Why did the Irish language decline even further after Ireland became independent? I understand not being able to expand the language across the whole island, but not even being able to preserve the pockets that were still there? They might as well have just stayed part of Britain tbh.
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There is no practical reason to learn the Irish language. There are plenty of practical reasons not to deal with the British.
Because Irish people decided they didn't consider it that important. Irish language was genuinely important for de Valera and his generation, and was a crucial part of their understanding of what Irish nationalism should be. However, it just wasn't as important to the next generation, who wanted to focus more on prosperity and modernization rather than pure nationalism. de Valera's successors, Sean Lemass and Jack Lynch, de-emphasized Irish and it went from there. Not to say that Irish has been abandoned but it's just a matter of secondary importance to people in how they understand what it means to be Irish and how important it is to them.
>They might as well have just stayed part of Britain tbh.
I mean that's just stupid as hell.
Irishgay here
There are a lot of factors, but it's important to remember that the Gaelic culture of which Irish was the language basically collapsed in the Elizabethan era. The Flight of the Earls meant that the aristocracy got entirely replaced with Bongs (which is still the case today), and without their patronage the native Irish art forms like sung poetry vanished because no one could afford to pay people to learn, perform and compose such highly complex works. They still exist in the form of Sean-Nos singing but its a much simpler art form than what existed previously.
The famine then produced mass poverty and forced people to learn english for work and/or emigrate. Because the country's economy was in ruins (a situation that persisted well after independence) parents started only speaking English to their children so they'd have more opportunities in life. The new state attempt to halt this but the decline was already in motion.
It might have worked if they had banned English in public usage or something from Day 1 but the damage was done by that point. The government kept it on life support by making it mandatory in schools, funding Irish radio (and eventually TV) etc., and founding Gaelscoils, schools in which English is forbidden and only Irish can be used (still a very popular option to this day).
The mandatory Irish backfired a bit because now people associate it with being forced to learn it in school, but it did keep it alive.
The number of second-language speakers is growing but as a first language its in trouble, the reason being that there are zero jobs or opportunites in the West where it's most spoken, Dublin is the only real option for a successful career as a wagie (maybe Cork at a stretch). Consequently there's nothing really holding younger people to those communities anymore
Oh also, the various invasions and plantations essentially meant that major towns developed with no tradition of speaking Irish whatsoever. For reason in native Irish culture we never developed big population centres, but lots of smaller ones.
The normans, vikings and bongs founded most of the big population centres. Consequently somewhere like Dublin may have had some native Irish dialect but was basically an English-speaking town.
Youghal in Cork is a good example of towns explicitly set up for Bongs, so English was always the language. Problem is when you have a lot of these it tends to change the language used for commerce and industry, which didn't help
This makes it more plausible how English overtook whatever language the Britons spoke after the Anglo saxons arrived, rather than genocide. We know that the English and Scotts didn't (succesfully) genocide the Irish, they just dominated them so hard that they lost most of their culture. I imagine the saxons did that same thing to the Britons.
Swarthy celts aren't white, and naturally bow down to their Germanic Anglo Saxon masters
Swarthy Celts? The Scottish who are Celtic don't look swarthy to me. Scottish and Irish are one and the same and are pale and not swarthy because English /Anglos are the only swarthy people in the isles. All Scottish people are technically Irish
>scottish
>celtic
AHAHAHAAHAH
The scots are germanic
Look at the purest celts in the british isles, the welsh and the cornish, and they're incredibly dark and swarthy you dumb mutt
Tacitus even described the celts as swarthy and iberian
Scots aren't Germanic they're Irish & Picts aka Celts. You're probably a swarthy Celt yourself. I bet you definitely are and will assume you are until proven otherwise.
And Ben Franklin said Germanic were swarthy so there's that too. English people are quite swarthy.
What was Edinburgh called before it was taken over by English?
Scots are Germanic you delusional mutt
Disregarding the highlands (which have germanic blood and are hardly purely celtic) lowland scots are primarily of Germanic blood
the only "swarthy" english you will find are those with irish blood or those in cornwall and out west
Tl:dr
Scots are most certainly Celts and there's no disputing it. You're most likely a Celt yourself too.
Russell Brand or Rowan Atkinson for example are swarthy Englishmen without a drop of Celtic blood and have Anglo Saxon surnames. English people are pretty much the most swarthy people in these isles but the south of England has a pretty nice climate so a lot tan but are fairly swarthy anyway. That's English people aren't Anglo Saxons though they're just turbo mutts and you'll never find a 100% Anglo Saxon in Britain because they don't exist.
We have some native swarthoids here. It's not that uncommon
t, Swarthoid Scot
>all scottish people are technically Irish
Edinburgh doesn't strike me as very gaelic sounding. Also please go outside, there are swarthy people from Wales, Scotland and Ireland it's a genetic trait that comes from the Western Hunter Gatherers, the Romans themselves mention that the Silures tribe was swarthy in appearance.
>average anglo Germanic vs Average celtic swart irishman
There are lots of things you can make fun of the Irish for but not for being submissive or acquiescent. The Irish fought against British rule for eight centuries and eventually achieved independence, triggering the collapse of the British Empire in the process. That isn't a meme.
Nineteenth century British racism against the Irish was based on the idea that they were inherently rebellious and intractable, not that they were inherently slavish and obedient.
If anybody in Europe naturally bows to anyone else it's the Anglo-Saxons to their Norman masters.
> The Irish fought against British rule for eight centuries
lol frick off, the Irish fought for the English crown more often than they fought against it.
English rule started when the Irish aristocracy submitted voluntarily to Henry II in the hope that he'd protect their lands from Norman raids. English rule was re-established in the Tudor period because Irish lords were happy to bend the knee to the king in return for titles and recognition of their position in their various quarrels against their relatives (which every single Irish lord had a bunch of). The whole reason the English were able to conquer and hold Ireland while spending most of their energy against France (and most of the rest against Scotland) was because the Irish didn't really have a problem with English kings and were more interested in fighting amongst themselves.
In both the English civil war and the Glorious Revolution, the Irish fought FOR the legitimate King of England against the rebels. After the defeat of James II there wasn't another serious rebellion in Ireland until after WW1; the one or two attempts were embarrassing failures that fizzled out without gaining any wide support. Ireland was peaceful from 1800 to 1916, by which point the popularity of violent rebellion was so low that the people of Dublin spat on the participants of the Easter Rising.
>Nineteenth century British racism against the Irish was based on the idea that they were inherently rebellious and intractable
Actually, insofar as a general opinion on the matter, it was based on the idea that they were inherently drunk and stupid. But the British weren't really racist against Irish people, apart from a few outliers who viewed categorizing things according to race as more 'scientific'. It was more regional prejudices, like Londoners held against the uncultured swine up north and Northerners held against the effete pansies down south. All legal discrimination was anti-Catholic.
This is semi-true. The native Gaelic aristocracy didn't collapse during the Elizabethan era; outside Ulster there were still plenty of areas where the Gaelic and Old English (Gaelicized Normans) lords remained strong at the beginning of the 17th century. The Flight of the Earls more marked the point where the English were able to really impose central authority on the Gaelic nobility. It was the Irish Confederate Wars and the Jacobite war that forced the native aristocracy to choose between either exile or conversion and assimilation.
The end of the Gaelic speaking aristocracy did damage the old bardic traditions, but Gaelic art still remained in the form of folk songs. So although it had an affect, I don't think I'd list it as a leading cause.
Nor did the famine suddenly make everyone poor and force them to learn English. What OP's map doesn't show is that there was a long period of bilingualism. English was already spoken widely in the 18th century, it just existed alongside Gaelic.
Leaning English was a multi-generational process: first Gaelic-speaking parents would teach their children English for economic reasons, who would become Gaelic speakers with English as a second language, used when they had to go into town or talk to passing merchants and tradesmen. Then when the number of English speakers reached critical mass, children would switch to being English first language speakers with Gaelic as a second language, using it at home to talk to the older generation. Then the older generation died off, and the younger generation simply didn't bother speaking Gaelic with their kids. Economics played a part, but it was more just apathy.
>in native Irish culture we never developed big population centres, but lots of smaller ones.
This was one of the most important reasons Gaelic died out. It could have survived English plantations, but the problem was the economic centres in most parts of Ireland were English-speaking.
>The mandatory Irish backfired a bit because now people associate it with being forced to learn it in school, but it did keep it alive.
This reminds me of what Israel did to revive Hebrew as a language, kids complaining and all, only theirs succeeded.
>inb4 ir*sh spammers
>Colbert
>Oliver
>Kimmell
Not Irish names
>map
This is missing a few such as Muskerry in Cork I think
Because Celtoids are sub humans
Celts are naturally submissive and made to be conquered and assimilated
None of the people in the Pic are Irish they're all Americans. Is that one of your israeli websites trying to scapegoat Americans of Irish ancestry for what the Yids have done to America? I don't think anyone is buying it.
The Celts are 19th century invention. There was no Celtic race and the peoples who were called Celts were just generic western Europeans and are the British, Irish, French, Germans of today. No one in Ireland calls themselves a Celt or anything like that so maybe you should abandon your schizo seething because you're only seething against Celts because you think Irish = Celt and by attacking the Celts you are attacking us but you're wasting your time and you are most likely descended from people who are known today as Celts.
>None of the people in the Pic are Irish they're all Americans.
Americans are g a race and yes they are of Irish descent, not German, Norwegian nor English, but IRISH
are not*
The people in that Pic are Americans and their mutted ancestry doesn't matter. And as someone has pointed out none of them have Irish surnames.
>Colbert
>Oliver
>Kimmell
>Biden
Not one of those surnames are Gaelic.
>No one in Ireland calls themselves a Celt or anything like that
I disagree with most of your post but this is true. Of all the people in these islands it is the English who are most obsessed with Celticism and identifying and classifying the traits of their neighbours and themselves as Celtic. For all the caricature of the Irish as obsessed with an imagined Celtic past the word 'Celtic' has never been especially important to Irish self-identification and national identity whereas English accounts of the Irish, Scottish Gaels and Welsh in the 19th century bring up the Celts again and again. The English project their fascination with things Celtic onto their Celtic neighbours, and they assume the nationalism of the Celtic peoples is larp inspired by something like their own Celtomania
>The Celts are 19th century invention. There was no Celtic race and the peoples who were called Celts were just generic western Europeans and are the British, Irish, French, Germans
I disagree. There are clear structural parallels between the societies and cultures of the medieval insular Celts and those of the continent as described by the classical authors. The affinity of medieval Gaelic Ireland with pre-Roman Gaul has been recognised for centuries.
The Celts who know think they're English perhaps. Of all the peoples in these isles the English are the most conquered and mutted.
Because for most Irish 'nationalists', Irish nationalism was just a code word for Catholic chauvinism. They either didn't care about the Irish language or were actively hostile to it as a provincial backwater dialect that made them look like a bunch of hicks. Ironically genuine Irish nationalism was begun and most heavily concentrated in the Protestant community, but a handful of amateur enthusiasts from a different class and religion to the majority of the population weren't ever going to have much effect.
It seems the more "independent" these nations get the more soulless and international they become.
the bloody english
The efforts to revitalise the Irish language were operating under the assumption that was pretty common at the time that national boundaries were synonymous with linguistic boundaries, the Irish were different, so they should speak their own tongue, overtime this view has become less prominent, so Gaelic goes from an essential proof that Ireland is a nation distinct from England/Britain, to a second language at best, as the the economic benefits of speaking English present themselves.
Basically, after a generation or two independent, the fact that Ireland was a distinct nation was obvious, and didn't need to be reinforced with linguistic barriers between it and her former overlord.
Irish are already mixed with significant English ancestry and DNA from Great Britain, on top of extra Scandinavian Norse patrilineal DNA more so than most of England received.
They are still culturally and linguistically Anglos, no matter how much they deny it.
This
Welsh kept their language for so long because the English didn't really give a shit about wales after they conquered it and as a result they remained pure
At this rate they're going to need one of these.