Updates to the Irish Language: Blogging (bhlagáil)

I've talked about the Irish language on this blog before but it really does fascinate me. It is the primary language of Ireland, a certain mark of pride in the country and its culture, it is extremely difficult to learn/comprehend/understand for the untrained ear, it is not phonetic (as is even Bulgarian!) and is pretty much unused anywhere else in the world.

According to 2011 data the number of people able to speak the Irish language increased by 7.1 per cent between 2006 and 2011, reaching 1.77 million in April 2011.

I've asked a few friends recently how the language evolves as so (relatively) few people use it as a primary language. How, for example, does the language come up with words for new things like the Internet, apps, tweets and hashtags?

In response to this question, our friend Susan reminded me that there is a group of people in Ireland who use the language on a daily basis and there are newspapers and magazines in Irish that could work to further the language. Furthermore there is an official group who decides on new words.

From the Census, of the 1.77 million people who said they were able to speak the language:

• 77,185 said they speak it  daily outside the education system and about 30% of these people live in Gaeltacht areas
• 110,642 said they spoke it weekly
• 613,236 said they spoke it less often than weekly
• One in four said they never spoke Irish

Susan talked about how particularly difficult the language is and that there are parts of its structure that do not serve any purpose. It has masculines and feminines that do not seem to be intuitive and that change.

So, I was reading the Times the other day, particularly about the recent "leaving cert" that seniors took, and came across this article: "G'tweet? G'wan ourra that, say students -- #uncool" by Peter McGuire.

"Today, we learned that the Irish plural for tweets is, of course, tuíteálaithe. You couldn’t make it up – except somebody did.

Immediately after today’s Honours Irish Junior Cert exam, students took out their phones and Googled the meaning of the word gtúit, which appeared in a question about a tweetup (meetup organised through Twitter) of Irish speakers. What did the word mean? Nobody was quite sure, but it seemed to be an a stab at “Gaeilge tweet” (gtuit).

It was, the students recognised, an attempt to be cool. Experienced – not to mention adept – at mocking, and with a well-honed teenage ability to reject the terminally uncool, they immediately took to Twitter to laugh at the notion that examiners would try to speak in their language.

“What even is this?! The state examinations commission trying to be cool with their hashtags”, wrote one Twitter user as her eyes rolled out of her head and across the floor. “We should trend #Gtuít even though i have no idea what it means,” wrote another user. His advice proved popular, with the hashtag trending throughout the day.

Irish has always struggled to fit in with the popular kids. Indeed, they have laughed in its face. In the mid-90s, examiners struggled to keep control during the Irish aural test as students collapsed in laughter at a cringingly bad impersonation of Bart Simpson. “Is mise Bart Simpson. Is buachaill dána me,” said an old man from Spiddal in his best impersonation of a cartoon character which teenagers had long since stopped caring about.

Whatever about the g’coolness or otherwise of the gtúit, the Irish word for tweet is in fact tvuít, according to the this year’s updated Irish-English dictionary. A special committee - funded by the taxpayer - also created some other new words for the 21st century: Vicipéid (Wikipedia), bhlagáil (blogging), and cibearspás (cyberspace) have entered the language.

Hidden in the paper was a clue to what the Irish language examiners really care about behind closed doors, when they’re not trying to fit in. One part of the reading comprehension included the sentence: “Cuimhnigh, a chara ghil, gur ar scáth a chéile a mhairimid,” (remember, my good friends, that we all live in each other’s shadow). It’s an old Irish proverb, and one which was particularly beloved of Peig Sayers, famous storyteller, arch nemesis of former Leaving Cert Irish students, and the embodiment of everything the language thinks it should jettison. What would Peig make of all this g’tuíteálaithe-ing? Not g’cúl."