After a lot of frustration trying to book a frequent flyer ticket to Kiev, Ukraine, we ended up throwing our hands in the air and booked a trip to Ireland. I’ve dashed all of my cyrillic textbooks with a bit of relief as I always try to learn as much of the language I can before going to a foreign country.
I’m curious though if it’s useful. Are there people there who prefer (or only) speak in Irish/Gaelic? Or am I chasing my tail bothering to learn Irish before I go? (I studied it years ago in college for fun and remember how to pronounce (most) words, but besides “How are you?” and “Are you satisfied”, everything else is forgotten.)
As for an itinerary, we have none. Flying into Dublin Nov 28th and out December 7th. We’re planning on renting a car on our way out of Dublin (no plans on driving in the city after reading how bad that could be). But we do want to pretty much get around the whole country (and Northern Ireland too).
I sincerely doubt you will find anyone in Ireland who doesn’t speak English at least as well as you’ll be speaking Gaelic.
And depending on your talent and demeanor, you’ll either look ridiculous or charming.
So learn some phrases, including at least one good bit of cussing, but don’t bother learning to really speak the language.
There are a few isolated spots in rural Ireland where people still primarily speak Gaelic, but otherwise, almost everyone speaks English. Most Irish kids have to study Gaelic in school, but few speak it often or well. English remains the first language of amost everyone a tourist would encounter.
Study Gaelic if you find the language interesting, but there’s absolutely no practical benefit to learning it for an ordinary tourist.
Some of the Gaelic-speaking areas are quite touristy. Every single person you run into will speak very good English, typically as their first language. You might impress someone, as most tourists don’t learn any at all, but it’s not likely. You might get some benefit from being able to read road signs more easily, as a few signs are Gaelic-only.
It’s a fun time to go to the country; I was there last December. Off-season prices and no crowds, even at the most touristy places.
I was trying to find my great aunt’s house on north Galway bay, in an idyllic little town named Rosmuc. Two of the people we stopped to ask direction spoke only Gaelic. The third, thankfully, was the mailman and knew right where she lived, and spoke English. But Rosmuc is quite a bit off the beaten path. It shouldn’t be an issue for general travel.
The number of monoglot Gaelic speakers is vanishingly small. There’s some debate about whether’s there’s any left at all, aside from a few remote, bachelor, ancient farmers in Galway who might have died off by now.
I’ve read estimates that something like 3-5% of the population speak Gaelic as a first language, c. 10% speak it regularly, about 25% speak ‘some’, but in reality, it isn’t going to be any practical use to you aside from amusing yourself reading the road signs. And what speakers there are, tend not to live anywhere near Dublin. They are mostly along the west coast.
Since the language itself is under threat, using even a little bit as a tourist and taking it seriously is actually a tiny little way to help. You won’t need Irish for anything, but do use some if you can.
This is probably pretty accurate. Knowing Gaelic might give you a bit of flavor, but you are very unlikely to be in a situation where you are surrounded by monolingual Gaelic speakers and are unable to function. We have similar things in the US - there are still a fair number of (primarily rural) German speaking communities here but 95%+ of the German speakers there are also fluent in English. Same thing with French in Louisiana and Maine. Sure there are people who speak French, but hardly anyone who doesn’t also speak English, and the ones that don’t speak English mostly live out in the sticks and are likely to be very old. Also, the US dialects of those languages are not exactly the same as the standard varieties taught in schools - Cajun French is closer to the French of New Brunswick and PEI than to either Montreal or Paris, and the German dialects spoken in the US are based on regional dialects that left Germany hundreds of years ago.
We go to Dingle, Co. Kerry, every summer to visit family. The Dingle peninsula is a Gaeltacht and you hear a lot of Irish being spoken there. I have picked up quite a bit over the years. If you are interested in Irish (and it’s always called Irish, never Gaelic) Dingle is a great place to go. It’s a great place to go anyway. There’s plenty to see and do there.
While most people, even in the Gaeltachts, primarily speak English they often mix in Irish words. You may be asked if you want bainne with your tea or someone may ask how the craic was last night at the pub. The craic is always mighty at Flaherty’s so be sure to go there if you’re in Dingle.
The main benefit of learning some Irish is that it will help you pronounce and recognize names correctly. Without some knowledge of Irish you will massacre half of the names you see on signs. Irish words often seem to contain twice as many letters as are actually needed. If someone tells you to look for the sign for Dun Leary you probably would go right past it because surely Dún Laoghaire couldn’t be pronounced that way.
Study it and learn a bit if you want to but echoing what most others have said there’s no practical reason you’d need to be able to speak it. Expect bonus points for making the effort though. I met my first Irish speaker in a long time who wasn’t comfortable speaking English, so we conversed in Irish. She’s 5, so the topic of conversation was mainly lullabies. It was a surreal experience as I rarely get to speak Irish and after a while I forgot which language I was speaking as there were Irish speakers and English speakers in the room.
Do Irish speakers do that thing (like Scots Gaelic speakers) where they switch language mid-sentence?
Like, you know, you go to Stornoway and hear someone talk on the phone and it sounds like “Yarble ccchhhh yarble spragee spraga I’m sick of these mutherfucking snakes on the plane!”
I’ve noticed this from subcontinental language speakers as well.
Hell, in some parts of Scotland, they will switch between English and Scots (the Germanic language that sounds like incomprehensible English), or Scottish and Scots.
And of course, the word “Gaelic” (allow for spelling) is pronounced differently in Ireland/Scotland.
Filipino (or Tagalog) does that sometimes as well. It’s fun watching TV, where they speak several words in Filipino, then say a word or two in a strong American accent, often a word that you know already exists in the language.
No Béarla is a special on finding Irish speakers, if you can view it.
Well, I mean, I suppose I do that sometimes - to the extent that I speak Scots or see it as a different language from English.
Is that how it works? If you’re bilingual between English/Irish or Gaelic/English (or Tagalog and English for that matter) do you end up making no real distinction between the languages, in the same way that I don’t see much distinction between English and Scots?
I think they do but of course it’s contextual. There are probably familial, personal situations where it’s not needed nor desired but in my experience people can and do flip. It’s always of course in my experience among non-native speakers. On Irish language telly often there are terms, like I suppose “know what i’m sayin?” that will be said in english in the middle of and Irish language sentence.
The behaviour was something I’d noted from Scots Gaelic (native) speakers and also folks who speak, say, Hindi or some other subcontinental language. It’s not just a case of using an English word here and there: “Yadda yadda asheish battery shaver!”
Perhaps it’s totally natural to those who are bilingual. That’s why I was interested in the idea that Scottish folks switch between Scots and English - I don’t even really consider those to be different languages. But maybe folks who speak English and Irish, or English and Tagalog, think of things in the same way.
I’m no student of Irish, but I’d swear Dara was going “xxxxx? Tell you what, xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx” in the clip I linked to. Unless that’s just Irish that sounds like those English words.
I can’t speak for the Irish, since I was there 30 years ago and my host family didn’t speak Irish at all, but it’s just common in multilingual people. Very often the expression in “the other language” is an idiom - a few days ago I heard a lady in hijab proclaim she was ¡hasta los cojones del vago ése! (fed-up to her testicles with that lazy-ass; sick of him).
Yeah around 0:42 he says “tell you what”. It’s very common to drop stuff like that in. When I was a kid it annoyed me but then I realised that communication is more important than any spurious notion of purity.
