Irish

Irish (Gaeilge) is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish. more...

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Irish is now spoken natively by a small minority of the Irish population – mostly in Gaeltacht areas – but also plays an important symbolic role in the life of the Irish state. It enjoys constitutional status as the national and first official language of the Republic of Ireland and it is an official language of the European Union. Irish is also an officially recognised minority language in Northern Ireland.

Estimates of fully native speakers range from 20,000 to 70,000 people. The Department of Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs estimated in 2007 that 17,000 people lived in areas where Irish was the community language, and a further 10,000 in areas where it is partly the community language. But since Irish is an obligatory subject in schools, many more are reasonably fluent second-language speakers. Furthermore, a much larger number regularly regard themselves as competent to some degree in the language: 1,656,790 (41.9% of the total population aged three years and over) regard themselves as competent Irish speakers. Of these, 538,283 (32.5%) speak Irish on a daily basis (taking into account both native speakers, as well as those inside the educational system), 97,089 (5.9%) weekly, 581,574 (35.1%) less often, 412,846 (24.9%) never, and 26,998 (1.6%) did not state how often.

14% of the population of the Republic of Ireland listen to Irish radio programming daily, 16% listen 2-5 times a week, while 24% listen to Irish programming once a week.

The number of inhabitants of the official-designated Gaeltacht regions of Ireland is 91,862, as of the 2006 census. Of these, 70.8% aged three and over speak Irish and approximately 60% speak Irish on a daily basis.

The 2001 census in Northern Ireland showed that 167,487 (10.4%) people \"had some knowledge of Irish\" (see Irish language in Northern Ireland). Combined, this means that at least one in three people (~1.8 million) on the island of Ireland can understand Irish to some extent.

On 13 June 2005, EU foreign ministers unanimously decided to make Irish an official language of the European Union. The new arrangements came into effect on 1 January 2007, and Irish was first used at a meeting of the EU Council of Ministers, by Minister Noel Treacy, T.D., on 22 January 2007.

Names of the language

In English

The language is usually referred to in English as Irish, sometimes as Gaelic or Irish Gaelic. The term Irish Gaelic is often used when English speakers discuss the relationship among the three Goidelic languages (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx). Scottish Gaelic is often referred to in English as simply Gaelic. The archaic term Erse (from Erische), originally a Scots form of the word Irish applied in English-speaking Scotland (by Lowlanders) to all of the Goidelic languages, is no longer used for any Goidelic language, and in most current contexts is considered derogatory.

Read more at Wikipedia.org