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.
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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.
English has been spoken in at least parts of Ireland since the House of Normandy arrived in The Pale, so perhaps the transformation hasn’t been all that rapid. :’) The population of Ireland that speaks only Gaelic, basically no English at all, has been getting more and more rare, but still can find someone bilingual to talk with using Gaelic. If there were a Gaelic-speaking population outside of Ireland, it might be worth having that offered at the high school level even here in the US. But there isn’t. Gaelic (both Scot and Irish, they’re very similar anyway) isn’t that much different in distribution from Norwegian, which is almost entirely spoken in Norway, and has relatively few speakers for a European language.