not take place in Connaught, whilst in Ulster the tendency is to
shorten the vowel. Again in monosyllables ending in ll, nn, m, and
under certain other conditions a short vowel becomes a diphthong
in the south, in Connaught it is merely lengthened, but in Ulster the
original length is retained, e.g. Ulster ball, “member, limb,” Connaught
bāll, Munster baull. Final dh, gh in Munster are sounded as
g. In certain cases the north prefers the vocalic mutation where
the west and south have the nasal, thus notably in the dative singular
after preposition and article, e.g. Munster-Connaught do’n bhfear,
“to the man,” Ulster do’n fhear. In the south synthetic verb-forms
are employed to a much larger extent than in the north.
In the early part of the 19th century Irish was still the speech of more than half the inhabitants of Ireland. A German traveller reckoned that out of a total population of seven millions in 1835 four millions spoke Irish as their mother-tongue. The famine of 1846–1847 was felt most in those districts that were purely Irish, and these were the parts that were and still are chiefly affected by the tide of emigration. Add to this the fact that the influence of O’Connell and his satellites, and above all that of the Roman Catholic clergy, was against the language. In spite of the efforts of the Gaelic League (founded 1893), which have met with considerable success, the language is rapidly dying of internal decay. The speakers of Irish are chiefly confined to the following counties, where over 20% of the population speak Gaelic:—Waterford, Cork, Kerry, Clare, Galway, Mayo, Sligo, Donegal. The following figures will illustrate the decay of the language since the famine:—
| Year. | Monoglots. | Bilinguists. |
| 1851 | 319,602 | 1,204,684 |
| 1861 | 163,275 | 942,261 |
| 1871 | 103,562 | 714,313 |
| 1881 | 64,167 | 885,765 |
| 1891 | 38,192 | 642,053 |
| 1901 | 20,953 | 620,189 |
According to the 1901 census report the speakers of Irish were distributed as follows:—Leinster, 26,436; Munster, 276,268; Connaught, 245,580; Ulster, 92,858. The Gaelic movement, which has thriven largely on account of its anti-English character, would have a much better chance of galvanizing the ancient language of Ireland if it were not for the supreme difficulties of Irish spelling and phonetics. Of the hundreds of thousands of persons who attend the classes of the League not more than one or two per cent. at the outside arrive at any state of proficiency. Presbyterian Gaels in Scotland are taught to read the Bible but Irish Catholics are not encouraged to do so. The result of this is seen in the fact that, whilst many, if not all, of the local Nationalist newspapers under the pressure of the League publish badly-printed and little-read columns in Irish, there are only two regularly appearing periodicals which contain any large amount of Irish. Half the contents—and those the most important—of the weekly organ of the league, An Claidheamh Soluis (“the flaming sword”), are in English. The latter was started in 1898 under the title of Fáinne an Lae (“the ring of day,” i.e. the dawn). The other periodical is the monthly Gaelic Journal (Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge), a would-be literary magazine of very inferior quality which has led a precarious existence since 1882. In 1898 it was decided to hold a festival called the Oireachtas (“hosting, gathering”) on the lines of the Welsh Eisteddfod. The venture was a great success and similar meetings have been held every year since, whilst each province and many of the counties have their annual local Gaelic feis (festival). The literary output of the movement has been prodigious, consisting in the main of a number of short stories and dramas (mostly propagandist), but nothing of any particular merit has as yet been forthcoming. The best-known writers are Dr Douglas Hyde (collector of folk-stories—Beside the Fire, 1890, An Sgeulaidhe Gaedhealach, 1895 (reprinted from vol. x. of the Annales de Bretagne), Love Songs of Connaught, 1893, Religious Songs of Connaught, 1905); P. O’Leary (author of two lengthy stories, Seadna, 1904, Niamh, 1907); P. Dinneen (author of an historical tale, Cormac Ua Connaill, 1901); P. O’Shea, better known as “Conan Maol,” author of a collection of short stories entitled An Buaiceas, 1903.
Authorities on Irish Language.—For the study of Old Irish—Zeuss, Grammatica Celtica2 (Berlin, 1871); B. Güterbock and R. Thurneysen, Indices to the Irish words treated in Zeuss (Leipzig, 1881); E. Windisch published the first grammar of Old Irish in 1879 (trans. by N. Moore, Pitt Press, 1882), but Windisch’s treatment of the verb was rendered obsolete by the discovery of the laws of the Irish accent by H. Zimmer, Keltische Studien (Berlin, 1884), and R. Thurneysen, Revue celtique, vi. 309, J. Vendrèys, Grammaire du Vieil-Irlandais (Paris, 1908); R. Thurneysen, Handbuch des Alt-Irischen (Heidelberg, 1909). Mention should also be made of J. Strachan, Selections from the Old Irish Glosses (Dublin, 1904); and the same writer’s Old Irish Paradigms (Dublin, 1905), Stories from the Táin (Dublin, 1908). See also various papers on the Irish verb in the Transactions of the London Philological Society by Strachan (1895–1902); H. Pedersen, Aspirationen i Irsk (Copenhagen, 1898); C. Sarauw, Irske Studier (Copenhagen, 1901); G. J. Ascoli, Archivio glottologico italiano, vols. v. and vi. For the study of Middle Irish—E. Windisch, Irische Texte mit Wörterbuch (Leipzig, 1880). (Other volumes in conjunction with W. Stokes.)
Editions of texts by W. Stokes, Kuno Meyer and others in the Revue celtique, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, Ériu. K. Meyer has issued an exhaustive Mid. Irish glossary (A-D) as a supplement to the Archiv für celtische Lexikographie. The remainder is being published under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy. The first grammar of Modern Irish was published by Francis Molloy in 1677 at Rome under the title of Grammatica Latino-Hibernica. Molloy was followed by Jeremiah Curtin in 1728 with a book called Elements of the Irish Language. Numerous other grammars were published towards the end of the 18th and at the beginning of the 19th century, but few of them have any value. The more important of them are enumerated in the introduction to O’Donovan’s Grammar and to Windisch’s Kurzgefasste irische Grammatik, and in Pedersen’s Aspirationen i Irsk, pp. 29-47. We may mention W. Neilson’s Grammar (1808) as it is important for the Irish of E. Ulster. But the greatest native grammarian was John O’Donovan, who traversed Ireland in connexion with the Ordnance Survey, and published in 1854 a comprehensive grammar noting the differences between the various dialects. A little grammar published by Molloy in 1867 is instructive on account of the author’s peculiar point of view. The most useful books for the study of the living language are the series of booklets (five) published by Father O’Growney, one of the chief promoters of the present movement. Mention should also be made of J. P. Henry’s Handbook of Modern Irish, pts. i.-iv., and of the grammars by P. W. Joyce (Dublin, 1896) and the Christian Brothers (Dublin, 1901). For the northern form of Irish J. P. Craig’s Grammar of Modern Irish is useful (2 Dublin, 1904). The phonetics of a Munster dialect have been investigated by R. Henebry, A Contribution to the Phonology of Desi Irish (Greifswald, 1901). The dialect of the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway has been described by F. N. Finck, Die Araner Mundart, i. Lautlehre und Grammatik, ii. Wörterbuch (Marburg, 1899). G. Dottin has given an account of a dialect of North Connaught (Mayo) in the Revue celtique, xiv. pp. 97-137. A study of the speech of the north was published by E. C. Quiggin under the title of A Dialect of Donegal, Phonology and Texts (Cambridge, 1906). For an account of the decay of Irish see H. Zimmer, “Die keltische Bewegung in Irland,” Preussische Jahrbücher for 1898, vol. 93, p. 59 ff., and the last chapter of Douglas Hyde’s Literary History of Ireland (London, 1901).
The work of the earlier compilers of glosses will be mentioned in the literature section below. The first dictionary of the modern language of any importance was that published by J. O’Brien in 1768. Next came E. O’Reilly with his Irish-English Dictionary (Dublin, 1817). This book contains a vast store of words gathered on no principle whatever from all manner of sources, and has therefore to be used with caution, but even at the present day it renders considerable service. A second edition with a supplement by O’Donovan was published after the latter’s death in 1864. The first trustworthy dictionary of the modern language was published under the auspices of the Irish Texts Society by P. J. Dinneen (London, 1904). English-Irish dictionaries have been compiled by D. Foley (Dublin, 1855); E. E. Fournier (Dublin, 1903); T. O’Neill Lane (Dublin, 1904).
(b) Scottish Gaelic.—Scottish Gaelic is the form of Goidelic speech which was introduced into Scotland by the Dalriadic Scots who came over from Ireland in the early centuries of our era. We possess practically no early monuments of the language. We have one or two inscriptions in Latin characters, such as that at St Vigeans and the Ogams mentioned above, which have not yet been solved. In the Book of Deir there is a colophon of a few lines probably written by an Irish scribe in the 9th century, and as the language of these lines differs in no wise from the Irish of the period, we do not know if they accurately represent the Gaelic of Scotland or if they may not be pure Irish. In the same MS. there are further Gaelic scraps belonging to the 11th and 12th centuries. The word-forms in these entries are identical with those current at the time in Ireland, but the historical orthography seems to show more signs of decay than is the case in Irish. The medieval Scottish MSS. in the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh are only just being published, but they seem either to hail from Ireland or to be written in pure Irish. The end of the 15th century brought a change. The Lordship of the Isles, the great bond between Ireland and Scotland, was broken up. The Gaels of Scotland, thrown on their own resources, advanced their own dialect to the position of a literary language and tried to discard the Irish orthography. The Book of the Dean of Lismore, compiled about 1500, is written in a kind of phonetic orthography which has not as yet been sufficiently investigated. The language of those poems which are not directly ascribed to Irish poets, and which may therefore be regarded as representing the literary language of the Highlands at the time, seems to occupy a position midway between Irish and Scottish Gaelic. But until the beginning of the 18th century the Highlands were
