Which native language or languages would a typical peasant in Ireland born around the year 1500 speak? Gaelic?
Irish Gaelic, yes.
Yep. Irish (Gaelic) was the more common language until about the 19th century. And of course it was spoken almost exclusively “beyond the pale”, which expression derives from the line demarking the area around Dublin controled by the English.
More accurately it would have been Middle Irish
Could it have been “Erse” which is/was one of the languages spoken by both Scots and Irish about the time period mentioned.
I think Erse is just another name for Irish.
The Scottish immigrants didn’t start coming over in significant numbers until the 16th and 17th centuries. And even then, I believe they were mostly in the north.
Irish Gaelic- which dialect would depend on which part of the country they were from (i.e. Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connacht Irish were all different).
Let me verify what you’re expressing here, for clarity’s sake, John:
As I read it, you’re saying that
[ul][li]Prior to 1800, the more common language almost anywhere in Ireland would be Irish.[/li][li]It was the only language of the overwhelming majority of people beyond the Pale.[/li][li]It was as common as English, or more so, even within the Pale.[/ul][/li]
Is that about right?
Scots Gaelic and Irish are closely related, though distinct languages. Scots Gaelic diverged to become a distinct language comparatively recently, IIRC the later Middle Ages. If there was in fact an indigenous Goiledic (Gaelic-speaking) substrate in Scotland before the Dalriada Scots settled there (on which issue linguistic historians are still out), it’s been submerged in later linguistic developments without definite evidence.
“Erse” is a coinage for “the language of Eire,” i.e. Irish, but insofar as I can tell its only common usage seems to be in crossword puzzles. Essentially, Erse is what ernes and emus use when discussing their roles in crosswords.
But they were all mutually intelligible, right? How easy was it for speakers of Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic to understand each other in the 1500s?
Only anecdotal evidence, but mutual intelligibility even in the 20th century wasn’t a guarantee. My grandfather learnt Irish at school in Munster. Many years later he moved to Donegal, and despite keen efforts and a strong linguistic mind, it still took him many months to adapt to the local dialect enough to fully follow a conversation. He said it was closer to Scottish Gaelic than to the Irish he had learnt in Cork.
The four kingdoms simply had different dialects of Irish Gaelic. As I understand, Irish and Scots Gaelic are still mutually intelligible, but with some really distinct forms and usages – think of the equivalent of a rural Yorkshireman, a digger from an Aussie station, and a small-town Mississippi auto mechanic trying to carry on a conversation: they’ll understand each other reasonably well, but there may be times they need to “back up and regroup” to clarify something. My guess is that in 1500 the men from Harris and County Kerry would have simply heard each other as having really strong accents.
Even today, not all dialects of Irish Gaelic are mutually intelligible. It would be more accurate to say that in 1500, there was a dialect continuum stretching from Munster in the southwest to Ulster in the northeast. The Ulster dialects are closest to Manx and Scottish Gaelic.
I was going to give some f’r instances, but I see Wikipedia has beat me to it: Differences between Scottish Gaelic and Irish
Excellent description, and it’s probably worth pointing out that Norwegian, Swedish and Danish also have enough in common for speakers of each to converse with another.
Not quite, and you rightly point out that my post was too short to be clear. The OP asked about the “typical” peasant. The Pale (inside, that is) didn’t cover much territory so most of Ireland was always “beyond the pale”. English would have had some currency among the more welathy beyond the pale, but a “typical peasant” probably wouldn’t have spoken it. And even inside the pale, the English didn’t try to eradicate it, so most peasants would still have spoken it-- even if the more wealthy did not. It wasn’t until the 19th century and later that the English tried to discourage Gaelic and to introduce English aggressively. Also, after the Scots started arriving, they were still a minority in Ireland as a whole-- remember that the country of Ireland wasn’t formed as a seperate entity until the 20th century. I don’t think Scottish Gaelic ever represented a majority language on the island.
I once heard an anecdote (no idea whether it’s true or even plausible) which supports this. Apparently in the 1970’s an English tourist in the Gaeltacht (the Irish-speaking part of Ireland, basically the west coast) went into a pub where all the locals were speaking Irish among themselves. There was a TV above the bar with the sound turned down low. A news bulletin in Irish came on; the tourist could tell it was in Irish but nobody in the pub paid any attention. Five minutes later the bulletin was repeated in English - and the pub landlord turned up the volume and everybody fell silent to hear the news.
The tourist asked the landlord “Why didn’t you listen to the Irish bulletin? You’re all Irish speakers.” His reply was “Ah, that was Dublin Irish, official Irish. Nobody speaks that around here.”
<hijack> Pardon the hijack, but, which Irish would somebody from Limerick City, this century speak? </hijack>
thanks,
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handsomeharry- someone from Limerick, would, naturally be expected to have learned Munster Irish. This is probably the case, but I know of at least one person from the West who learnt Donegal (Ulster) Irish, because that was the dialect their Irish teachers spoke. I know someone else who was brought up in Cork in an Irish-speaking home, by parents from Donegal, she spoke Donegal Irish at home, and Munster Irish in school.
So…probably Munster, but not definitely.
Googled and found that it is/was a synonym for Irish Gaelic but was originally a Scottish form of the word ‘Irish’
Thanks for the clarification; that helps.
OK, I think we’re mixing two distinct usages of “Scot” here, with the usual confusion.
First, the Gaelic-speaking inhabitants of Dal Riada, in Ulster, called “Scots,” colonized Galloway, directly across the North Channel from Ulster, in ca. the fifth century. To the best of my knowledge, Scots Gaelic primarily derives from this migration, though there may have been other settlements that also acted as centers of diffusion. The royal house of Ulster produced a scion house that became the Scottish monarchs, merging with the Pictish monarchy at the time of Kenneth MacAlpin. (As far as can be determined, the lineage is sound, though legendary accretions have been tacked on.) Prior to this time, the “Scots” lived in Ireland and there appears to have been no common name for the land north of the Tweed (although I would not be surprised to be proven wrong on this).
Second, in the time of William and Mary and later, colonization of much of Ulster by people of Scottish descent, largely English speaking (though no doubt with Lallans mixed in) was encouraged by the English monarchs for reasons both political and economic. These are the Scotch-Irish who in turn settled some of the Upland American South (Appalachia and neighboring areas).