The Irish Language Revival

For much of the twentieth century, Irish was a language that many people in Ireland learned at school, failed to enjoy and then quietly forgot. It was compulsory, it was examined and, for a great many teenagers, it was associated with grammar drills rather than with anything they might actually want to say. Lately, however, something has begun to change. Irish, it seems, is becoming cool.

To understand why this matters, it helps to know how fragile the language had become. Irish was the majority language of the island until the nineteenth century, when the Great Famine, emigration and the dominance of English in schools and public life pushed it to the margins. By the time Ireland became independent in the 1920s, Irish was spoken as an everyday language mainly in scattered rural communities, known as the Gaeltacht, along the western coast.

The numbers today tell a complicated story. In the 2022 census, close to two million people in the Republic said they could speak Irish to some degree. Yet only around 70,000 said they used it every day outside the education system. In other words, a great many people have some knowledge of the language, but comparatively few live their lives through it.

What is changing is not so much the number of speakers as the image of the language. Music has played a large part. A hip-hop trio from Belfast, rapping in a mixture of Irish and English, has attracted a young audience well beyond Ireland, and a film loosely based on their story was chosen as Ireland's entry for the Oscars. A few years earlier, The Quiet Girl became the first Irish-language feature film to be nominated for an Academy Award. Neither, admittedly, was made with language learners in mind. That is precisely the point: they treat Irish as a language for telling stories, not as a school subject.

Online, the shift is equally visible. There are podcasts in Irish about football, comedy and mental health, and language-learning apps have introduced the language to learners all over the world. Social media accounts share slang, jokes and new words for modern life. For young people who grew up thinking of Irish as something their parents were made to study, discovering that it can be funny, rude or romantic has come as something of a surprise.

Schools, too, are part of the picture, although in a different way from before. Irish-medium schools, where every subject is taught through Irish, have grown in number over recent decades, and many have waiting lists. Parents who chose them often did so not because they spoke Irish at home, but because they wanted their children to have what they themselves had missed.

None of this guarantees that the revival will last. Gaeltacht communities still face real pressures, from the cost of housing to the departure of young people for the cities. Even so, many observers agree that the mood has shifted. Irish is no longer only a symbol to be respected. For a growing number of young people, it is simply a language to be lived in.