The Irish language seems to be dying off as quickly as a species of insect, so why should we save it? Kate Fennell argues that it's as precious as any endangered ecosystem.
I don't know how old I was when I realised it wasn't only people with brown eyes who spoke that strange language I didn't understand. I must have been about seven, because it was at that point that we left Maoinis (or Mweenish) Island, off Connemara, and moved to the metropolis of Galway city. There even the people with grey, blue and green eyes, the same as my friends' and family's, spoke this language.
The two brown-eyed brothers in Maoinis school known as the come-day-go-days, because of their frequent excursions to a faraway country called Thurles, had been the only children I had known until then who spoke and understood English fluently. I was soon to be immersed in this language, my family home becoming an island of Irish. Well, not entirely, because my new school had a rule that meant we were not allowed to speak English. Yet they had difficulty understanding my Irish.
The language police would circulate in the clós during break times, noting the names of people who were singing the skipping rhyme "Vote, vote, vote for de Valera" in English. I couldn't win. I was proud to be beginning to converse in this new language, but already it was a crime.
At the same time my Irish was the cause of much mirth, as I pronounced "ch" with much more of an "ach" sound than they did. Theirs were "ks"; mine were softer, more like the "ch" in Loch Ness. Teachers would not hesitate to make me stand up in class and speak to my new classmates in my native tongue, so they could hear this beautiful Irish. I didn't know what they found beautiful about my rough accent, as I saw it. The language I was learning was a lot cleaner and less wild.
A slight feeling of shame and embarrassment began to creep in. Why did I speak this language so differently from them? No child wants to be different, but as soon as I opened my mouth in class the difference would be as plain as day.
Language is sound. It is the first sound that reverberates in the human body. It is the most common tool that we use to communicate with one another. Apparently, language was not always there. As cavepeople we grunted and made noises to suit our intentions. Our way of communication now is the same but more sophisticated. It is still a basic expression of the human being.
Songs seem to carry these expressions most effectively over generations and geographical distances. Each tribe has dirges, each tribe has songs of victory, of pure joy, of love, of longing. Song is a translation of feeling and thought into sound so as to communicate more directly with the heart and soul of others. When this is successful we often get the meaning without understanding the words. The sound suffices to close the gap between language and understanding.
When I was uprooted from Connemara the world of sounds that I knew vanished almost completely. I started to make new sounds. They were crisper, sharper, harder and less tonally varied than my native tongue. A handful of people I knew spoke Irish like me. Each time we spoke I felt we were excluding others, because very often they would be left with blank faces.
With English it was the opposite. Everybody understood me when I spoke. It was inclusive. It could be a beautiful language in poetry and prose. But the sound of it never became my sound. It felt alien.
In my life today these are the sounds I have to make to be understood in the main. But they don't make me feel whole. I feel I am speaking from my head. When I speak Irish I feel I am speaking from my heart. It is not surprising, therefore, that I was drawn to the Slavic languages to find the sounds that I missed. Russian has those "shhs" and "chs" and "nyas" and thick consonants that I was used to mouthing from a young age. It is an old, rich and very poetic language.
I fell in love with it, learnt it, lived in Russia and felt a hole had been considerably filled. You can live there, after all, and everyone speaks it, not just in pockets of low employment and dependence on grants but everywhere - and they are proud of it.
Yet the gnawing feeling of lacking something was to return, and 20 years after leaving Connemara I returned for my fix. I wanted to live in a world where my original sounds were understood not by a select few but by everyone from the postman to the county councillor. I didn't want to be seen as a freak for speaking this "dead" language, as I had often felt while studying and living in Dublin. I wanted to hear the same sounds returned. Now my heart was singing in earnest.
I had needed to be reconnected. That it was an emotional experience as much as a linguistic one was not lost on me.
In Ireland Irish is more of an emotional question than a linguistic one. The sound of Irish seems to be lodged in the subconscious mind of our people. That might explain why discussions about Irish are more about emotion than about the intricacies of the language itself.
It is such an emotionally charged subject that Irish nearly ceases to be seen as a European language with a culture and a history as unique as those of Spanish or Portuguese. That Irish is Europe's third oldest written language, after Greek and Latin, seldom arises as part of a discussion about Irish. It's the longing to know it or the very hatred of it.
I fear there are many misperceptions about native Irish-speakers. Broadly speaking, they seem to arise from a misunderstanding between those who live in the Gaeltacht and those, to use an Irish-language term, who live in the Galltacht; that is, those who have been brought up in English-speaking areas and speak English in the home. This gap is rapidly being reduced because of the proliferation of Gaelscoileanna, the popularity of TG4, our growing confidence and the improved economic climate.
The result is that the stigma of speaking Irish has lessened, but confusion between the camps remains. I've witnessed many people in the Galltacht expressing the belief that Gaeltacht people have a real pride in their language and would prefer to keep the "blow-ins" out. This may be true of some, but a feeling of inferiority has for centuries been rampant among native Irish-speakers. Many in the Gaeltacht feel English to be the better language. The teenagers speak English while they eat their sandwiches outside the shop at lunchtime in Carraroe. They speak English while they play in the yard. On saluting a stranger in Connemara, English is more often than not the language used. There is a shyness about using the language unless we are sure the other person converses in it comfortably. Among the younger generation English is considered cool, Irish not. In the past English meant being educated and getting on in life. Understandably, it is hard to shake off those shackles.
Usually, if somebody who doesn't speak the language joins a circle of Irish-speakers the conversation will switch to English. This changes the dynamic, of course. It feels strange to speak English to my siblings or to close friends whose native language is Irish. But because we are bilingual and communication is the key, the minority language gets dropped sooner. It is the lesser of the two in practical life and so has a very fragile existence. For a language to thrive it has to feel equal to any other language around it.
I still had my blas when I returned to live in Connemara for a few years, which meant that after the preliminary round of questioning to ascertain my stock I was treated like one of their own. I don't think I would have had the same experience if I had been a non-native speaker from, let's say, Tipperary. That is natural. A language is not simply the words you use to convey a message. There is an attitude and way of expressing yourself unique to each language. Each has its nuances, from particular words to body language to a type of humour. With Irish, our points of reference are different to those of the English-speaking world. We have different heroes, different connections and a different vocabulary. We feel and express ourselves differently when speaking different languages.
When I am in England or central Europe, even though I speak and understand their languages I don't feel the connection I feel when I travel to countries further east. The eastern outlook on life sits more comfortably with me than that of the Continent or northern Europe. I always feel that the people further east are more like people from Irish-speaking Connemara. Equally, I feel more at home in Mediterranean countries than in English-speaking ones.
I have tried to work out why this is so. The roots of our language are neither Germanic, Nordic nor even Latin. If it is true that Irish is a language of the Celts, a tribe believed to have originated in central Europe, then it seems that a language carries with it more than sounds. The language reflects the way the people think, feel and see their place in the world. Generations of shaping the language means generations of people sharing a similar world view that their language puts across. English cannot express us in the same way, as it has been shaped by different peoples who adored different gods.
We have undoubtedly shaped the English that was brought here, and every day I hear expressions that are direct translations from Irish. Yet more than once I have met people who feel cheated because their native language is English, not Irish. Deep down they feel Irish is their language, but they do not speak it. English doesn't seem to serve its purpose when they try to express who they are. It seems our native tongue has a grasp on us that even we cannot comprehend.
I often wish I had only one native language. It would simplify my internal and external worlds. As it is I feel I am living in two cultures. If I would like to participate in the world that understands sean-nós, tradition, turns of phrase in Irish, lyrical descriptions of the landscape I grew up in, then I would be living in the Irish-speaking world, which means the Gaeltacht. If, on the other hand, I would like to be a part of a lively, young, modern, fast-changing city life then I would be living in an English-speaking world or abroad, where Irish is not the everyday sound. To live in either culture involves a geographical choice that leaves me feeling split in two.
I sometimes try to join the two by attending Irish-language events in the city or going to places where the music and traditions are alive, but it doesn't fulfil me. It exaggerates that feeling of being a dinosaur in an oasis. Along with that, the Irish that is learnt in the Galltacht, an caighdeán oifigiúil, differs considerably from my native tongue. It differs in terms of sound and vocabulary. It's rare that someone has the same richness and fluency if they haven't had the opportunity to spend time in a Gaeltacht.
Sometimes I feel that it impedes real, deep communication in Irish, because I am aware that our sounds are different, that there are grammatical mistakes to overlook and so on. I cannot fully relax in the conversation, because I am aware I could use an expression they may not know, and then it turns into a language class when all I want to do is converse with my fellow countrymen and -women.
Native Irish also has an inherent music that is mostly missing from the caighdeán oifigiúil. English sounds are much thinner than Irish ones, so it is often difficult for an English-speaker to make them. My great sadness is that the music and the richness of the language are dying with the native speakers, that the new language pronounces its "chs" as "ks". Nobody is to blame; it is the way things are.
I am aware that Irish could be substituted with Konkani, Ruthenian or any of the minority languages that seem to be dying off faster than species of insects. It is not unique to Ireland. In fact what is unique these days, compared with the ancient past, is that most of us are monolingual.
The rich tapestry of accents and dialects in Ireland tells of a much more varied linguistic plateau in times gone by. In many countries this is true today.
Although we now have only two, the language question in Ireland is still a complex one. I watch the nuacht sometimes and wonder how it must feel not to be able to understand the newscaster who is speaking what is purportedly the first official language of the country. I am sure many English-speakers feel let down by the way Irish was taught to them in school. I feel privileged to have known Irish from my birth and for it to have been shaped by the rocks and rough seas of Connemara. It has certainly made my world richer.
It is also strange to be living in a time when the language of my birth is by all appearances dying, and a culture dying with it. One may ask why we should bother to save a language that is perhaps for many nothing more than a nostalgic vestige of the past. Maybe because Irish is our sound. Passed on from our ancestors, it is ingrained in the crevices of the monastery walls, Viking ports, Norman castles, thatched cottages and even luxury duplexes.
All we have to do is look at our place names and know that every hillock was baptised by the people who lived and worked the land for hundreds of years. They had an intimate knowledge of and a communion with their surroundings. Just as our ecosystem changes when another species dies, so our conscious world changes with the death of a language, the key to an entire culture. The effect of losing our language is a subtle shift in our harmony with ourselves. It will not make headlines, but its survival is necessary for our fundamental feeling of belonging and our understanding of who we really are.
This is an edited version of an essay in 'Who Needs Irish?': Reflections On The Importance Of The Irish Language Today, edited by Ciarán Mac Murchaidh and published by Veritas, €14.95
Kate Fennell is an assistant documentary producer with Liberty Films
