February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Irish would not return as the common language of Ireland, but its advocates did succeed in preserving it as a living vestige of Irish heritage.
Many people use the word Gaelic when they are referring to the native language of Ireland. Technically speaking, the correct term is Irish Gaelic, or, as most in Ireland say, Irish. Such specificity is needed because three main forms of Gaelic currently exist — Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx Gaelic (spoken on the Isle of Man). All three derive from a common, ancient Celtic dialect known as Goidelic. Until the 16th century Irish was the dominant language of Ireland.
So what happened? Simply put, English colonization of Ireland in the 16th century under the Tudors included a specific program of de-Gaelicization. The goal was to create an Ireland loyal to the British crown by replacing native Irish culture and Catholicism with English culture and Protestantism. It began slowly under Henry VIII but grew more intense and ruthless in the 1600s when much of the land of Ireland was taken from the native Irish and given to British landlords (the plantation scheme).
Still, as late as 1750 as many as two-thirds of the Irish population spoke Gaelic in everyday life. But stepped up Anglicization meant that by the time of the census of 1851 (the first to inquire about language), only about 23 percent had any knowledge of the language and most of them lived in the poorest and more remote counties in the south and west of Ireland. Massive immigration from these areas to England and America from the 1850s to the 1920s further diminished the use of the language. So, too, did the gradual modernization of the Irish economy, which pulled these heretofore isolated areas into the wider British economy. By 1901, only 14 percent of Ireland’s population could speak the language.
But by then, a language revival movement was well under way. It began as far back as 1807 with the founding of the Gaelic Society, which was followed by similar organizations such as the Iberno-Celtic Society (1818), the Ulster Gaelic Society (1830), the Irish Archaeological & Celtic Society (1840), and the Ossianic Society (1853). In addition, activists established Irish-language newspapers like the True Irishman (1862). The movement received a big boost when Archbishop MacHale of Tuam, Co. Galway, began publishing works in Irish and speaking in favor of the language revival.
A similar movement emerged in America. In 1856, a chapter of the Ossianic Society opened in New York City and the next year the first regular publication in America in the Irish language began with the establishment of “Our Gaelic Department,” a weekly feature in the newspaper the Irish-American. But it was not until the early 1870s, with the establishment of the Philo-Celtic Societies in Boston and Brooklyn (with countless more following suit across the country in cities with large Irish populations) that a full-fledged movement began in the U.S.
The beginning of a true national movement in Ireland came on Dec. 29, 1876 with the establishment of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language in Dublin. It presently merged with the Gaelic Union (1878) and became the chief organization committed to promoting the language revival. That mantle was passed to the Gaelic League founded in 1893. The League spread rapidly throughout Ireland, with more than 500 branches established by 1904. It published several Irish-language periodicals and fought successfully to inaugurate a bilingual educational policy in Irish-speaking regions (1906) and to add Irish language courses to university curriculum (1909).
The source of inspiration behind the late-19th century language revival was rising nationalism. For Irish and Irish-American nationalists, nothing so symbolized a distinct and venerable Irish culture than the Irish language. The fact that so few people of Irish birth or background spoke Irish as a direct result of British colonial domination made its resurrection all the more meaningful. It represented not merely Ireland’s political independence, but its cultural independence as well.
As Douglas Hyde, a co-founder of the Gaelic League and one of Ireland’s leading cultural revivalists, put it, “In order to de-Anglicize ourselves, we must at once arrest the decay of the language. We must bring pressure upon our politicians not to snuff it out by their racist discouragement merely because they do not themselves understand it. We must arouse some spark of patriotic inspiration among the peasantry who still use the language, and put an end to that shameful state of feeling — a thousand-tongued reproach to our leaders and statesmen — which makes young men and women blush and hang their heads when overheard speaking their own language.”
The movement likewise flourished in America. Irish language scholar Michael Logan started the bilingual monthly magazine Gael in 1881 that provided an important forum for Irish language literature. Many Irish-American newspapers added Gaelic columns in the 1880s and ’90s as the Irish language revival hit full stride. In the 1890s, the Ancient Order of Hibernians established a chair of Gaelic at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
The revival of the Irish language eventually petered out in America, but in Ireland it continued into the 20th century. The Free State constitution established Irish as the official language of the Republic and made instruction part of the public school curriculum. In 1943, the government created the Gaelic Commission to establish and maintain uniform standards of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. In 1973, the EEC (forerunner to the EU) recognized Irish as one of its official languages. Today, there are about 1.5 million people (43 percent) out of Ireland’s total population of 4 million who are familiar with Irish, with perhaps 80,000 of them considered fluent.
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