Thank you, Gumbi. That is exactly what I am trying to get across.

I agree with Bríd that urban Irish is better than no Irish at all. I don't discourage people from speaking Irish in any way they can.

I just don't think that courses should be proactively teaching urban/Galltacht Irish and I feel we should be free to point out what is urban/Galltacht and what is Gaeltacht native so that learners can make informed choices about which courses they choose.

I also think we should also be free to point out to beginners that there are definitions of "native" that would not be acceptable in any other language. On another thread there is a second-language speaker from Donnybrook, Dublin billed as a "native speaker". He looks fluent but what he is fluent at is urban/Galltacht (aka "school Irish"). They can get away with this because some people expand the definition of "native" to mean "anyone born in Ireland". I think learners should be informed that that is sometimes the case.

As I've said above, I feel that declaring Gaeltacht Irish obsolete or "dead" is premature and not helpful to efforts to preserve, revive and modernize the language.

Unlike, Lughaidh, I don't believe that the Caighdeán Oifigiúil/Official Standard is necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that it could be brought more in line with native Gaeltacht dialects and we must be careful that it doesn't become a snob's weapon.

The Caighdeán Oifigiúil/Official Standard doesn't dictate pronunciation, but I feel that more should be done to lead people towards the traditional pronunciations and sound distinctions.

It may feel confusing to beginners initially but we are trying to shine a few lights in this dark mess and call people to account for misrepresentations like the above.

This is a forum and by definition we are meant to discuss things. Sometimes those discussions get a bit frenzied and look like arguments (as long as we avoid personal insults, I don't think they are) but it is important that these points be aired and discussed rather than leave pitfalls for people to fall into.

It is the actual situation that is confusing. Hopefully discussing the problems helps beginners and learners see what the issues are so that they can then make informed choices that meet their own goals and abilities.


I would also like to point out that Eoin's course is excellent in many ways and I appreciate the effort that has gone into it, but I just feel it shortchanges the learner in the pronunciation department. If the recordings were redone by Gaeltacht speakers, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. Until they are - or whilever they are not - I feel obliged to point it out to unsuspecting learners.

But then, like a review by a movie reviewer, people are free to take my advice or ignore it.

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

Absolutely

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It is recommended that you always wait for three to agree on a translation.
I speak Connemara Irish, and my input will often reflect that.
I will do an mp3 file on request for short translations.
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To quote the great philosopher Delmar in the movie "Oh Brother Where Art Thou"......"I'm with you fellers".

It is, since it is spoken by native speakers. Hibernian English is a dialect of English.
Are there real native speakers of Standard Irish? No, since it's an artificial dialect. You can't find families who've spoken Standard Irish for centuries.



That is simply ignorance of what languages are.



It has not progressed. Languages don't evolve through the speech of learners, but through the speech of native speakers. The various mistakes that learners make, don't matter, they are simply mistakes, it's not "an evolution of Irish".



neither do I, but I tell them they should try to choose a dialect and to stick to it.



what's the point learning a kind of Irish that is only spoken by learners, and often full of mistakes (in pronunciation, grammar, expressions etc) ?



If it were dead it wouldn't have any speaker. Those who say Gaeltacht Irish is dead are ignorant people. First, they don't know what a dead language is, and 2nd, they don't know that Gaeltacht Irish has many speakers. And Gaeltacht Irish is the genuine language of Ireland - not standard Irish. Standard Irish didn't exist before 1950, it's too recent to be a part of the Irish heritage, isn't it
It's a bit like Esperanto... but nobody says Esperanto is something else than Esperanto.

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

It’s a dialect of English becaues it evolved as a version of English used by non-native learners who had Irish as their first language. That’s how language contact and substrate and superstrate influence work.

The situation in Hibernian English is exactly comparable to the situation in Urban Irish (which is not the same as Standard Irish). It’s a form of a language that originally arose through non-native speakers acquiring the language as their second language, then passed it on to the next generation as that generation’s first language, albeit with certain traits that native speakers of the older form of the language would not exhibit. Exactly the same thing.

The only difference is the time frame. With Hibernian English, the change happened long ago; with Urban Irish, they are happening now.


Urban Irish is any of the various forms of Irish spoken by people who use the language in non-Gaeltacht areas. Standard Irish is an orthography, not a language or a dialect.

That orthographies are often taken, especially by teachers, to be superior to dialects, and thus end up actually pushing dialects to the periphery (and sometimes killing them off altogether) and becoming dialects of their own is quite common. Unfortunate, in my view, since that’s rarely (nowadays) what orthographies set out to do—but common nonetheless.


So is saying that Urban Irish is not ‘real’ Irish, but Hibernian English is ‘real’ English.

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Not a native speaker.

Always wait for at least three people to agree on a translation, especially if it’s for something permanent.

My translations are usually GU (Ulster Irish), unless CO (Standard Orthography) is requested.

the Irish people learnt English from native speakers' speech in the first place...



no because Urban Irish hasn't been learnt from native speakers.
Hiberno-English isn't English with all sounds replaced by the closest Irish ones.
Urban Irish is simply a kind of Irish that is heavily influenced by English in all points of view because the people who speak it didn't manage yet to speak proper Irish ie. native Irish ie. Gaeltacht Irish.
Hiberno-English isn't English influenced by Irish in all points of view etc. There's an Irish influence, but it's not all of what makes it different from standard English. Otherwise there would be slender and broad consonants, the verb at the beginning, declensions and so on.

And if Hiberno-English were only English heavily influenced by Irish, then the native speakers of Hiberno-English would learn Irish very easily, they would easily get the slender/broad consonants and so on. When you hear Hiberno-English speakers learning Irish, their accent sounds more English than Irish...



No it's not only an orthography. Otherwise you wouldn't have grammars of Standard Irish in bookshops... And Irish handbooks wouldn't teach Standard Irish. They would only be orthography handbooks... which they are not.



orthographies and dialects are completely different things.



orthographies that become dialects? Looks like you don't know what orthography is:



from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthography



Is cosúil nár thuig tú rud ar bith dár scríobh mé. Léigh aríst le do thoil. Níl mé ag iarraidh an rud céarna a mhíniú aríst is aríst eile...

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Is fearr Gaeilg na Gaeltaċta ná Gaeilg ar biṫ eile
Agus is í Gaeilg Ġaoṫ Doḃair is binne

Only if you define Urban Irish as Irish learnt non-natively by non-native speakers. There are quite a few non-native learners who learn Irish by native speakers in non-Gaeltacht areas. For example, all the children growing up in the Gaeltacht Quarter in Belfast (which, despite the name, is not a Gaeltacht, since it’s not an area that has a continuous tradition of Irish being the main language of everyday life) grow up to speak perfectly fluent Irish, and many/most of people (adults) whom they learn from are native speakers from various different Gaeltachts, or just from families where Irish survived outside the Gaeltacht areas.

This is Urban Irish, too, and it’s simply not true to say that ‘Urban Irish’, lumped together as a whole, is not learnt from native speakers.


Nor is Urban Irish Irish with all sounds replaced by the closest (Hibernian) English ones.


And vice versa. Urban Irish does not have the subject first, either, and it (usually) has broad/slender distinctions, though perhaps to a lesser degree than in Gaeltacht Irish.


Don’t put words in my mouth. I know perfectly well what an orthography is.

The Wikipedia article on orthographies mentions, but fails to expound on the fact that orthographies are standardised systems of representing oral languages in writing. Writing systems include not only the correct spellings of individual lexemes, but also the rules for representing morphology in written form, and also extends to syntactic standardisations. An orthography can and usually does also standardise morphological and syntactical forms and categories, and it is often perfectly possible to write a grammar of an orthography that nonetheless describes no dialect.

Standard Irish does not pro- or describe pronunciation, and it is therefore not a dialect, since a dialect is by definition a spoken form of a language.

And yes, I know that orthographies don’t literally become dialects. My meaning (which would have been clear to anyone not out to pick nits) was that orthographies, being often government-backed and having official status, nearly always end up occupying the higher diglossic seat, and speakers of dialects often end up hypercorrecting their dialect to fit the orthography better, resulting sometimes in dialects that change to the point of becoming just a spoken counterpart of the orthography.



But anyway. This is turning into a rather pointless argument about something that doesn’t really have much bearing on the thread (or anything else here, for that matter), so I’ll just stop here and not contribute further to that derailing.

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Not a native speaker.

Always wait for at least three people to agree on a translation, especially if it’s for something permanent.

My translations are usually GU (Ulster Irish), unless CO (Standard Orthography) is requested.

There appears to be an online version of Gaeilge gan Stró with sample lessons available free for trial at:

http://www.ranganna.com/

The sound files contain a range of native speakers from all three major dialects (though it doesn't point out which is which) and only a very small ratio of second-language speakers.

The author Éamonn Ó Dónaill is a native of Gaoth Dobhair in the Donegal Gaeltacht:

http://www.gaelchultur.com/index.php?pa ... =6&lang=en

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Múinteoir Gaeilge - Irish Teacher
My "specialty" is Connemara Irish, particularly Cois Fhairrge dialect, but I can also speak Ulster and Munster Irish with native-level pronunciation.
Is fearr Gaeilge ḃriste ná Béarla cliste, cinnte, aċ i ḃfad níos fearr aríst í Gaeilge ḃinn ḃeo na nGaeltaċtaí.
Gaeilge Chonnacht (GC), go háraid Gaeilge Chois Fhairrge (GCF), Gaeilic Uladh (GU), Gaelainn na Mumhan (GM), agus Gaeilge an Chaighdeáin Oifigiúil (CO).

With 800 years of being under English occupation, centuries that the English trying to wipe out Irish, the famine, independent for 90 years. Lets be grateful any type of Irish is still alive through

People say they fear for the future of Irish because there is influences from English, I will only fear for the language if Irish had no speakers.

That can be very insulting

Tell that to the people who dedicate their lives speaking, promoting, breathing Irish in places like Derry, Dublin and Belfast.

If thats the case they might as well stop speaking Irish then all around urban Ireland, then eventually the Gaeltacht will die (which is happening), then the language will be completely dead.