[SunkenCiv]

Thanks NYer.

The bilingual Doegen Records Web Project website contains audio recordings made by Dr Wilhelm Doegen... Between 1928 to 1931, 136 speakers from 17 counties recorded 400 stories, songs, prayers, charms and parables. Then the original wax matrices were transferred to Berlin and reformatted onto shellac discs. Linguists have known about the shellac discs, according to NUI Maynooth, but The Royal Irish Academy Library wanted to make them freely available to everyone via a digital archive on the internet. In 2008, armed with funding under the Higher Education Authority’s PRTLI4, the academy library began to transfer the recordings to the web, along with speaker details, annotated transcripts of content, translations of the transcripts and other data.

[Bigg Red]

Very interesting. It’s good to have these recordings since Irish is surely on its way out. English is just taking over the world.

At this site,
http://www.gaeltachttravel.com/gaeltacht-regions/statistics-on-the-gaeltacht-and-the-irish-language/

I found these figures from several years ago:

....28 April 2002, there was 1,570,894 Irish speakers in the country as opposed to 2,180,101 Non-Irish speakers. An Irish speaker is defined as a person who claims that they can speak Irish, but who do not necessarily use it in their daily life.

***
But I wonder how inflated the numbers are for those claiming to be Irish speakers. In Ireland, kids learn Irish in school, I think, but how many are fluent unless they are required to use it every day?

My maternal grandmother was born here to Irish immigrants. She said her prayers — and cussed —in Irish, according to my mother. But my mother and her siblings were not taught any Irish at all because her parents wanted them to be Americans.