Gaeilge ó Bhanríon Shasana

["ón mBanríon Shasana"? But it's a genitive phrase with a specific referent, so it feels weird....]

Sorry this has taken a while, I was doing some traveling when the news broke. (Plus, I couldn't imagine anyone was waiting with bated breath for a post on this site.) I'll start with the stuff that happened first.

Queen's conciliatory message and use of Irish draws widespread praise from many quarters (May 20, 2011)
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0520/1224297354176.html

Memories of a historic royal visit (May 21, 2011)
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0521/1224297441669.html
Item: "Her majesty’s lovely cúpla focal at the start of her speech at Dublin Castle. The word from palace sources is that they were included at Queen Elizabeth’s suggestion."

Letters to the editor: The Queen's speech (May 20, 2011)
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2011/0520/1224297354036.html
The first is the simplest and my favorite:
"An Elizabethan conquest of Ireland through the medium of the Queen’s Irish?"

Text of the Queen's speech (May 19, 2011)
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0519/1224297287750.html

Poll shows how Queen was taken to Irish hearts - Sunday May 22 2011
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/queen-visit/poll-shows-how-queen-was-taken-to-irish-hearts-2654225.html
"'It was a great moment for this country when the Queen addressed our nation in Irish at the opening of her speech, really wonderful,' one female respondent said."

Tweeting as Gaeilge: Social networking and the Irish language

From the Sociable

Tweeting as Gaeilge: Social networking and the Irish language (March 6, 2011)
http://sociable.co/2011/03/06/tweeting-as-gaeilge-social-networking-and-the-irish-language/

by Piers Dillon Scott

It is probably best, for full disclosure and to assuage my guilt, to admit that my Irish is not great. In fact it’s horrendous; I can remember the few stock phrases that we all recall from Primary School, “An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas”, as well as a couple of choice curse words. After that my lingual abilities become an embarrassment, yet on the social web there is a passionate community of Irish language speakers who are tweeting and status-updating as Gaeilge.

But what place does Irish hold in the social media age? Is the one of the oldest continuously spoken languages in the world surviving online or is it being drowned out by our colonial mother tongue.

I spoke to Niamh O’Sullivan, projects executive with Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge, an umbrella organisation that represents 24 Irish language bodies, including Conradh na Gaeilge, Gael Linn, Gaelscoileanna. Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge are frequent users of social networking websites to promote their activities and the Irish language, they can be found on Facebook and on Twitter @gaelport.

I began by asking Niamh if there was any value for Irish language speakers in using Twitter or Facebook.

“I would say that the development of social media has been of great benefit for Irish language organisations. It’s very cost effective and is a useful way of connecting with Irish speakers online.” These connections are important, social media, she tells me, is not simply the narcissistic tool that some parts of the media have painted it to be. Its value can be found in its ability to connect people with similar interests, regardless of their location.

“Irish speakers can often feel isolated, particularly those who are not living in a Gaeltacht region or are living in areas such as Dublin, Belfast or Galway where there isn’t real vibrant Irish language community. Social media gives them opportunity to join in a community and feel connected.

“Irish speakers or gaeilgeoirí can just log on to their Facebook and keep up to date with what’s happening, find out about events and news and can interact with each other.”

This community of users is not just limited to those with a grasp of Irish but people who’s passion for the language comes more from admiration than fluency. The passion for the language goes beyond some gaeilgeoirí clique but is open to all with an interest in Irish affairs.

“We get great feedback from other twitter users on stories we feature or ideas for promoting the language in other areas. The response during the election, in the wake of the controversy surrounding the Fine Gael proposal to reduce the status of Irish at Leaving Certificate level has been huge. As has the response to the debate on TG4.

“The response has been especially huge on Facebook. A large number of people have joined a page set up by the USI protesting against the move and other Irish language organisations campaigning on the matter. The feedback on our own Facebook page has been immense.

“Social networks have been an invaluable way of keeping people up to date on the policies of the parties and we have been using Vimeo and YouTube throughout the election campaign to record events. The parties’ various have been were discussed from Donegal to Dublin to Dingle and that has meant a greater level of engagement with Irish speakers and others who support the language.”

But Fine Gael’s view of Irish is not an isolated case, many Irish companies simply don’t use the language, either online or in more traditional media. This lack of visibility can make the job of promoting the language even more difficult,

“I think the top technology companies are doing their bit, both Google and Facebook provide Irish language versions of their services, but more indigenous companies could follow their lead. Google often contact us with press releases as Gaeilge- something many other companies don’t bother doing. Google, I think, has a very positive attitude to multilingualism which is very important.

“But I don’t think native companies realise how much goodwill is out there for the Irish language or how much Irish people want a connection with the language. I do think if a company did a proper social media campaign as Gaeilge that there would be a very good response. It’s something maybe more companies should look into.”

With this lack of Irish promotion the challenge for organisations represented by Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge is simply to remain visible

“Every year for past 2 or 3 years there has been a lá na Gaeilge on Facebook and Twitter on March 17th. This has helped but I do think that this shouldn’t be a one-off. You have to keep visible and in touch with what’s happening and I think it is important that the status updates should tap into the mood of the day and should take place all year.”

So, what would Niamh say to companies and people such as myself who rarely share a cupla focal online,

“Fáilte! Just go for it. Don’t get hung up on the grammar or spelling too much. Use the social media to practice your Irish, to meet other speakers online and to be part of the community online.”

Language activists blast FG's plan to make Irish optional

Irish Independent via http://www.gaelport.com/sonrai-nuachta?NewsItemID=5455

Language activists blast FG's plan to make Irish optional (January 12, 2011)
Controversy is likely to rage over move to scrap compulsory Gaeilge after the Junior Cert

"Fine Gael is set for a war with Irish language activists as it sticks by its plan to scrap compulsory Irish at the Leaving Cert. The party, which is set to lead the next Government, is committed to making Irish optional after the Junior Cert. Enda Kenny has frequently stated that compulsion has failed as the political engine to revive the language. If he presses ahead with his plan, he would be slaughtering one of the sacred cows of Irish education. Tens of thousands of students who see little value in learning Irish will welcome the move, but language activists warn that it could have a catastrophic effect."

More at Gaelport.com

Civil Unions for Gays and Lesbians Coming to Ireland

Ireland moves forward a bit! Civil unions is at least a good start.
Tugaigí píosa beag Gaeilge faoi dheara ann freisin!

http://bit.ly/hHsmqi

Word play as Gaeilge: Irish Scrabble now available

Word play as Gaeilge: Irish Scrabble now available (November 27, 2010)
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/1127/1224284259365.html

“Droch-bhainc” sounds much more enigmatic than “bad bank”, while “taosc” is a pretty neat Irish word for “bailout”.

Such was the observation of one Scrabble addict in the west yesterday, as the world’s first version of the game as Gaeilge reached the market.

A licence for the Irish version was secured by Glór na nGael, the Irish language development organisation, along with An Comhairle um Oideachas Gaeltachta agus Gaelaíochtas (COGG), the organisation supporting Irish teaching in schools.

Earlier this year, the two groups had been approved to produce Junior Scrabble (Puzal Ollmhór Urláir do Leanaí ).

“We hope people with a little less fluency will play this with their dictionary to hand,” said Eoghan MacCormaic, Glór na nGael development officer.

A “huge step forward in normalisation of the language” is how Lorcán Mac Gabhann, Glór na nGael chief executive, describes the new version of the popular game.

“We have developed this game as part of our strategy of creating and supporting opportunities for people to use Irish in everyday settings. We analysed the letter frequencies for Irish, and have produced this game after plenty of field-testing with different formats, some with consonants with the séimhiú (h) combined, some without, and of course there was much debate about fadas and úrú,” he said.

“We believe this game will now give learners, and fluent Irish speakers the same chance to score doubles, and triples and reach the same high scores as in any other versions of the game,” he said.

Scrabble was first invented as “Lexiko” in 1938 by architect Alfred Mosher Butts, who drew on the New York Times among other publications for a frequency analysis of letters. The game is now available in almost 30 languages. Glór na nGael’s next plan is to produce an Irish language version of Monopoly.

Scrabble is available in Irish language bookshops and online from www.udar.ie. Glór na nGael hopes it will reach toyshops by Christmas.

By Lorna Siggins

Stephen Fry to appear in 'Ros na Rún'

Stephen Fry to appear in 'Ros na Rún' (November 16, 2010)
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/1116/breaking38.html

Actor, broadcaster and well-known Twitter user, Stephen Fry is to make a guest appearance on the Irish-language soap opera Ros na Rún.

Fry was invited to appear in the show after visiting the set in Connemara recently for a new BBC TV series on minority languages called Planet Word.

His cameo will be filmed in early December on a closed shoot in Spiddal, Co Galway.

Now in its fifteenth year, Ros na Rún is broadcast on TG4 every Tuesday and Thursday evenings with an omnibus edition airing on Sunday nights.

The show is also broadcast on WYBE public television in Philadelphia, in the US and on the Scottish Gaelic channel TeleG.

Ros na Rún , which celebrated its 1000th episode last New Year's Eve, has featured a number of strong storylines over the years covering issues such as domestic violence, suicide, rape, drugs, elder abuse and abortion.

The soap's series producer Hugh Farley said there is huge excitement on about Fry's forthcoming cameo appearance.

"Our team of scriptwriters are currently writing Stephen a cúpla focal for his special role and we plan to film a highly entertaining scene with Stephen and some of Ros na Rún’ s best loved characters,“ he said.

Galway man launches Irish-speaking toy

Oh, one more:
Galway man launches Irish-speaking toy (July 2, 2010)
http://www.theirishworld.com/article.asp?SubSection_Id=2&Article_Id=14724
"Shops in Ireland will be selling the world's first Irish-speaking toy within a month.
"Known as ‘BB’, the toy has been designed by a Galway man to give toddlers and children a hand learning the Irish language."

€1m windfall to raise Irish profile abroad

€1m windfall to raise Irish profile abroad (July 11, 2010)
http://www.independent.ie/national-news/euro1m-windfall-to-raise-irish-profile-abroad-2254208.html
"Universities around the world are benefiting from a €1m windfall from the Government to help raise the profile of the Irish language."

Irish Times: Schism fears for Gaeilgeoirí

Schism fears for Gaeilgeoirí
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/0116/1224262447899.html
Brian Ó Broin
The Irish Times
Saturday, January 16, 2010

A new survey indicates that Gaeltacht and urban Irish speakers are finding each other increasingly more difficult to understand. Could this rift further weaken the language?

Recently, I’ve been meeting a lot of urban speakers of Irish, and was thinking about the Government’s plan to boost the number of daily speakers of Irish from the current 83,000 to 250,000 within 20 years. A threefold increase in daily speakers is a bold proposal, and there’s little doubt that these speakers are going to have to come from the towns and cities, rather than from the Gaeltacht, whose entire population (including several solidly anglophone suburbs of Galway city) is currently 91,000.

This got me thinking. Is there a city version of the Irish language? And if there is, how different is it from Gaeltacht Irish? A conversation I recently had with a speaker from Limerick, who is raising her daughter in Irish, revealed a fascinating fact. She never listened to Raidió na Gaeltachta. Was it that it was a Gaeltacht station and irrelevant to her, I asked? Only partly, she admitted. It was actually because she found the presenters very difficult to understand.

Yet this woman spoke fluent Irish. How could a fluent speaker of Irish have such difficulty with the national Irish-language radio station? What did she listen to?

“Oh, the usual. RTÉ, Today FM, Live95.” Surely she listened to some Irish-language media. Maybe she watched TG4?

“No. Not TG4, sometimes Hector and the sports.” And she let her young daughter watch the kids’ programmes.

My conversations with Gaeltacht people met with a similar bias, but in the other direction. When presenters with so-called “school Irish” came on the radio, my Gaeltacht friends say they tend to tune out, finding the Irish unpleasant, or difficult to understand. They tolerate much of TG4’s output, but grimace or change channels when city speakers come on. As for the hordes of Irish-speaking teenagers and parents who descend on the Gaeltacht during the summer months, they absolutely prefer to speak English with them. They say that the city folks’ Irish is simply too strange.

As a linguist, I find this fascinating. The two groups, while nominally speaking the same language, have almost no points of contact. They prefer to tune each other out or speak English with each other, rather than use Irish together. This seems to have all the hallmarks of a separation.

Linguists tend to examine languages according to several criteria, and I decided to do a comparative analysis of the two types of Irish (Gaeltacht and non-Gaeltacht) using the most common of these criteria: pronunciation, word-order, word-formation, and vocabulary. To do this, I transcribed recordings of news reports compiled and read by Gaeltacht speakers on Raidió na Gaeltachta, and then by urban speakers on the two urban Irish-language stations, Raidió Fáilte in Belfast and Raidió na Life in Dublin.

Next I transcribed segments of chat shows from the different radio stations, in which the speakers were speaking freely. To avoid complicating matters, I chose the speakers at random, electing to ignore whether they were speakers who had learned Irish in the Gaeltacht or not. A comparison of the recordings unearthed significant differences in all areas of analysis.

Phonetics, or pronunciation, is a major feature of any language, and particularly so for Irish, which uses pronunciation to mark things such as the case of a noun or the tense of a verb. Since Irish has very many distinct phonetic features, I chose only three for comparative analysis: slender dentals (the initial consonants of “teas” and “tí”, for example), velar fricatives (the initial consonants of “chaisleán” and “Chonnacht”, for example), and palatal fricatives (the initial consonants of “cheann” and “chiseach”, for example).

Newsreaders on RnaG missed these features between 0 and 7 per cent of the time (that is to say, not much), while newsreaders on the urban stations missed them between 21 and 66 per cent of the time, a fairly significant number.

This demonstrates differences in pronunciation between Gaeltacht and city, and suggests a significant difference in the grammar used by Irish speakers in urban areas.

Most linguists agree that syntactic sophistication can be partially marked by the presence of subclauses in sentences. So, one might argue that “Peter died because he was sick” is more sophisticated than “Peter was sick and (then) he died”. A count of subclauses in the texts shows that newsreaders on RnaG produce eight subclauses for every 10 sentences, while their counterparts in urban stations produce five.

Gaeltacht speakers produce 15 subclauses for every 10 sentences, while their urban counterparts produce between six and eight. This is a considerable difference. Furthermore, urban speakers rarely nested subclauses within subclauses, while Gaeltacht speakers did so very frequently. The implications of this are quite serious, suggesting that the sentences of urban speakers are notably less sophisticated than those of their Gaeltacht counterparts.

Given all this, one might expect a lexical analysis of the texts to show that urban speakers have smaller vocabularies, but they actually seem to have much the same vocabulary as their Gaeltacht counterparts. For every 100 words used by a Gaeltacht newsreader, 66 are discrete (that is to say, not repeated). For the urban newsreader, the number is 68. The Gaeltacht speaker has 46 discrete words per 100, while his urban counterpart has 42. The conclusion is that speakers within and without the Gaeltacht have a similar range of vocabulary.

Interestingly, although language activists often decry the presence of English in the utterances of all Irish speakers, the highest level of English for any of the speakers was 4 per cent, from a speaker who used interjections such as “níl aon, really, excitement” and “you know, sin grand”.

This suggests, perhaps, that some (but not all) urban speakers are occasionally thinking partially in English, and translating what comes to mind on an ad-hoc basis.

Irish has a fairly sophisticated morphological system. That is to say, words can change form in several ways. The noun cainteoir, for instance, can mutate to gcainteoir, cainteora, chainteora, cainteoirí, and gcainteoirí, depending on its grammatical function. As we saw earlier, if the pronunciation of these mutations alters or fails, the entire grammatical system of the language becomes endangered.

When I analysed the expected morphological changes in the nouns of newsreaders, I found that newsreaders on RnaG, reading the news and speaking off the cuff, missed a fairly unremarkable 2 to 6 per cent. Newsreaders on urban stations, however, missed 40 per cent of expected changes.

In terms of expected pronunciation, the relaxed urban speakers missed almost every opportunity to lenite or eclipse (“séimhiú” and “urú”), usually failing, for example, to mark any masculine nouns that were in the plural or genitive. This is an extraordinary development, and the urban dialect of Irish seems to have not yet developed any strategies to deal with it.

Urban Irish doesn’t seem to be actually Anglicising, but it is different, particularly in the area of grammar. Some experts might be tempted to call this new entity a Pidgin. Although the term has negative connotations, there is some justification for it. A Pidgin is a relatively unstable language with simplified pronunciation and grammar, created on the fly for purposes of practical communication. By definition, it has no native speakers. Should the Pidgin persist into another generation and further, it gains native speakers, becomes known as a Creole, and develops the hallmarks of an independent language, including a stable grammar.

The number of Irish speakers in Ireland is increasing, according to all census and survey data, and yet the number of Gaeltacht speakers is falling. However, the city dialect of Irish seems not yet to have progressed beyond the level of a second language spoken mostly outside the home by activists, while Gaeltacht Irish is, at least for its broadcasters, a medium through which they are working and thinking for most of the day without the undue influence of other languages.

Language purists may claim this as more evidence that Irish is dying, but it must be most vigorously noted that this small study shows quite the opposite. The language is being spoken in all corners of the country (and abroad), and while it might be changing radically, particularly in this current generation, there is no evidence of it dying out. The good news is that there are urban Irish-language radio stations, and that they broadcast a wide variety of programmes directed primarily at young people. There were no such media 20 years ago, and this suggests that Ireland’s towns and cities are reaching a critical mass of second-language Irish speakers who want their own media.

If their language is to move beyond its current unstable stage, however, they will have to consider making the decision to raise their children through Irish.

Some, such as my Limerick friend, are already doing so, and we can only wait to see what sort of Irish the next generation of urban speakers will have. Will the urban variety become its own dialect of Irish, or grow further apart from its Gaeltacht cousin, becoming a Creole or new language?

Brian Ó Broin teaches linguistics and medieval literature at William Paterson University, New Jersey, US.

© 2010 The Irish Times

New Irish Language Newspaper and other news items that caught Mary's fancy

Foras na Gaeilge Announces New Irish Language Newspaper (Nov 20, 2009)
http://www.gaelport.com/default.aspx?treeid=37&NewsItemID=3432
"Foras na Gaeilge announced today (20th November) that they are to award the contract to provide a new weekly Irish language newspaper to Torann na dTonn Teoranta. Torann na dTonn Teoranta is a partnership between The Connacht Tribune of Galway city and Eo Teilifís a television production company based in An Spidéal, Co Galway."
Leagan Gaeilge: http://www.gaelport.com/sonrai-nuachta?NewsItemID=3432

New book tells a Polish tale for children as Gaeilge (Dec 3, 2009)
http://www.gaelport.com/default.aspx?treeid=37&NewsItemID=3520
"This is Laoise [Ní Chomhraí]’s second book in her Taisteal le Tarlach series. This latest instalment follows Tarlach on his way to Poland with his friend Adas."

Raj gets on his bike to promote Irish language (Dec 4, 2009)
http://www.gaelport.com/default.aspx?treeid=37&NewsItemID=3535
"Raj [Khan] arrived in Ireland in 2002 and, after watching a demonstration on Dublin calling for Irish to be officially recognised as working language of the European Union, he developed an interest in the language."

Foinse in print again

Foinse in print again (Nov 17, 2009)
http://www.gaelport.com/default.aspx?treeid=37&NewsItemID=3387
"The secret is out- a new version of Irish language newspaper, Foinse, will be available in print again as of tomorrow morning, 18 November as the newspaper is set to be distributed every Wednesday free in the Irish Independent."

Irish language paper closes

Irish language paper closes (June 26, 2009)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8120355.stm
"Ireland's largest Irish language newspaper, Foinse, has closed down.
"The paper which was published weekly on Saturdays had been struggling since 2007.
"It is the second Irish language newspaper to fail in the last seven months - Lá Nua was closed in December 2008."

Sos beag*

You might be wondering what the heck is up with the Agus Araile team. Then again, maybe not.... But if you are, let's just sum it up by saying that this winter's been a tough one! Some health- and family-related issues have cropped up, requiring rather a bit of attention. We'll be back in publication when circumstances allow. Thanks for your patience!

*A.k.a. "okay fine Wes I blinked"