The current status of Irish Gaelic in Ireland

Question

In addition to all the usual phonology, grammar, and vocabulary one has to learn for a new language there is the social situation, among many things when is it appropriate to speak in one register or another. And every language/variety has its own particular social situation to deal with.

Irish Gaelic in Ireland has an interesting past. It was once a classic learned language during the Middle Ages, but declined in use during English colonization and was literally marginalized (to the western edges of the island) by the early 20th century.

There seems to be nowadays two versions of the prevalence of Irish Gaelic in Ireland. One is that the daily users of Irish are still only in this Gaeltacht area (on the western coast). There has been nominal teaching of the subject in school since independence, but few (10%) use it in the home, and even fewer (1%) use it regularly outside the home. Almost everyone speaks English natively in Ireland (even the Gaeltacht Irish speakers), but few speak Irish natively. The default is English.

The other impression is that school teaching over the last hundred years has revived the language, not to the extent of Hebrew in Israel, but to a useful language that many people use. Roads and signs over the country are bilingual, there are newspapers, radio, and television produced in Irish, and what's more telling is that the radio and TV interview national leaders and people on the street in Irish.

These aren't necessarily facts, just a compilation of what I think I've read.

As an outsider, it's hard to judge what's real. Are the TV people selecting the extremely small minority of Irish speakers to interview, are they all using dysfluent grade-school Irish, or are there lots and lots of fluent professionals and everyday people? Are the maps with Gaelic speakers only on the west coast out of date or labeled wrongly?

Is there a better source to justify any a judgement than the wikipedia article on the Irish language?

Answer 1

There's an easy answer which is to check out the wikipedia page on the status of the Irish language. But the following is what I found with and outside the wikipedia article.

Linguistic maps of Ireland show only the areas in the extreme west of the Gaeltaecht as having native Irish speakers. From Quora. Yes, I realize that the nominal definition of 'the Gaeltaecht' is 'where people speak Irish all day', but that is vague and is changing but I take it to mean 'the far (including the extreme) west of Ireland where you're more likely to hear Irish in the streets. I know, still vague.

The proportion who say they can speak Irish (as first or second language not specified). Note that the color range may be misleading; the second darkest shade of green is 40-70%. Self reporting has many social biases involved (desire to say yes out of pride, tendency to say no out of disparagement, etc)

There's a very similar map showing the percentage of those who do speak Irish (outside of the education system, presumably day to day). Unfortunately leaving out the counties of Northern Ireland.

With respect to consuming mass media, there is the national Irish language radio station RTE. I could not find its listenership numbers

The national Irish language TV is TG4:

In 2015 TG4 reported that overall it has an average share of 2% (650,000 daily viewers) of the national television market in the Republic of Ireland.

I could not find the viewership numbers for the other stations to compare.

---

My understanding of all this data (and commentary around it) is that native (family learned) Irish speaking is near or at least heading to extinction in the Gaeltaecht and rural areas, but that the language policies (secondary schooling) has been very successful in reviving and keeping fluency alive in the more educated bigger cities. In Ireland. Because of political issues and much less secondary education, Irish in Northern Ireland will be limited to an academic subject (similar to Provencal in southern France).

There is still the practical motivation of all this. How likely is it that someone from Mars who learns Irish from books and tapes will run into someone on the street in Ireland with whom they can converse fluently in Irish? Ballparking it, I'd say 100% in the extreme west, but dropping off to 20% until you get to a big city (Dublin, Limerick, Cork), where it'll go back up to 50%. My reasoning? TG4 seems to have no problem finding fluent Irish speakers at random to interview at car accidents.

Answer 2

I am not certain what the question is, but if it helps, most Irish people start learning the language from the age of 4 or 5 so everyone is familiar with basic phrases, even though few of us speak it fluently. When we watch TG4 there are usually subtitles in English on the Irish-language programmes. Many English-speakers will choose to educate their children in Irish-language schools around the country so it is not necessarily true to say the West is the only place Irish is spoken. There are also Gaeltacht areas in counties such as Waterford.