No in my experience. In both Cork and Kerry some people retain them, but even what they retain varies wildly.

To give you a proper impression of this, I know neighbours who don't use the same verbal nouns for many verbs, people who live down the road from each other and don't recognise vocabulary the other has used for basic things (e.g. porridge, sausages, etc).


Yes, for some people.

Again I know a native speaker who uses genitive plurals, but doesn't properly distinguish broad and slender L.

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

Well, what is "Muskerry Irish"? Most Irish speakers in Muskerry don't exactly speak Muskerry Irish. There is one well-known native speaker who wrote the igaeilge blog - and I was told by people in Muskerry that his father, who died when he was a child, would have been ashamed of him owing to the poor quality of is Irish... and yet he larps as a native speaker. Sure, he speaks something or other natively, but it is not
Muskerry Irish.

I now realise that it was silly to learn a dialect that doesn't have a Category A Gaeltacht. If I had my time over again, I would have studied Corca Dhuibhne Irish. Of course, as An Londubh points out, the difference in the Irish of the younger generation is there in CD too. In fact, in Muskerry I was told about a schoolboy who spoke good Irish before he went to the bunscoil there in the Gaeltacht. The bunscoil destroyed his Irish - if you go there with Munster Irish and they're teaching the CO and most of other children don't speak Irish as well, etc, well you can see the result won't be good. Actually, we're at the fag-end of the Irish language.

I wonder if it was like this in the old days, or if this wide variation between neighbours is a new development?

That's definitely a new phenomenon. If you look at the quarterly journal An Músgraigheach in the 1940s - PDfs provided by An Londubh on the Cork Irish website - there was once a strong sense of what was right and wrong in Muskerry Irish. It was not a "one person keeps the traditional grammar, the other person doesn't bother with it at all" thing.

An Músgraigheach is simply delightful. There were 8 issues, edited by a secret/undisclosed person, and issue 1 is at https://corkirish.files.wordpress.com/2 ... heach1.pdf

I was told on various forums, including Daltaí, that only foreign learners of Irish supported the traditional dialects or strongly insisted on what was right and wrong in the language. Then I found out that that was entirely wrong. Peadar Ua Laoghaire, Amhlaoibh Ó Loingsigh, Dónall Bán Ó Céileachair and the writers in An Músgraigheach had a clear view of what was grammatically correct or not -and it was once a very important part of Muskerry culture. The idea that you could just rock up in Muskerry in the 1940s and say "bhí siad" and not be looked down on is just false.

Ceanntuigheoireacht - have a look at the article Seachain!, on p29 of the PDF of issue 1 (numbered as p29, but it is also 15/17 in the page searchbox of the PDF - as the internal numbering of PDF pages can differ from the page number of the PDF file). A list of things that are incorrect in Muskerry Irish are listed. Including "fear amháin" for "one man", which can only be "aon fhear amháin" in the dialect (fear amháin = only a man).

As djwebb2021 said it is a new development. Even today there is more consistency between older speakers.

There's even the fact that if you show a clip of Irish from the 1920s-40s to older speakers today they will understand it. Younger native speakers generally will not. They'll usually do no better than a good learner.

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

Wow! A Londuibh, have you had any experience in Corca Dhuíbhne with younger native speakers struggling to understand their grandparents?

Yes. I've been in an awkward situation where I understood the grandparent and they didn't.

Mostly it is due to vocabulary, i.e. the older speaker used a less common word. However it is sometimes grammar or even pronunciation. The last is the worst I think as it's a bit strange when a sentence with fairly standard grammar and so forth is not understood due to fully native pronunciation.

You'll find accounts of younger people explicitly saying they sometimes can't understand their grandparents in the book An Chonair Chaoch.

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