Introductory.
A desire to make myself acquainted with spoken Gaelic led me to think of spending the long vacation in Ireland in 1903. Types of southern and western Irish are already familiar from the descriptions of Henebry, Finck and Pedersen, and the hope of finding some closer connection, either in sounds or forms, between the Gaelic of the north of Ireland on the one hand and that of Scotland and Man on the other determined me to endeavour to investigate the form of Irish spoken in Donegal.
Meenawannia is the name of a townland about four miles from Glenties, running due east from the main road to Donegal. It contains some seven cottages, and the inhabitants practically without exception are able to speak Irish. In putting Meenawannia on the title-page of this sketch I do not wish to imply that the townland has a peculiar dialect of its own or that I have not associated with speakers from outside, but simply that the persons to whom I have had most opportunity of listening are natives of the townland. The speech of this small community of between 30 and 40 souls is perhaps even less homogeneous than might otherwise be expected. One of the parents in each family—usually the mother—must almost of necessity come from outside, and the speech of the children is therefore a compromise. Hence in one family cha predominates as the negative, while another has ní almost exclusively, and variants such as an uile, gach uile (gα·fwelʹə), and amárach, amáireach are similarly distributed among the various cottages. On the other hand the difference between the generations is almost incredible. Meenawannia has so far been practically unaffected by the efforts of the Gaelic League, though I believe more Irish is now spoken there than was the case 10 or 15 years ago. The phonetic decay of the speech of the younger people will be constantly exemplified in this sketch, but more appalling is the introduction of English words. Numbers of the people have
