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91-469: Ardfield ( Irish : Ard Ó bhFicheallaigh , meaning 'height of the Feelys'), historically Ardofoyle , is a small village and civil parish on the south-west coast of County Cork , Ireland. It lies 8 kilometres south of Clonakilty and 11 kilometres east of Rosscarbery , near Galley Head . Ardfield's Roman Catholic church dates to 1832 and is within the ecclesiastical parish of Ardfield/Rathbarry. Ardfield

182-465: A featural system uses symbols representing sub-phonetic elements—e.g. those traits that can be used to distinguish between and analyse a language's phonemes, such as their voicing or place of articulation . The only prominent example of a featural system is the hangul script used to write Korean, where featural symbols are combined into letters, which are in turn joined into syllabic blocks. Many scholars, including John DeFrancis (1911–2009), reject

273-540: 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

364-697: A bargaining chip during government formation in Northern Ireland, prompting protests from organisations and groups such as An Dream Dearg . Irish became an official language of the EU on 1 January 2007, meaning that MEPs with Irish fluency can now speak the language in the European Parliament and at committees, although in the case of the latter they have to give prior notice to a simultaneous interpreter in order to ensure that what they say can be interpreted into other languages. While an official language of

455-560: A better future for Ireland and all her citizens." The Strategy was produced on 21 December 2010 and will stay in action until 2030; it aims to target language vitality and revitalization of the Irish language. The 30-page document published by the Government of Ireland details the objectives it plans to work towards in an attempt to preserve and promote both the Irish language and the Gaeltacht. It

546-576: A characterization of hangul as a featural system—with arguments including that Korean writers do not themselves think in these terms when writing—or question the viability of Sampson's category altogether. As hangul was consciously created by literate experts, Daniels characterizes it as a "sophisticated grammatogeny " —a writing system intentionally designed for a specific purpose, as opposed to having evolved gradually over time. Other grammatogenies include shorthands developed by professionals and constructed scripts created by hobbyists and creatives, like

637-416: A component related to the character's meaning, and a component that gives a hint for its pronunciation. A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent either syllables or moras —a unit of prosody that is often but not always a syllable in length. The graphemes used in syllabaries are called syllabograms . Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, since

728-472: A cultural and social force. Irish speakers often insisted on using the language in law courts (even when they knew English), and Irish was also common in commercial transactions. The language was heavily implicated in the "devotional revolution" which marked the standardisation of Catholic religious practice and was also widely used in a political context. Down to the time of the Great Famine and even afterwards,

819-541: A degree course in the NUI federal system to pass the subject of Irish in the Leaving Certificate or GCE / GCSE examinations. Exemptions are made from this requirement for students who were born or completed primary education outside of Ireland, and students diagnosed with dyslexia . NUI Galway is required to appoint people who are competent in the Irish language, as long as they are also competent in all other aspects of

910-478: A different symbol is needed for every syllable. Japanese, for example, contains about 100 moras, which are represented by moraic hiragana . By contrast, English features complex syllable structures with a relatively large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters —making for a total of 15–16,000 distinct syllables. Some syllabaries have larger inventories: the Yi script contains 756 different symbols. An alphabet

1001-418: A five-fold classification of writing systems, comprising pictographic scripts, ideographic scripts, analytic transitional scripts, phonetic scripts, and alphabetic scripts. In practice, writing systems are classified according to the primary type of symbols used, and typically include exceptional cases where symbols function differently. For example, logographs found within phonetic systems like English include

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1092-460: A fully recognised EU language for the first time in the state's history. Before Irish became an official language it was afforded the status of treaty language and only the highest-level documents of the EU were made available in Irish. The Irish language was carried abroad in the modern period by a vast diaspora , chiefly to Great Britain and North America, but also to Australia , New Zealand and Argentina . The first large movements began in

1183-574: A paper suggested that within a generation, non-Gaeltacht habitual users of Irish might typically be members of an urban, middle class, and highly educated minority. Parliamentary legislation is supposed to be available in both Irish and English but is frequently only available in English. This is notwithstanding that Article 25.4 of the Constitution of Ireland requires that an "official translation" of any law in one official language be provided immediately in

1274-554: A pass in Leaving Certificate Irish or English, and receive lessons in Irish during their two years of training. Official documents of the Irish government must be published in both Irish and English or Irish alone (in accordance with the Official Languages Act 2003, enforced by An Coimisinéir Teanga , the Irish language ombudsman). The National University of Ireland requires all students wishing to embark on

1365-611: A religious context. An Irish translation of the Old Testament by Leinsterman Muircheartach Ó Cíonga , commissioned by Bishop Bedell , was published after 1685 along with a translation of the New Testament. Otherwise, Anglicisation was seen as synonymous with 'civilising' the native Irish. Currently, modern day Irish speakers in the church are pushing for language revival. It has been estimated that there were around 800,000 monoglot Irish speakers in 1800, which dropped to 320,000 by

1456-408: A set of defined graphemes, collectively called a script . The concept of the grapheme is similar to that of the phoneme used in the study of spoken languages. Likewise, as many sonically distinct phones may function as the same phoneme depending on speaker, dialect, and context, many visually distinct glyphs (or graphs ) may be identified as the same grapheme. These variant glyphs are known as

1547-530: A spoken language, this functions as literacy in a second, acquired language. A single language (e.g. Hindustani ) can be written using multiple writing systems, and a writing system can also represent multiple languages. For example, Chinese characters have been used to write multiple languages throughout the Sinosphere —including the Vietnamese language from at least the 13th century, until their replacement with

1638-537: A wider meaning, including the Gaelic of Scotland and the Isle of Man , as well as of Ireland. When required by the context, these are distinguished as Gaeilge na hAlban , Gaeilge Mhanann and Gaeilge na hÉireann respectively. In English (including Hiberno-English ), the language is usually referred to as Irish , as well as Gaelic and Irish Gaelic . The term Irish Gaelic may be seen when English speakers discuss

1729-568: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Irish language Irish ( Standard Irish : Gaeilge ), also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic ( / ˈ ɡ eɪ l ɪ k / GAY -lik ), is a Celtic language of the Indo-European language family . It is a member of the Goidelic language group of the Insular Celtic sub branch of the family and is indigenous to

1820-489: Is a set of letters , each of which generally represent one of the segmental phonemes in a spoken language. However, these correspondences are rarely uncomplicated, and spelling is often mediated by other factors than just which sounds are used by a speaker. The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta , the names for the first two letters in the Greek alphabet . An abjad is an alphabet whose letters only represent

1911-438: Is a visual and tactile notation representing language . The symbols used in writing correspond systematically to functional units of either a spoken or signed language . This definition excludes a broader class of symbolic markings, such as drawings and maps. A text is any instance of written material, including transcriptions of spoken material. The act of composing and recording a text may be referred to as writing , and

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2002-448: Is also An Caighdeán Oifigiúil , 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

2093-468: Is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. In an abugida, there may be a sign for k with no vowel, but also one for ka (if a is the inherent vowel), and ke is written by modifying the ka sign in a consistent way with how la would be modified to get le . In many abugidas, modification consists of

2184-451: Is defined as a potentially permanent means of recording information, then these systems do not qualify as writing at all, since the symbols disappear as soon as they are used. Instead, these transient systems serve as signals . Writing systems may be characterized by how text is graphically divided into lines, which are to be read in sequence: For example, English and many other Western languages are written in horizontal rows that begin at

2275-511: Is divided into four separate phases with the intention of improving 9 main areas of action including: The general goal for this strategy was to increase the number of daily speakers from 83,000 to 250,000 by the end of its run. By 2022, the number of such speakers had fallen to 71,968. Before the partition of Ireland in 1921, Irish was recognised as a school subject and as "Celtic" in some third level institutions. Between 1921 and 1972, Northern Ireland had devolved government. During those years

2366-475: Is home to St James' GAA Club , which fields both hurling and Gaelic football teams. Local amenities include the local Roman Catholic church, a school, a pub, Ardfield Creamery, a children's playground and two all-weather tennis courts. The village is close to several beaches, including Red Strand and Long Strand. 51°34′N 8°55′W  /  51.567°N 8.917°W  / 51.567; -8.917 This geographical article about County Cork

2457-571: Is no evidence of contact between China and the literate peoples of the Near East, and the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches for representing aspects of sound and meaning are distinct. The Mesoamerican writing systems , including Olmec and the Maya script , were also invented independently. The first known alphabetic writing appeared before 2000 BC, and was used to write a Semitic language spoken in

2548-567: Is only in Gaeltacht areas that Irish continues to be spoken as a community vernacular to some extent. According to data compiled by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht , Sport and Media , only 1/4 of households in Gaeltacht areas are fluent in Irish. The author of a detailed analysis of the survey, Donncha Ó hÉallaithe of the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology , described

2639-412: Is still spoken daily to some extent as a first language . These regions are known individually and collectively as the Gaeltacht (plural Gaeltachtaí ). While the fluent Irish speakers of these areas, whose numbers have been estimated at 20–30,000, are a minority of the total number of fluent Irish speakers, they represent a higher concentration of Irish speakers than other parts of the country and it

2730-636: Is the Brahmic family of scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia. The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Geʽez script used in some contexts. It was coined as a linguistic term by Peter T. Daniels ( b.  1951 ), who borrowed it from the Ethiopian languages. Originally proposed as a category by Geoffrey Sampson ( b.  1944 ),

2821-996: Is used in various models either as a synonym for "morphographic", or as a specific subtype where the basic unit of meaning written is the word . Even with morphographic writing, there remains a correspondence between graphemes and the sounds of speech, but the pronunciation values of the units of meaning is not what is being encoded firstly by the writing system. Many classifications define three primary categories, where phonographic systems are subdivided into syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental ) systems. Syllabaries use symbols called syllabograms to represent syllables or moras . Alphabets use symbols called letters that correspond to spoken phonemes—or more technically to diaphonemes . Alphabets are generally classified into three subtypes, with abjads having letters for consonants , pure alphabets having letters for both consonants and vowels , and abugidas having characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs. David Diringer proposed

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2912-440: Is used throughout the study of writing systems, the precise interpretations of and definitions for concepts often vary depending on the theoretical model employed by the researcher. A grapheme is the basic functional unit of a writing system. Graphemes are generally defined as minimally significant elements which, when taken together, comprise the set of symbols from which texts may be constructed. All writing systems require

3003-709: The Fíor-Ghaeltacht (true Gaeltacht ), a term originally officially applied to areas where over 50% of the population spoke Irish. There are Gaeltacht regions in the following counties: Gweedore ( Gaoth Dobhair ), County Donegal, is the largest Gaeltacht parish in Ireland. Irish language summer colleges in the Gaeltacht are attended by tens of thousands of teenagers annually. Students live with Gaeltacht families, attend classes, participate in sports, go to céilithe and are obliged to speak Irish. All aspects of Irish culture and tradition are encouraged. The Act

3094-428: The allographs of a grapheme: For example, the lowercase letter ⟨a⟩ may be represented by the double-storey | a | and single-storey | ɑ | shapes, or others written in cursive, block, or printed styles. The choice of a particular allograph may be influenced by the medium used, the writing instrument used, the stylistic choice of the writer, the preceding and succeeding graphemes in

3185-444: The Latin alphabet and Chinese characters , glyphs are made up of lines or strokes. Linear writing is most common, but there are non-linear writing systems where glyphs consist of other types of marks, such as in cuneiform and Braille . Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya script were often painted in linear outline form, but in formal contexts they were carved in bas-relief . The earliest examples of writing are linear: while cuneiform

3276-619: 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 An Caighdeán Oifigiúil , the standard written form, is guided by a parliamentary service and new vocabulary by a voluntary committee with university input. In An Caighdeán Oifigiúil ("The Official [Written] Standard ")

3367-645: The Sinai Peninsula . Most of the world's alphabets either descend directly from this Proto-Sinaitic script , or were directly inspired by its design. Descendants include the Phoenician alphabet ( c.  1050 BC ), and its child in the Greek alphabet ( c.  800 BC ). The Latin alphabet , which descended from the Greek alphabet, is by far the most common script used by writing systems. Several approaches have been taken to classify writing systems, with

3458-547: The Tengwar script designed by J. R. R. Tolkien to write the Elven languages he also constructed. Many of these feature advanced graphic designs corresponding to phonological properties. The basic unit of writing in these systems can map to anything from phonemes to words. It has been shown that even the Latin script has sub-character features. In linear writing , which includes systems like

3549-408: The ampersand ⟨&⟩ and the numerals ⟨0⟩ , ⟨1⟩ , etc.—which correspond to specific words ( and , zero , one , etc.) and not to the underlying sounds. A logogram is a character that represents a morpheme within a language. Chinese characters represent the only major logographic writing systems still in use: they have historically been used to write

3640-404: The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet (with these graphemes corresponding to various phonemes), punctuation marks (mostly non-phonemic), and a handful of other symbols, such as numerals. Writing systems may be regarded as complete if they are able to represent all that may be expressed in the spoken language, while a partial writing system cannot represent

3731-622: The varieties of Chinese , as well as Japanese , Korean , Vietnamese , and other languages of the Sinosphere . As each character represents a single unit of meaning, many different logograms are required to write all the words of a language. If the logograms do not adequately represent all meanings and words of a language, written language can be confusing or ambiguous to the reader. Logograms are sometimes conflated with ideograms , symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas; most linguists now reject this characterization: Chinese characters are often semantic–phonetic compounds, which include

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3822-611: The 17th century, largely as a result of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland , which saw many Irish sent to the West Indies . Irish emigration to the United States was well established by the 18th century, and was reinforced in the 1840s by thousands fleeing from the Famine . This flight also affected Britain. Up until that time most emigrants spoke Irish as their first language, though English

3913-769: The 1998 Good Friday Agreement , the language gradually received a degree of formal recognition in Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom, and then, in 2003, by the British government's ratification in respect of the language of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages . In the 2006 St Andrews Agreement the British government promised to enact legislation to promote the language and in 2022 it approved legislation to recognise Irish as an official language alongside English. The bill received royal assent on 6 December 2022. The Irish language has often been used as

4004-400: 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

4095-472: The 20th century due to Western influence. Several scripts used in the Philippines and Indonesia, such as Hanunoo , are traditionally written with lines moving away from the writer, from bottom to top, but are read horizontally left to right; however, Kulitan , another Philippine script, is written top-to-bottom in columns arranged right-to-left. Ogham is written bottom-to-top and read vertically, commonly on

4186-403: The 6th century, used the Latin alphabet and is attested primarily in marginalia to Latin manuscripts. During this time, the Irish language absorbed some Latin words, some via Old Welsh , including ecclesiastical terms : examples are easpag (bishop) from episcopus , and Domhnach (Sunday, from dominica ). By the 10th century, Old Irish had evolved into Middle Irish , which

4277-563: The Act all detailing different aspects of the use of Irish in official documentation and communication. Included in these sections are subjects such as Irish language use in official courts, official publications, and placenames. The Act was recently amended in December 2019 in order to strengthen the already preexisting legislation. All changes made took into account data collected from online surveys and written submissions. The Official Languages Scheme

4368-463: The European Union , only co-decision regulations were available until 2022, due to a five-year derogation, requested by the Irish Government when negotiating the language's new official status. The Irish government had committed itself to train the necessary number of translators and interpreters and to bear the related costs. This derogation ultimately came to an end on 1 January 2022, making Irish

4459-536: The Irish language policy followed by Irish governments as a "complete and absolute disaster". The Irish Times , referring to his analysis published in the Irish language newspaper Foinse , quoted him as follows: "It is an absolute indictment of successive Irish Governments that at the foundation of the Irish State there were 250,000 fluent Irish speakers living in Irish-speaking or semi Irish-speaking areas, but

4550-484: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in the 20th century. In the first several decades of modern linguistics as a scientific discipline, linguists often characterized writing as merely the technology used to record speech—which was treated as being of paramount importance, for what was seen as the unique potential for its study to further the understanding of human cognition. While certain core terminology

4641-597: The Republic of Ireland ), new appointees to the Civil Service of the Republic of Ireland , including postal workers , tax collectors , agricultural inspectors, Garda Síochána (police), etc., were required to have some proficiency in Irish. By law, a Garda who was addressed in Irish had to respond in Irish as well. In 1974, in part through the actions of protest organisations like the Language Freedom Movement ,

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4732-635: The act of viewing and interpreting the text as reading . The relationship between writing and language more broadly has been the subject of philosophical analysis as early as Aristotle (384–322 BC). While the use of language is universal across human societies, writing is not—having first emerged much more recently, and only having been independently invented in a handful of locations throughout history. While most spoken languages have not been written, all written languages have been predicated on an existing spoken language. When those with signed languages as their first language read writing associated with

4823-415: The addition of a vowel sign; other possibilities include rotation of the basic sign, or addition of diacritics . While true syllabaries have one symbol per syllable and no systematic visual similarity, the graphic similarity in most abugidas stems from their origins as abjads—with added symbols comprising markings for different vowel added onto a pre-existing base symbol. The largest single group of abugidas

4914-552: The addition of dedicated vowel letters, as with the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet c.  800 BC . Abjad is the word for "alphabet" in Arabic and Malay: the term derives from the traditional order of the Arabic alphabet 's letters 'alif , bā' , jīm , dāl , though the word may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic . An abugida

5005-731: The beginning of the following academic year. For a number of years there has been vigorous debate in political, academic and other circles about the failure of most students in English-medium schools to achieve competence in Irish, even after fourteen years of teaching as one of the three main subjects. The concomitant decline in the number of traditional native speakers has also been a cause of great concern. In 2007, filmmaker Manchán Magan found few Irish speakers in Dublin , and faced incredulity when trying to get by speaking only Irish in Dublin. He

5096-576: The consonantal sounds of a language. They were the first alphabets to develop historically, with most that have been developed used to write Semitic languages , and originally deriving from the Proto-Sinaitic script . The morphology of Semitic languages is particularly suited to this approach, as the denotation of vowels is generally redundant. Optional markings for vowels may be used for some abjads, but are generally limited to applications like education. Many pure alphabets were derived from abjads through

5187-600: The corresponding spoken language . Alphabets use graphemes called letters that generally correspond to spoken phonemes , and are typically classified into three categories. In general, pure alphabets use letters to represent both consonant and vowel sounds, while abjads only have letters representing consonants, and abugidas use characters corresponding to consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use graphemes called syllabograms that represent entire syllables or moras . By contrast, logographic (alternatively morphographic ) writing systems use graphemes that represent

5278-512: The earliest true writing, closely followed by the Egyptian hieroglyphs . It is generally agreed that the two systems were invented independently from one another; both evolved from proto-writing systems between 3400 and 3200 BC, with the earliest coherent texts dated c.  2600 BC . Chinese characters emerged independently in the Yellow River valley c.  1200 BC . There

5369-468: The end of the famine, and under 17,000 by 1911. Irish is recognised by the Constitution of Ireland as the national and first official language of Republic of Ireland (English being the other official language). Despite this, almost all government business and legislative debate is conducted in English. In 1938, the founder of Conradh na Gaeilge (Gaelic League), Douglas Hyde , was inaugurated as

5460-545: The first President of Ireland . The record of his delivering his inaugural Declaration of Office in Roscommon Irish is one of only a few recordings of that dialect. In the 2016 census, 10.5% of respondents stated that they spoke Irish, either daily or weekly, while over 70,000 people (4.2%) speak it as a habitual daily means of communication. From the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 (see History of

5551-473: The hand is to the right side of the pen. The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew , came to be written right-to-left . Scripts that historically incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically in columns arranged from right to left, while a horizontal writing direction in rows from left to right became widely adopted only in

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5642-576: The island of Ireland . It was the majority of the population's first language until the 19th century, when English gradually became dominant, particularly in the last decades of the century, in what is sometimes characterised as a result of linguistic imperialism . 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 declared they could speak Irish in April 2022

5733-698: The language family, is derived from the Old Irish term. Endonyms of the language in the various modern Irish dialects include: Gaeilge [ˈɡeːlʲɟə] in Galway, Gaeilg / Gaeilic / Gaeilig [ˈɡeːlʲəc] in Mayo and Ulster , Gaelainn / Gaoluinn [ˈɡeːl̪ˠən̠ʲ] in West/Cork, Kerry Munster , as well as Gaedhealaing in mid and East Kerry/Cork and Waterford Munster to reflect local pronunciation. Gaeilge also has

5824-410: The language was in use by all classes, Irish being an urban as well as a rural language. This linguistic dynamism was reflected in the efforts of certain public intellectuals to counter the decline of the language. At the end of the 19th century, they launched the Gaelic revival in an attempt to encourage the learning and use of Irish, although few adult learners mastered the language. The vehicle of

5915-472: 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 ,

6006-563: The mid-18th century, English was becoming a language of the Catholic middle class, the Catholic Church and public intellectuals, especially in the east of the country. Increasingly, as the value of English became apparent, parents sanctioned the prohibition of Irish in schools. Increasing interest in emigrating to the United States and Canada was also a driver, as fluency in English allowed

6097-441: The most common based on what unit of language is represented by each unit of writing. At the highest level, writing systems are either phonographic ( lit.   ' sound writing ' ) when graphemes represent units of sound in a language, or morphographic ( lit.   ' form writing ' ) when graphemes represent units of meaning, such as words or morphemes . The term logographic ( lit.   ' word writing ' )

6188-771: The name of the language is Gaeilge , from the South Connacht form, spelled Gaedhilge prior the spelling reform of 1948, which was originally the genitive of Gaedhealg , the form used in Classical Gaelic . The modern spelling results from the deletion of the silent ⟨dh⟩ in Gaedhilge . Older spellings include Gaoidhealg [ˈɡeːʝəlˠəɡ] in Classical Gaelic and Goídelc [ˈɡoiðʲelɡ] in Old Irish . Goidelic , used to refer to

6279-463: The new immigrants to get jobs in areas other than farming. An estimated one quarter to one third of US immigrants during the Great Famine were Irish speakers. Irish was not marginal to Ireland's modernisation in the 19th century, as is often assumed. In the first half of the century there were still around three million people for whom Irish was the primary language, and their numbers alone made them

6370-639: The number now is between 20,000 and 30,000." In the 1920s, when the Irish Free State was founded, Irish was still a vernacular in some western coastal areas. In the 1930s, areas where more than 25% of the population spoke Irish were classified as Gaeltacht . Today, the strongest Gaeltacht areas, numerically and socially, are those of South Connemara , the west of the Dingle Peninsula , and northwest Donegal, where many residents still use Irish as their primary language. These areas are often referred to as

6461-498: The other official language, if not already passed in both official languages. In November 2016, RTÉ reported that over 2.3 million people worldwide were learning Irish through the Duolingo app. Irish president Michael D. Higgins officially honoured several volunteer translators for developing the Irish edition, and said the push for Irish language rights remains an "unfinished project". There are rural areas of Ireland where Irish

6552-539: The political party holding power in the Stormont Parliament , the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), was hostile to the language. The context of this hostility was the use of the language by nationalists. In broadcasting, there was an exclusion on the reporting of minority cultural issues, and Irish was excluded from radio and television for almost the first fifty years of the previous devolved government. After

6643-487: The relationship between the three Goidelic languages (Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx). Gaelic is a collective term for the Goidelic languages, and when the context is clear it may be used without qualification to refer to each language individually. When the context is specific but unclear, the term may be qualified, as Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic or Manx Gaelic. Historically the name "Erse" ( / ɜːr s / URS )

6734-432: The requirement for entrance to the public service was changed to proficiency in just one official language. Nevertheless, Irish remains a required subject of study in all schools in the Republic of Ireland that receive public money (see Education in the Republic of Ireland ). Teachers in primary schools must also pass a compulsory examination called Scrúdú Cáilíochta sa Ghaeilge . As of 2005, Garda Síochána recruits need

6825-625: The revival was the Gaelic League ( Conradh na Gaeilge ), and particular emphasis was placed on the folk tradition, which in Irish is particularly rich. Efforts were also made to develop journalism and a modern literature. Although it has been noted that the Catholic Church played a role in the decline of the Irish language before the Gaelic Revival, the Protestant Church of Ireland also made only minor efforts to encourage use of Irish in

6916-483: The script. Braille is a non-linear adaptation of the Latin alphabet that completely abandoned the Latin forms. The letters are composed of raised bumps on the writing substrate , which can be leather, stiff paper, plastic or metal. There are also transient non-linear adaptations of the Latin alphabet, including Morse code , the manual alphabets of various sign languages , and semaphore, in which flags or bars are positioned at prescribed angles. However, if "writing"

7007-469: The spoken language in its entirety. Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing systems consisting of ideograms and early mnemonic symbols. The best-known examples include: Writing has been invented independently multiple times in human history. The first writing systems emerged during the Early Bronze Age , with the cuneiform writing system used to write Sumerian generally considered to be

7098-451: The text, the time available for writing, the intended audience, and the largely unconscious features of an individual's handwriting. Orthography ( lit.   ' correct writing ' ) refers to the rules and conventions for writing shared by a community, including the ordering of and relationship between graphemes. Particularly for alphabets , orthography includes the concept of spelling . For example, English orthography includes

7189-444: The top of a page and end at the bottom, with each row read from left to right. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left, with the animal and human glyphs turned to face the beginning of the line. The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions: horizontally from side to side, or vertically. Prior to standardization, alphabetic writing could be either left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL). It

7280-501: The units of meaning in a language, such as its words or morphemes . Alphabets typically use fewer than 100 distinct symbols, while syllabaries and logographies may use hundreds or thousands respectively. A writing system also includes any punctuation used to aid readers and encode additional meaning, including that which would be communicated in speech via qualities of rhythm , tone , pitch , accent , inflection , or intonation . According to most contemporary definitions, writing

7371-705: The vacancy to which they are appointed. This requirement is laid down by the University College Galway Act, 1929 (Section 3). In 2016, the university faced controversy when it announced the planned appointment of a president who did not speak Irish. Misneach staged protests against this decision. The following year the university announced that Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh , a fluent Irish speaker, would be its 13th president. He assumed office in January 2018; in June 2024, he announced he would be stepping down as president at

7462-594: The work of such writers as Geoffrey Keating , is said to date from the 17th century, and was the medium of popular literature from that time on. From the 18th century on, the language lost ground in the east of the country. The reasons behind this shift were complex but came down to a number of factors: The change was characterised by diglossia (two languages being used by the same community in different social and economic situations) and transitional bilingualism (monoglot Irish-speaking grandparents with bilingual children and monoglot English-speaking grandchildren). By

7553-460: 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

7644-523: Was also sometimes used in Scots and then in English to refer to Irish; as well as Scottish Gaelic. Written Irish is first attested in Ogham inscriptions from the 4th century AD, a stage of the language known as Primitive Irish . These writings have been found throughout Ireland and the west coast of Great Britain. Primitive Irish underwent a change into Old Irish through the 5th century. Old Irish, dating from

7735-643: Was enacted 1 July 2019 and is an 18-page document that adheres to the guidelines of the Official Languages Act 2003 . The purpose of the Scheme is to provide services through the mediums of Irish and/or English. According to the Department of the Taoiseach, it is meant to "develop a sustainable economy and a successful society, to pursue Ireland's interests abroad, to implement the Government's Programme and to build

7826-729: Was establishing itself as the primary language. Irish speakers had first arrived in Australia in the late 18th century as convicts and soldiers, and many Irish-speaking settlers followed, particularly in the 1860s. New Zealand also received some of this influx. Argentina was the only non-English-speaking country to receive large numbers of Irish emigrants, and there were few Irish speakers among them. Writing system Writing systems are generally classified according to how its symbols, called graphemes , generally relate to units of language. Phonetic writing systems, which include alphabets and syllabaries , use graphemes that correspond to sounds in

7917-435: Was most commonly written boustrophedonically : starting in one (horizontal) direction, then turning at the end of the line and reversing direction. The right-to-left direction of the Phoenician alphabet initially stabilized after c.  800 BC . Left-to-right writing has an advantage that, since most people are right-handed , the hand does not interfere with text being written—which might not yet have dried—since

8008-409: Was not linear, its Sumerian ancestors were. Non-linear systems are not composed of lines, no matter what instrument is used to write them. Cuneiform was likely the earliest non-linear writing. Its glyphs were formed by pressing the end of a reed stylus into moist clay, not by tracing lines in the clay with the stylus as had been done previously. The result was a radical transformation of the appearance of

8099-465: Was passed 14 July 2003 with the main purpose of improving the number and quality of public services delivered in Irish by the government and other public bodies. Compliance with the Act is monitored by the An Coimisinéir Teanga (Irish Language Commissioner) which was established in 2004 and any complaints or concerns pertaining to the Act are brought to them. There are 35 sections included in

8190-678: Was spoken throughout Ireland, Isle of Man and parts of Scotland . It is the language of a large corpus of literature, including the Ulster Cycle . From the 12th century, Middle Irish began to evolve into modern Irish in Ireland, into Scottish Gaelic in Scotland, and into the Manx language in the Isle of Man . Early Modern Irish , dating from the 13th century, was the basis of the literary language of both Ireland and Gaelic-speaking Scotland. Modern Irish, sometimes called Late Modern Irish, as attested in

8281-442: Was unable to accomplish some everyday tasks, as portrayed in his documentary No Béarla . There is, however, a growing body of Irish speakers in urban areas, particularly in Dublin. Many have been educated in schools in which Irish is the language of instruction. Such schools are known as Gaelscoileanna at primary level. These Irish-medium schools report some better outcomes for students than English-medium schools. In 2009,

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