The Irish Language

Ireland’s Language Remains on Life Support
By Robert Mackey
March 17, 2009, 5:23 pm

Since March 17 is probably the day each year when more words are spoken in the Irish language than on any other, it seems like a good moment to check in on the decades-long debate still raging in Ireland over the government’s costly efforts to keep that language among the living, and whether it is really worth the expense.

As Kari Lydersen pointed out in the Washington Post on Monday, the number of people who actually use the language they are forced to learn in school is shrinking at a great clip:

"Irish, often called Gaelic in the United States, is one of thousands of “endangered languages” worldwide. Though it is Ireland’s official tongue, there are only about 30,000 fluent speakers left, down from 250,000 when the country was founded in 1922."




Percentage of Irish speakers by county of the Republic (the six counties of Northern Ireland have been considered as one). In the west, where the language is the strongest, the ratio is greater than fifty percent, but falls off as you move east, and to less than one third in Northern Ireland. On the map here, the levels are:
>50 percent
45-50 percent
40-45 percent
35-40 percent
<35 percent