Author: Lauren Jean

Now that I’ve been back in the States for about a week I’ve been left to ponder if my Irish actually improved at all. I did very well in the classroom, and think that my ability to read and write has improved, but I’m not certain about speaking.

I can understand most of what is said to me, but I find myself panicking, utterly tongue-tied, and devoid of anything resembling vocabulary when trying to speak. I think my host family was shocked to learn I was in the Ardrang (the advanced course), because my spoken Irish at home was so poor compared to people in lower level classes. To be fair, one of the other students at my house was Breton and periodically I attempted to engage him in conversation in French, and that went very much the same way, though I’d say my fluency level in French is much, much higher than my Irish. It’s somewhat frustrating as I had really hoped to overcome this stumbling block through this immersion program. I have a diagnosed social anxiety disorder, so I’m wondering if its just something broken in me rather something than any amount of speaking practice can fix. My issues with communicating with French speakers certainly suggest its the former. I’d also be lying if I said I don’t have issues speaking English at times as well.

Two other students going into Advanced Irish I attended Oideas Gael this past summer; their speaking abilities were already head and shoulders above my own and likely are lightyears ahead now, so who knows how Irish will go for me this semester. We didn’t focus on speaking all that much in the classroom, so I am wondering if I would have benefited more from attending Oideas Gael in Donegal, though I’ve been working on focusing on the Connemara dialect.

My adviser has told me numerous times that I’m too hard on myself, and I’m hoping that’s true here, that I just hit a plateau and need to keep pushing through, that I’m better than I give myself credit for. Again, we’ll see what this semester holds.

The last night of the program was the culmination of many of the cultural activities we’d been participating in since day 1; the acadamh at NUIG liked to ensure that we had a full experience of traditional life in the Gaeltacht. Thus we had lessons in singing traditional songs (it was labelled as sean-nos singing, but it really wasn’t), sean-nos dancing, and ceili dancing.

There was a great deal of all of that on the last night. I’m not terribly coordinated so I didn’t participate in the dancing, but I do enjoy singing. We did rousing renditions of “Peigín Leitir Móir,” “An Cailín Álainn,” and “Tá Mo Chleamhnas Déanta.” I particularly like “Tá Mo Chleamhnas Déanta,” though it’s the saddest of the group. I think we all found singing to be particularly useful for pronunciation practice.

At varying points some of the other students performed; a good many of us played traditional music, though it was only a small handful that volunteered to play in front of everyone else, rather than with everyone else as was more usual. I myself play tinwhistle and grew up playing with the Groton Session in Massachusetts, but I didn’t volunteer to go up. It was more than enough to watch and listen and have this room filled with Irish speaking where it had been English on that first morning.

“Tabhair dom an pis thalún, le do thoil,” was something one of the older ladies in my household was wont to say at breakfast every morning.* It made me wince– she was using “pis thalún” to refer to the peanut butter (though it really only means peanut), insisting that that was what peanut butter was called. Yet our hosts usually called it peanut butter. Pádraig particularly was not thrilled with that sort of thing, like using anann instead of “pineapple.”

If it wasn’t something native to Ireland, generally you use the English/ other language equivalent. Whenever we asked Pádraig how to say things of that nature in Irish, he’d usually counter with “Cad é iógart i mBéarla?” (what is yoghurt in English?) to illustrate that Irish had every right to use loanwords just as English does.

I’m not sure that that lady ever really got the point that Pádraig was making, as she continued to insistent on the correctness of the dictionary over what the actual native usage of the language is. That sort of thing drives me crazy in any language really, as linguistic prescriptivism generally only serves to create a hierarchy of language usage that generally disadvantages speakers of a certain socio-economic status. Language is a living organism whose life is dictated by its speakers, as I referred to in an earlier post; there’s a point where you need to abandon the dictionary and let the community you’re in really dictate what you’re doing.

*Side note: they generally did our housing by age, so we had four people in their 60s/70s, two men in their forties, then myself at 27, and three 22 year olds; it was an interesting combination, and I genuinely mean that.

The title of this post refers back to July 28th, when myself and five other students decided we’d make the trek out to Leitir Mealláin, a village/ island near Carraroe. Incidentally Leitir Mealláin is where my Notre Dame Irish professor, Tara, is from, as well as my bean an tí, Báirbre.

The original purpose of our journey (a turas, as Gaeilge) was to see the currach and hooker races. The Galway hookers are sail boats with three sails and need a certain amount of wind to race efficiently; unfortunately there wasn’t enough that day to hold the hooker races, though they did have them out and about in the water.

The currach is another type of boat native to the west of Ireland, traditionally made from tarred canvas stretched over a wooden frame. They’re propelled by paddle, much like a canoe, so the wind was less of a factor in determining if they would race. While it was nice to be able to see some traditional watercraft, the race itself was fairly short.

   

When we all had told Báirbre that we wanted to go to Leitir Mealláin she made a call to her brother, John Baba Jack, and told us that we needed to meet him at the Leitir Mealláin heritage center at 3:00 so he could show us the place; it was a Sunday and generally wasn’t open, so this was a rare opportunity for us. So after the races finished we began the trek out to the village center and met with John.

John is an interesting character: he had a real love of history, particularly local history and folklore and it really shone through as he talked about this artifact or that one that he’d managed to collect over the years for the Heritage Center, all in Irish of course. He had been a fisherman for most of his life and knew the traditions of that life inside and out; he was fairly disappointed that so few young men pursued that life anymore as he saw that knowledge as dying out. There’s a particular jargon that accompanies fishing, and many of those names and words were being lost over the years; John particularly dwelt on his knowledge of the names of nine types of breakers, and how that knowledge would be gone forever when he was gone.

We all implored John to write this information down or at least get in touch with a folklorist to record it. This is the very reason the Irish Folklore Commission was founded, after all. John refused to write it, saying it was information that needed to be passed on orally. Later when we relayed this information to Báirbre she told us that John had been interviewed by TG4– the Irish language channel– several times already and that we shouldn’t be feeding his ego. We all had a good laugh at that one, reassured that at least John was talking to someone about what he knew.

Beatha teanga í a labhairt is a seanfhocal (“old saying”) meaning that the life of a language is in the speaking– a particularly important thing to keep in mind with the Irish language. It was also the starting point for my Irish class, the Ard Rang (advanced class) on the very first day of class in Carraroe.

It’s a more neutral way of saying Padraig Pearse’s famous “Tir gan teanga, tir gan anam” (a land without a language is a land without a soul) which has become a seanfhocal in its own right. Living in Carraroe and being privileged enough to go to Rosmuc and see Pearse’s cottage, that sort of credo runs deeply through the way the program here is structured, which I’ve already developed a deep appreciation for.

Pearse’s cottage in Rosmuc.

It’s somewhat simplistic, but it’s amazing how much the world changes when you can function (or rather have to function!) entirely in another language. I’ve never had the opportunity to do an immersion program, so this is all quite new and exciting for me. I might be a researcher who mainly will use Irish for my work, but I’m also deeply committed to becoming an Irish speaker as a matter of ethical practice and disciplinal decolonisation. I’m only a few days into my first week here, and I’m excited to see where I will go.