent. Everyone can speak it "to some extent". But few people are fluent, I don’t know how many but I’m guessing less than 750,000 speak it as their native language.