Author: danielmartin

There were many insights I gained into Irish culture, and language learning as a whole as a result of my time in Ireland this summer. One thing that struck me about immersive language acquisition specifically is how far a reasonably small amount of vocabulary can get you in a conversation. While it may seem like the best possible route is to try to learn a bunch of very specific words, having a firm grasp on the most common words and expressions proves far more valuable. I believe I did take out of this experience much of what I hoped to learn from it. I learned many expressions relating to everyday life and my surroundings, and started to see my environment through the lens of Irish language structures.

I also gained a more complete perspective of modern Irish culture, separate from the often romanticized vision I think many foreigners have of the country. Particularly in coming to terms with the serious situation of the Irish language, and how the fight to keep it alive is being fought not on a national level, but town by town and family by family. Even in Southwest Donegal, the primary schools some 15 years ago would have been through English, but now Irish is the educational medium in the primary schools and is being phased-in in the nearby secondary school. This sort of grass roots fight to keep the language alive is not something one can really experience from the outside. To a future SLA recipient I would just give the simple advice of go for it. Never again in your life will you have this kind of opportunity, so why not throw yourself all in and come out the other side all the better for it? Slán agus go raibh míle maith agaibh!

When learning a minority language such as Irish, it is easy to focus on how English has influenced it. A huge amount of vocabulary for new words, especially technology, is basically English transliterations- e.g. fón=phone. What has been educational about staying in Ireland for a month, however, is seeing how the Irish I have been studying effects the way Irish people speak Hiberno-English. There are two phrases that just about everybody uses that are wonderful examples of how Irish influences Irish people’s English, even if they don’t speak Irish themselves.

One of my favorite phrases in Irish is “tá Gaeilge agam,” which is how you say you speak Irish. However, if one were to directly translate this phrase it means I have Irish. It is beautiful in a way that Irish isn’t just something you speak, but something that is a part of you- something you possess. When Irish people are referring to what languages they speak in English, they will use this same structure, saying “I have Irish” or “I have French.” I don’t think I will use this phrase in English when I’m talking about being able to speak foreign languages, but I will use it when talking about Irish. I like the idea that Irish is uniquely something that’s a part of you, not a skill you have.

Another great example of Hiberno-English being directly pulled from Irish phraseology is the expression “he was giving out,” which means that he is scolding or chastising. This too is a directly translation of “ag tabhairt amach,” which is to be scolding. This is quite a funny expression to me because unless somebody told you, it would be pretty hard to guess the meaning of this expression. For this reason I don’t think I will use this expression simply because most people in the America would be pretty confused if I tried using this in English.

In a country like Ireland where most people can’t speak their own country’s first and native language, it’s amazing to see how Irish still permeates the culture and thought.

Although Ireland was once known for its overwhelming adherence to organized religion, the vast majority being Catholic, over the last 40 years the country has seen a plummet in the number of people who regularly attend church and more broadly those who have a belief in God which plays a role in their lives. As was explained to me by an Irish man, who like so many others was raised Catholic but holds no religion, Ireland has essentially become an agnostic or even atheist secular country. The marks of religion are everywhere: statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary in people’s windows, Christian symbols embedded in architecture and national imagery, but by and large the people aren’t religious. 

Living in Ireland for a month I can confirm the truth in these statements. Religious adherence is overwhelmingly generational, older people are far more likely to be practicing Catholics, and finding Irish people my age who are faithful is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I have however come across some religious people, old and young, who explained to me how the situation looks from an Irish perspective. A consistent theme conveyed to me was that the modern Irish people saw leaving the Church as a way to finally throw off the shackles of a “backwards, out-of-date institution”; adhering to religion was a what they did in the old days when Ireland had a poor rural economy and to progress as a modern nation it was necessary to rid ourselves of this dinosaur. 

The majority having embraced secularism, those who remain in the Church have only a memory left of a time when Ireland was called the “land of saints and scholars.” Because of the perception of the Church as oppressive, young people who are religious are made fun of and ostracized for their devotion. One young man told me that if he ever expressed his faith around an audience of his peers he immediately would be a member of the “out-group,” and looked at it as a strange anomaly. 

As I mentioned in a previous blog many Irish speakers in the Gaeltacht tend to be older (and thus likely more religious), so I have seen week after week the state of religion in Ireland. Most Sundays I’m the youngest person in the church and the average age is about 75, with a smattering of a few people across a mostly empty church and a priest who would have retired a long time ago if there was anybody to replace him. I thought attendance was depressingly low back in the States, but compared to Ireland, church attendance in the U.S. looks like the promised land. Apparently I’m not the first to realize the stark contrast, and one young Irish man told me that those who are faithful among the young generations see the U.S. as “Catholic Disneyland”, a few of his friends even having moved to the States to marry women they had originally met online on Catholic dating sites, finding opportunities to date Irish girls who share their values few and far between. 

It is worth noting that some Irish speakers assign blame to the Church for the decline of the language with the criticism that it didn’t do enough to protect the language in the face of English Protestant oppression. While there certainly is truth in the claim that the Church could have done more, a professor at Notre Dame explained to me that during the 1800s, many of the Catholic clergy were from middle class merchant backgrounds and thus wouldn’t have had any Irish themselves.

Conversing with people of a minority group, practicing Catholics, has been informative about the similarities in experience between linguistic minorities and religious minorities particularly in terms of social exclusion.

Learning about what Irish people think about the sizable number of Americans who come to learn Irish has been eye-opening, as it has taught me a great deal about how the Irish see the language themselves. Because Irish is a minority language facing serious challenges in many traditionally Gaeltacht communities (economic stagnation, emigration, patchy intergenerational transmission), it inevitably evokes diverse feelings from people of varying perspectives. So many people have worked incredibly hard to achieve protection for the Irish language on the national level, whether it being made a mandatory subject in schools, or the illegality of monolingual English public signs. Many others have devoted themselves to preserving the Irish language in traditionally Irish speaking communities, as well as introducing it to English speaking areas. Despite this incredible push, however, Irish still remains on the periphery of most Irish people’s lives as it is simply not the language of discourse in its own country. 

This unfortunate lack of visibility has led many people to become indifferent to its plight as it has very little effect on their daily lives. Furthermore, poor Irish language education in the school system has led many students to discard it as pointless and useless, or even grow resentful because of its compulsory character. With this backdrop in mind, it is not hard to see why attitudes towards Americans coming in to learn Irish ranges from overjoyed, to confused, to negative. Many of the folks who work to preserve the language and pass it onto the next generation welcome the large number of Americans that have taken to learning the language for a variety of reasons. Many Americans they see come through have an interest based on heritage or a connection to the country, some are language lovers, and still others academics. Whatever the reason, many Irish speakers who may have been a bit confused at first, are joyful to see Americans tap into a sense of identity with the language that so many Irish school students never have. 

Other Irish people, both Irish speakers and English speakers, are still confused by Americans’ interest. I have met multiple school teachers who were mandatorily in the Gaeltacht to get certificates so they could retain their teaching qualifications, who simply could not understand why anybody outside of Ireland would ever have an interest in a language spoken by a small minority of speakers with no perceived promise of economic or social gain. After all, many of their own students couldn’t care less about the language, so why on earth would Americans?

Some, though seemingly a shrinking number, see Americans coming to learn Irish as dumb and a waste of time. I actually overheard a conversation wherein a man getting his PHD in Celtic Studies from Harvard was asked by a young Irish fellow “why are you wasting your life away?” Once again the lack of necessity inherent in minority languages, likely combined with some embarrassment at his own inability to speak the native language of his country, led him to have such a negative view of Americans taking an interest in Irish. 

These latter two categories of people (characterized by indifference or even hostility) would make me despair about being an American trying to access such an ancient and rich language, but fortunately those who are overjoyed to see Americans and other foreigners learning Irish outnumber the others in Gaeltacht communities and seem increasingly to be winning the battle to create a positive view of Irish.

In my time in Ireland I have gained a new perspective on what many people think about what Ireland will look like post-Brexit. The United Kingdom is now a non-EU country and Ireland is an EU country, and yet they share a controversial border. When the UK decided to leave the European Union, it quickly stoked fears about what would happen to the border between the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland (ROI), and the 6 counties of Northern Ireland over which the UK exercises jurisdiction. When the two nations were both members of the EU, a soft border with free movement was the default, but with the UK’s departure, to preserve this status quo a special agreement must be crafted, yet currently no such lasting agreement has been accepted. To write an international agreement allowing an essentially unregulated border between a non-EU country and an EU country is quite a hard thing to accomplish, but neither nation is interested in going back to the hard border that divided Ireland during the decades-long sectarian violence during the second half of the 20th century- The Troubles. 

Fear of a hard border was one of the issues that pushed the people of Northern Ireland to vote largely to remain in the EU. I haven’t encountered much discussion about the border itself since my coming to Donegal because it seems that virtually no one wants the island split again. What I have come across however, is diverse attitudes towards the EU and its relation to united Ireland, especially in light of the fact that the “Leave” campaign ultimately triumphed nationally. Independence talks have reignited in Scotland as well as Irish Reunification discussions in Northern Ireland since Brexit, since both were in favor of staying in the EU but were out voted by the much larger English (and Welsh) population. Something that has surprised me in discussions with the people here is that more often than not, nationalist united Ireland attitudes, and pro-EU attitudes go hand in hand. Because the Irish language has become associated with Irish nationalism in the North, many Irish language learners come from Belfast and Down who see Irish as an important aspect of their Irish identity in contrast to British unionism. 

As an outsider this has always been confusing to me, because it sort of appears that folks want to get rid of English governance once and for all in Ireland and be free of London… so that the whole island can be subject to the decisions of Brussels. I believe that this favorable view of the EU has become so popular among Irish nationalists because it was the UK and ROI’s membership in the EU that assuaged some of the aforementioned divisions that have plagued the island since the War of Independence in 1922, when Ireland was first artificially bifurcated. If it is England’s desire to leave the EU and impose the threat of division on Ireland then of course the popular-in-Northern Ireland EU is going to be used as a selling point among nationalist politicians who want to reunite with an EU member state: the Republic of Ireland. I don’t think this joining of nationalism and Eurocentrism is a reflection of Irish people putting a great deal of value on being part of Europe, but instead it really reflects a strong sense of Irish identity which calls for a united Ireland, and harnessing pro-EU sentiment is a way to effect political change favorable to nationalist identity and policy. I have had a lot of exposure to this particular combination of thought because Irish speakers (and learners) tend to be very passionate about Irish identity and therefore to a significant extent fall on the pro-EU united Ireland side of the post-Brexit vision of Ireland discussion.

Another less common but still present strain of thought that I have come across is that of people who would traditionally be a demographic who associate with nationalist sentiments, but are Eurosceptic and don’t associate with the modern nationalist political leaders, Roman Catholic conservatives on both sides of the border. Because Irish is a struggling minority language, it is disproportionately used by an older demographic who come from small communities less focused on European politics. There is certainly a strain of Euroscepticism in this demographic, and thus they don’t see the ROI’s EU status in the same light as the other aforementioned nationalist contingent. 

These folks have traditionally voted for nationalist parties, especially in Northern Ireland, however in my conversations with this group they feel increasingly alienated by Sinn Féin’s (the nationalist party in NI) increasingly progressive social and economic policies. I have spoken to several who, though coming from firmly nationalist backgrounds, are willing to vote for the more socially conservative, and eurosceptic, Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) despite its defense of unionism and the British government. This contingent of voters reflects people of a more conservative belief system who, though holding nationalist beliefs, have been defecting from nationalist politics over social issues, and it’s quite possibly its firm adherence to a pro-EU policy. 

Because the Irish language attracts both Northern nationalists who tend to be pro- EU, in accordance with Sinn Féin and the bulk of the nationalist community, as well as older more conservative native and L2 speakers, I have been able to engage in many intriguing discussions about the future of Ireland in a post- Brexit world.