The Irish Language is a Goidelic language, a language branch from the Indo-European language family. Some people call it Irish Gaelic to not get confused with Gaelic, which is Scottish Gaelic. It's called 'Gaeilge' in Irish, and although its name (in English) come from where it's spoken (Ireland), it's a minority language! It has fewer than 100,000 speakers, and if you really want to make Irish survive, then I recommend that you learn Irish and then become an Irish teacher.
What is the majority language, then? Yup, it's English!
It is among the national languages of the EU. Which is very impressive for a language which has less than a million speakers. The fate of the language was influenced by the increasing power of the English state in Ireland. Elizabethan officials viewed the use of Irish unfavourably, as being a threat to all things English in Ireland. Its decline began under English rule in the 17th century. In the latter part of the 19th century, there was a dramatic decrease in the number of speakers, beginning after the Great Famine of 1845–52. Then it lost 20-25% of its population.
Its word order is VSO (Verb-Subject-Object). Which is rare, as only 9% of languages follow this word order. It has 2-3 sets of numbers, read from this source:
In addition to one set of numbers for doing arithmetic or referring to dates and times, Irish has a second set for counting humans and a third set for counting non-humans. 'Five children' is "cúigear páiste," but five horses is "cúig chapall."
Learn some words in Irish but before that, let me tell you that the beginning of the word changes depending on the grammatical environment. For example, the Irish word for 'woman' can be either bean (pronounced ban, like in English), bhean (pronounced van, like in English) or mbean (pronounced man, like in English).
The closest I can get to for the pronunciation for the word for 'man' in Irish is 'fyar'. Just like the 'A' in man. It's fear.
The word for 'girl' in Irish is cailín. It's somewhat pronounced as 'Colleen', but if you want to make sure you can go search it on Forvo.
And, of course, if you want to learn more, go check out Irish from Duolingo!
And now I have a 2-day streak!
What is the majority language, then? Yup, it's English!
It is among the national languages of the EU. Which is very impressive for a language which has less than a million speakers. The fate of the language was influenced by the increasing power of the English state in Ireland. Elizabethan officials viewed the use of Irish unfavourably, as being a threat to all things English in Ireland. Its decline began under English rule in the 17th century. In the latter part of the 19th century, there was a dramatic decrease in the number of speakers, beginning after the Great Famine of 1845–52. Then it lost 20-25% of its population.
Its word order is VSO (Verb-Subject-Object). Which is rare, as only 9% of languages follow this word order. It has 2-3 sets of numbers, read from this source:
In addition to one set of numbers for doing arithmetic or referring to dates and times, Irish has a second set for counting humans and a third set for counting non-humans. 'Five children' is "cúigear páiste," but five horses is "cúig chapall."
Learn some words in Irish but before that, let me tell you that the beginning of the word changes depending on the grammatical environment. For example, the Irish word for 'woman' can be either bean (pronounced ban, like in English), bhean (pronounced van, like in English) or mbean (pronounced man, like in English).
The closest I can get to for the pronunciation for the word for 'man' in Irish is 'fyar'. Just like the 'A' in man. It's fear.
The word for 'girl' in Irish is cailín. It's somewhat pronounced as 'Colleen', but if you want to make sure you can go search it on Forvo.
And, of course, if you want to learn more, go check out Irish from Duolingo!
And now I have a 2-day streak!
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