Irish language

Irish (Standard Irish: ), also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic ( ), is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language group, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was the population's first language until the 19th century, when English gradually became dominant, particularly in the last decades of the century.
Today, Irish is still commonly spoken as a first language in Ireland's Gaeltacht regions, in which 2% of Ireland's population lived in 2022. 
The total number of people (aged 3 and over) in Ireland who claimed they could speak Irish in April 2022 was 1,873,997, representing 40% of respondents, but of these, 472,887 said they never spoke it and a further 551,993 said they only spoke it within the education system. Linguistic analyses of Irish speakers are therefore based primarily on the number of daily users in Ireland outside the education system, which in 2022 was 20,261 in the Gaeltacht and 51,707 outside it, totalling 71,968. In response to the 2021 census of Northern Ireland, 43,557 individuals stated they spoke Irish on a daily basis, 26,286 spoke it on a weekly basis, 47,153 spoke it less often than weekly, and 9,758 said they could speak Irish, but never spoke it. From 2006 to 2008, over 22,000 Irish Americans reported speaking Irish as their first language at home, with several times that number claiming "some knowledge" of the language.
For most of recorded Irish history, Irish was the dominant language of the Irish people, who took it with them to other regions, such as Scotland and the Isle of Man, where Middle Irish gave rise to Scottish Gaelic and Manx. It was also, for a period, spoken widely across Canada, with an estimated 200,000–250,000 daily Canadian speakers of Irish in 1890. On the island of Newfoundland, a unique dialect of Irish developed before falling out of use in the early 20th century.
With a writing system, Ogham, dating back to at least the 4th century AD, which was gradually replaced by Latin script since the 5th century AD, Irish has one of the oldest vernacular literatures in Western Europe. On the island, the language has three major dialects: Connacht, Munster and Ulster Irish. All three have distinctions in their speech and orthography. There is also , a standardised written form devised by a parliamentary commission in the 1950s. The traditional Irish alphabet, a variant of the Latin alphabet with 18 letters, has been succeeded by the standard Latin alphabet (albeit with 7–8 letters used primarily in loanwords).
Irish has constitutional status as the national and first official language of the Republic of Ireland, and is also an official language of Northern Ireland and among the official languages of the European Union. The public body Foras na Gaeilge is responsible for the promotion of the language throughout the island. Irish has no regulatory body but , the standard written form, is guided by a parliamentary service and new vocabulary by a voluntary committee with university input.
== See also ==
* , Anglicisms in Irish
* , a course in basic spoken Irish 
* Comparison of Scottish Gaelic and Irish
* , Irish language Society
* Dictionary of the Irish Language
* Fáinne, a lapel pin for Irish speakers
* Goidelic substrate hypothesis
* Hiberno-Latin, a variety of Medieval Latin used in Irish monasteries. It included Greek, Hebrew and Celtic neologisms.
* Irish language outside Ireland
* Irish name and Place names in Ireland
* Irish words used in the English language
* Irish, a subject of the Junior Cycle examination in Secondary schools in Ireland
* List of artists who have released Irish-language songs
* List of English words of Irish origin
* List of Ireland-related topics
* List of Irish-language given names
* List of Irish-language media
* Modern literature in Irish
* Status of the Irish language, a detailed account of the current state of the language.
* 
== Notes ==
== References ==
=== Citations ===
=== Bibliography ===
* McCabe, Richard A.. Spenser's Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference. Oxford University Press 2002. .
* Hickey, Raymond. The Dialects of Irish: Study of a Changing Landscape. Walter de Gruyter, 2011. .
* Hickey, Raymond. The Sound Structure of Modern Irish. De Gruyter Mouton 2014. .
* De Brún, Pádraig. Scriptural Instruction in the Vernacular: The Irish Society and its Teachers 1818–1827. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies 2009. 
* Doyle, Aidan, A History of the Irish Language: From the Norman Invasion to Independence, Oxford, 2015. 
* Fitzgerald, Garrett, 'Estimates for baronies of minimal level of Irish-speaking amongst successive decennial cohorts, 117–1781 to 1861–1871,' Volume 84, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 1984.
* Garvin, Tom, Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so poor for so long?, Gill and MacMillan, 2005. 
* Hindley, Reg (1991, new ed.). The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary. Routledge. 
* McMahon, Timothy G.. Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893–1910. Syracuse University Press 2008. 
* Ó Gráda, Cormac. '' in Dublin Review of Books, Issue 34, 6 May 2013: 
* Kelly, James & Mac Murchaidh, Ciarán (eds.). Irish and English: Essays on the Linguistic and Cultural Frontier 1600–1900. Four Courts Press 2012. 
* Ní Mhunghaile, Lesa. 'An Eighteenth Century Irish scribe's private library: Muiris Ó Gormáin's books' in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Volume 110C, 2010, pp. 239–276.
* Ní Mhuiríosa, Máirín. '' in , ed. Seán Ó Mórdha. 1981.
* Ó hÓgáin, Dáithí. Labhrann Laighnigh: Téacsanna agus Cainteanna ó Shean-Chúige Laighean. Coiscéim 2011.
* Ó Laoire, Muiris. Language Use and Language Attitudes in Ireland in Multilingualism in European Bilingual Contexts : Language Use and Attitudes, ed. David Lasagabaster and Ángel Huguet. Multilingual Matters Ltd. 2007. 
* Shibakov, Alexey. Irish Word Forms / Irische Wortformen. epubli 2017. 
* Williams, J. E. Caerwyn & Ní Mhuiríosa, Máirín (ed.). . An Clóchomhar Tta 1979.
* Williams, Nicholas. 'Na Canúintí a Theacht chun Solais' in , ed. Kim McCone and others. Maigh Nuad 1994. 
== External links ==
* Discover Irish
* "Learning Irish?," BBC
* programmes
* Irish Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix)
=== Grammar and pronunciation ===
* Learn Irish Grammar with audio and pronunciation
* Magazine – Irish Gaelic Arts, Culture, And History Alive Worldwide Today
* Trinity College Dublin The Irish Language Synthesiser
=== Dictionaries ===
* – Dictionaries and terminology resource
* General Gaelic Dictionaries
 
Category:Languages attested from the 4th century
Category:Fusional languages
Category:Goidelic languages
Category:Languages of Northern Ireland
Category:Languages of Ireland
Category:Verb–subject–object languages
Category:Vertical vowel systems
Category:Languages of the Republic of Ireland
Category:Definitely endangered languages