Language Research

Updated (January 2001)

The Irish language in Ireland still remains a symbolic language, fondly taken off the shelf for special occasions (e.g. St Patrick's Day), but not used in everyday life. Irish is an everyday language only for 2-5% (numbers vary) of the Ireland population.

Foreign visitors are amazed how an Irish person can go through 14 years of Irish classes not being able to put together a simple sentence.

But in spite of that, language is slowly finding its way into business, with pubs, restaurants running entirely in Irish in Belfast, Derry, Galway and Dublin.

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Updated (February 2002)

A NEW ON-LINE TERMINOLOGICAL RESOURCE FOR IRISH WAS LAUNCHED IN DUBLIN

The website www.acmhainn.ie will publish, in electronic form, all available terminological dictionaries for Irish. The government-sponsored Terminological Committee has approved the terms over recent years. Translators and others working professionally with Irish welcomed the new facility due to ongoing difficulties with terminology in Irish. The last major English-Irish dictionary was published in 1959 and has long been overtaken by technological advances in all areas of life.

The site will also contain advice and relevant links; exemplary texts already translated into Irish, opportunity for feedback and comment and it will be updated regularly.

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Updated (December 2003)

WILL IRISH BECOME AN OFFICIAL EU WORKING LANGUAGE?

A new online petition has been launched to campaign for an official status of Irish in Europe. The petition calls for the Irish language to be declared an official working language of the European Union.

Someone may find it odd that Irish is not already an official EU language considering that it is the national language of a member state.

The petition was launched only a few days ago and it already has nearly 2,000 signatures, with some signatories calling for Welsh to be made a working EU language as well.

Source: Eurolang News, Brussels, December 8, 2003, by Davyth Hicks, http://217.136.252.147/webpub/eurolang/pajenn.asp?ID=4531

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Updated (December 2004)

IRISH ONE STEP AHEAD OF BECOMING AN OFFICIAL LANGUAGE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

On November 25, 2004 the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, announced that Ireland had formally requested an official and working language status for Irish in the European Union.

Ireland's main argument for putting forward the proposal was that Irish is the only treaty language¹ that is not an official language in the EU so country representatives wanted to end this sui generis situation.

The proposal requires amending of Regulation 1 from 1958, which governs the Union's language regime. However for such an amendment unanimous approval of all 25 member states is necessary².

According to this regulation, the Official Journal of the Community shall be published in the official languages (Article 5). As stated in a press release, the Irish request is more pragmatic when for a four-year period only legislation adopted jointly by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament should be translated into Irish. After four years, the possibility of extending the range of documents to be translated into Irish (such as other acts, regulations, directives and decisions adopted by the European Court of Justice and the Council) would be reviewed. This temporary derogation is similar to that negotiated for the Maltese language.

The application of Ireland is expected to influence strongly Spanish efforts to claim the same status for the Catalan, Basque and Galician languages. Spain will probably raise this matter at the next meeting of EU foreign ministers in mid-December.

However, there is some concern in Ireland that since the decision to amend the list of official and working languages needs to be approved unanimously, if the Spanish Government's request is refused, Spain could veto the Irish proposal.

While Catalan and Galician are numerically stronger than Irish, their legal status is different, being official languages only in the regions where they are spoken. Irish, according to the Irish Constitution, is the national language and the first official language of the state. So far no request of a member state to have its national language declared as an official EU language has been refused.

If Irish becomes an official EU language, it will be the first Celtic language to achieve such a status and its success will undoubtedly have a major psychological impact on all six Celtic nations.

Source: Mercator News, November 2004, http://www.ciemen.org/mercator/index-gb.htm, Eurolang News, Brussels, November 11, 2004, by Davyth Hicks, http://www.eurolang.net/, Eurolang News, An Nás, Chill Dara, November 27, 2004, by Dónall Ó Riagáin, http://www.eurolang.net/

¹ All EU treaties are translated into Irish and citizens can write to EU institutions in this language and receive a reply in it.

² According to the EU Observer, reactions from the other member states were generally positive. Only Italy raised the point about the EU already being stretched to the limit with its 20 official languages.

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Updated (February 2005)

A LANGUAGE ACTIVIST LEAVES $40,000 TO IRISH-MEDIUM EDUCATION

Irish-medium schools in the north of the country recently got a tremendous financial boost for their activities, when Eoin Mc Kiernan, a passionate and innovative advocate for the Irish language, in his last will left them a sum of $40,000.

Eoin McKiernan¹ believed that if a culture loses its language it will also lose its identity.

Iontaobhas na Gaelscolaíochta, the Belfast based group responsible for financing Irish medium schools, will receive the money soon and they are delighted with the news.

Source: Eurolang News, Belfast, January 13, 2005, by Eoghan ó Néill, http://www.eurolang.net/news.asp?id=4871

¹ Eoin McKiernan was born in Manhattan in 1915. He spent his early years both there and in Ireland. In the 1960s, he became a head of the English Department at the University of St Thomas, St Paul, Minnesota. In 1962, he founded the Irish American Cultural Institute, an organization which is still going strong today.

During the 40 years that followed, Eoin scripted and hosted 16 films and 53 programs on Irish literature, language, folklore and culture for public broadcast television.

He also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Irish studies in the US, organized stays of many young Irish Americans in Ireland, and brought hundreds of Irish writers, musicians and actors on tours to the US.

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