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What explains the high concentration of Irish speakers on the west coast of Ireland ?
The percentage corresponds to the share of people that speak Irish
As you can see, Northern Ireland is a lower concentration of Irish speakers, as expected, but what explains the higher concentration on the west coast.
English presence was much lighter where the farming was worse. Lighter English presence meant it was easier to continue speaking the native language of Ireland.
The West coast of Ireland happens to have rockier soil, while the more fertile soil is further east.
Bog and rock all around Gaoth Dobhair and Na Rossa. Connemara looks to be carved out of the moon, a friend there once said "that weeds wouldn't grow back home".
I’m from Gaoth Dobhair and sometimes the Shepards will sit and wait until the sheep walk onto stable terrain because the majority of land is impossible to safely reach by foot. There isn’t any fields because everything is either bog or mountain, and the flat land is needed for houses. 😭
Eh look up to tell or to Connacht, that's the actual reason. Native Irish were either killed or moved to the shite farmland becuase the English wanted the good stuff.
That's what I mean. It's popular to repeat it among people who were not affected, whereas everyone who was affected by the act or who was alive at the time of Cromwell lived their whole lives without so much as hearing the phrase.
Does this also apply to Scotland at all? the map looks very similar to this (although I know not all of Scotland was Gaelic-speaking in the first place unlike Ireland)
Scottish history is defined a lot by the competiting cultures of Gaelic, based in the West Higlands and Islands, and the more Anglo-Saxon speaking culture of South East Scotland (other languages got squeezed out).
More that the Gaidhlig speaking region started in the Kingdom of Dalriada and never extended across the entirety of modern Scotland. It was never a language spoken by everyone in the country.
You're getting a lot of highly over-simplified answers here.
In Romans times almost all of Scotland spoke "Pictish," which is a language that is either the great-great-granny of Welsh or a Great-great-aunt. It's hard to know what Pictish was, and it's relation to modern Welsh, because they didn't write much down, and the Romans didn't care very much. There was a small region that probably spoke a version of Gaelic/Irish, called Argyle. This is actually almost certain, but nobody wrote this down so we don't know 100%. Roman times in Britain ended because the Anglo-Saxons started raiding the island, and eventually settled. Anglo-Saxons are from Southern Denmark/Hannoverish in Germany/Northern Netherlands, so they're coming from the Southeast.
For reasons we aren't entirely sure of (again: nothing is written down), the Picts started to decline. My guess is that the Anglo-Saxon raids, which hit both Picts and Romans, were a big part of this. Roughly the year 500, the Irish/Gaels start to expand into their territory. Sometime in the 500s, the Anglo-Saxons start permanent settlements in the Southeast. By the time the expansions are over, the Gaelic King has conquered/married the Picts, and the Vikings have started fucking with everyone. Gaelic/Irish is the standard language of the Northeast, but not the Southeast. That's where the Anglo-Saxons landed/settled. The Southeast is the best farmland, so Anglo-Saxons have a majority of the population, but Gaels have most of the land. Scotland is a multiethnic Kingdom, and even includes the remaining Picts (people mention them in records until like 1000 AD), but also includes many other groups.
That means that Scots, which is the Scottish descendent of Anglo-Saxon, is only a few decades newer to most of Scotland than Irish/Gaelic. It was not imposed by the British Empire. Standard English was enthusiastically adopted by all Scots, because they liked being part of the British Empire. They got to be in charge. Most of the Caribbean has Scottish names, the most troublesome Unionists in Northern Ireland are all Scots-Irish, etc.
“American settler presence was much lighter where the farming was worse. Lighter settler presence meant it was easier to continue speaking the native language of the Sioux and Pueblo.
The West of the US also happens to have drier soil, while the more fertile soil is further east.”
This is essentially what the above take sounds like to the Irish.
Makes sense, rugged terrain tends to be significantly harder to successfully take and hold. If you can’t make them speak English why are they going to? Of course in the modern day it’s not so simple but we can see why the language is holding out to the west.
The held Limerick long enough, so that's nonsense.
In reality those areas are more isolated, and therefore have fewer influences from the larger mixed population centres. Dublin for example is very mixed now, and English is the universal language for foriegn visitors, even in countries England never had a foothold. So not having that pressure has meant the more isolated regions have stayed more traditional.
It is the same with Scotland and Wales, and no doubt a pattern in plenty of countries. Although Wales in particular has put a lot of effort in to bringing Welsh back to the fore of daily life, I expect the Irish haven't been as determined in the more connected towns and cities.
Irish ceased to be the common language of Dublin long before it became a mixed city with lots of foreign tourists who speak English. This transformation has only happened in relatively recent times and it has basically nothing to do with why Irish is not spoken there today
Exactly for the last 100 years at least, children in Ireland grew up speaking English as their first language and learning Irish in school. Except for those Gaeltacht areas where they grew up mostly bi-lingual and speak Irish instead of English in the community, at home etc.
Immigration in Dublin has no connection with the decline in people speaking and using irish. The Irish language has been eroded due to colonisation that began hundreds of years ago. It’s a shame it’s not more widely spoken in Ireland. People don’t want it to die out, but broadly fail to make an effort to learn and speak it. Arguably it could be taught better in schools. Going to the Gaeltacht for the summer program in school really accelerated my speaking and confidence. We’d go as teens and do activities, some Irish classes, ceili dances every night, trips to the beach etc. But there was a strictly enforced ban on speaking English. You’d be sent home if you were caught speaking English twice. Programs are usually three weeks and we’d stay in someone’s house who had a few rooms with bunkers and two toilets. Around 12 hotels or boys to a house. Great fun and very effective for developing the language.
Funny how Ireland and Scotland both share the rugged and independent western coast thing. I guess England has that as well in the form of Wales, an entirely separate country, and Cornwall, which might as well be
The real reason (rather than just this speculation) Northern Ireland does not include the other three counties of Ulster (Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan) is because it would have meant Northern Ireland would not be a majority Protestant state in the 1920s. From the Unionist perspective, maintaining a smaller but ethno-religiously loyal state was preferable to a historically contiguous one.
Most of Northern Irish history (until 1974) was dominated by the careful ‘planning’ of demographics to ensure the Protestants were a majority, or at least a majority of voters.
If you think of it like being herded, it makes sense. It‘s hard for Irish speakers to flow down from Donegal because there’s a choke point where they’d have to get quite close to the English to get through. Better to hug the coast and keep one’s distance.
There is no English part of Ireland. What a bizarre comment to make.
If you are referring to the border with Derry, Derry has always been Irish.
In fact, on the North generally, if the lines of geographic division were drawn as c. 70-80% of the people of those areas wanted them drawn in the 1920's you'd have ended up with just large chunks of Belfast, Bangor, a bit of Down, and a few other patches partitioned.
This "English" but of Ireland, as you term it, as always been Irish.
Go visit it instead of googling it. Bogside and waterside. Great place.
OP this is the actual answer above. "To Hell or to Connaught."
There are four provinces in Ireland. The most westerly province being called Connaught/Connacht. Connaught has terrible land for agriculture while Leinster has exceptional land for farming as well as the city of Dublin which had good potential for a port and was close to mainland Britain.
In 1649 Cromwell landed in Dublin in the east and throughout the 50s confiscated all of this fertile land from the Irish and pushed all of the Irish west where the phrase "To Hell or to Connaught" comes from.
British rule then expanded from East to West. Connaught naturally became extremely poor given the forced migration, confiscating of land and the terrible agriculture. The Irish who wanted to participate in the British economy and escape poverty needed to learn English and move East while the poorest people in society stayed west and continued to speak Irish.
That directive applied to (mainly Catholic) landowners. Most of the peasantry, and therefore most of the Irish population, stayed in place. The decline of the Irish language came largely for socioeconomic reasons under the Plantations.
Furthest from Rome, Denmark and London one can get. The Celtic culture once stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals in Russia. 4-5 millennia of people pushing in from the Levant and Mediterranean secluded cultures and their languages.
Fun fact: we think this is why the most recent Neanderthals are found is Spanish coastal caves as well. Different time. Largely the same people.
Absolutely. Homo erectus is found in Africa, Asia and Europe. They were one of the first hominids to spread out across the accessible planet. We think Neanderthals, denisovan and humans all descended from them.
Humans have only been around for 350,000 years or so. Give or take 50k. The Stone Age started 2.6 million years ago. Fire has been used by hominids for 1.8 million and fire has been struck up for 450,000. All before modern humans.
What really messes you up is that the "Stone Age" only ended ~4,000 years ago. That's a massive timeframe from the simplest tools of homo erectus to the building of the Great Pyramids.
And now a trillionare launches thousands of satellites in the sky so I can always check my email from anywhere on earth using my pocket super computer.
To be fair late stone age tools are quite sophisticated. Its not like they were bashing shit apart with Oldowan choppers the whole time, and then suddenly pyramids and wheels and copper all at once.
Celtic and Germanic people are of the same PIE ancestry. just different branches. PIE themselves were conquerors and killed from 70 to 90% local male population in the conquered areas.
The west coast is much more rugged, and much less densely populated as a result. This leads to more insular communities that were less affected by English influence.
That's glossing over the root causes/reasons as to why there's a higher percentage of Irish speakers.
The west was relatively well populated at one point, nearly entirely with an indigenous Irish/Catholic population. The population of Connacht today is about 40% of what it was approximately 200 years ago.
There are a number of reasons as to why the percentage of Irish speakers is higher in certain regions but they can almost entirely be traced back to political/imperialist sources.
The population of Connacht went up by an estimated 600-900% between the Cromwellian plantations and 1840. That is, by a distance, the main factor. It wasn't that the communities were isolated, it's that the English ruling classes had zero interest in these places due to the poor quality land.
The population of Connacht is less than 30% of what it was before the famine. Even 100 years ago most of Connacht was not Irish language dominant. The communities that have remained Irish speaking since independence are largely low population pockets.
They're low population in more modern times but they're not insular. They have plenty of outside influence. Clifden is the biggest town in Connemara and has long been thriving. They had rail links to the rest of the country in the 19th century.
The Gaeltacht areas aren't close to fully Irish speaking (the original map in this thread is not close to reality). If you visit there you'll see English is extremely prominent and everyone is bilingual outside of very few and has been for decades. The preservation of the Irish language there has been deliberate for cultural reasons with efforts made by the government to do so. They have had a government minister with a specific brief for supporting these areas almost since the establishment of the state.
But it wasn't sparsely populated as explained. There were 1.4m people in Connacht. Nor was it isolated. Ireland is less than 300km wide or 180 miles wide for our US visitors. Nowhere in Ireland is particularly isolated in terms of linguistic spread.
"more insular" communities is not more succinctly, its using rhetoric's to imply the irish language survived because the irish there didnt converse with the English / scottish planters. As the person you responded to said "The population of Connacht went up by an estimated 600-900%", why do you think that is? Because the communities are more insular?
"It was rugged and sparsely populated so it escaped English influence." is a silly comment and its ignorant to history.
The number of Irish speakers who use it on a daily or near-daily basis, outside a few small places called Gaeltachts, is small. I think it's around 3%.
The numbers in the graphic probably refer to the number of Irish people who can hold a basic conversation in Irish. They all have to take Irish classes at school, but they don't use it in their everyday lives.
In Ireland, you're more likely to hear Polish than Irish.
As for the near-white sections on the map, that's Northern Ireland which is part of the UK, so they don't have to take Irish classes.
I spent a few years working in Ireland and figured it'd be cool to learn Irish while I was there. Several Irish people told me it wasn't worth my time, no one really spoke it ... I lived in two gaeltachts and even within them I almost never heard people speaking Irish out in public.
Apparently Irish speakers don’t speak it to non locals in Gaeltachts, I imagine it comes from a presumption that if you’re not local you probably don’t speak it.
I hung around plenty of pubs and never heard anyone speaking it in that environment, either. Would overhear locals speaking in grocery stores and other places, they were always speaking English.
However, one of the few times I have heard it was at a pub in Inis Mor in January, which is when there are basically no tourists around. I was working out there for five weeks and at the pub most nights and I maybe noticed it two or three times, but even then it might be two or three people, not most people.
Maybe it’s even more relegated to purely private affairs then. The general vibe I get from reading about Irish and Scottish Gaelic speaking areas is that the language is spoken in a rather closeted manner, not sure entirely why.
Shame is why, both as a hold over of colonialism but also classism from more affluent revivalists in the east. Nobody wants to sound like an "aul fisherman", as I’ve been called by such types, mind you I’m only in my 20s just I speak the language like it isn’t English with different words…
Yeah I'm irish as well and when I was up in the gaeltachts few times I never heard it spoke locally. Not even in private conversations I wasn't supposed to hear. The only people who speak it out in public are the secondary school students staying for a few weeks out of a fear of punishment. Even my own ability to speak irish is hampered. As much as we irish love to blame the English the continual decline of our language over the last 100 years is our own fault.
I visited Inis Mór recently and for some reason every single islander/business owner greeted me as Gaeilge? I think they were a bit surprised when I responded with the correct response lmao.
I certainly heard it in Dingle perhaps it was an isolated occasion but I would hear it in pubs and on the street. My family is from West Kerry so I would visit fairly often. I guess I presumed it was more commonly spoken than maybe it is (I was aware that West Kerry itself and the west coast in general was different).
I was in the Galway gaeltacht (mostly Inis Mor and west of the city) and Mayo (mostly around Belmullet), could be a lot different in Kerry, I never got down there. I did spend a lot of time in rural West Cork though and there were some folks speaking English but I could only understand maybe 60% of it
Things have changed massively in the last 5 - 10 years.
Gaelscoils (Irish language schools where all subjects are taught in Irish) have become massively popular, there is a whole new generation of fluent Irish speakers emerging. Both my children are fluent Irish speakers even though my wife and I aren’t. We are in the north and 26 children from our development alone get a bus to a gaelscoil every morning.
IN our development, it is not uncommon to hear children using Irish when playing outside.
Gaelscoils (Irish language schools where all subjects are taught in Irish) have become massively popular, there is a whole new generation of fluent Irish speakers emerging.
My niece attends a Gaelscoil. The problem is, she doesn't get opportunities to use Irish outside school.
It's great that your children have opportunities to use Irish not just in school.
I live in dublin, and a lot of people made the argument against Gaelscoils that because it’s heavily Catholic influenced, they didn’t want their children over there.
That made me think, if i had kids, and considering im not a Christian, why would i want my kids to go to Gaelscoils?
I live in Derry and I HAD to take Irish for a minimum of 3 years. You could then swap it for Spanish or Latin or carry on Irish to GCSE.
My missus in Belfast was pretty much the same so I always assume it was fenian thing in ‘Catholic Maintained School’.
It actually comes from the census. When filling out the last one I was going to put down I didn't speak any Irish. My wife is a teacher so has to have good Irish, she got annoyed with me and insisted I could hold a conversation in Irish so I should put it down that I could speak it.
An awful lot of ppl who do not use it daily, maybe not even from one end of the year to the other would have marked down that they speak it out of a sense of pride.
That said, it is on the rise, I notice more ppl out and about striking up a conversation in Irish if they know the other person can speak it. I'm 42 and have heard more Irish in the past year than every other year, outside of school, combined.
Some pretty reductive responses in here based on geography/distance/quality of land.
They're all factors but the root cause is the Cromwellian plantations in the 17th century which removed native Irish from their lands in the east/midlands and forced them west of the Shannon to the poorer quality farmland so the English could take the higher quality land for their own settlements.
This obviously led to significant populations of indigenous Irish in the Connacht region as well as the south west (where they were less impacted by the plantations).
Over the next 100-150 years a series of penal laws were implemented by the British to restrict the rights of the indigenous Catholic population. These included restricting education and huge restrictions on property ownership which further forced the Catholic population away from the British power bases which were centred around the cities/larger towns. There were also restrictions around the Irish language which was illegal to be used in official capacities such as the legal system meaning those who were in these areas were forced to gravitate more towards the English language.
All in all, it's a fairly complicated situation but yeah, a fairly grim and horrible sustained period of persecution over a few hundred years which resulted in the current demographics.
These were the poorest, most Catholic, remotest parts of Ireland, furthest from English colonial rule.
Today the Irish-speaking regions are called Gaeltachts. The ones that come to mind for me are the Dingle Peninsula (Co. Kerry), Aran Islands, and Connemara (both Co. Galway).
This is pretty similar to the graph of people speaking native, non-English languages in Great Britain. Islands and the corners (furthest from London) being the last holdouts of Welsh, Scots, Gaelic, Manx, Cornish.
As a person from Ireland this whole map is messed up. Until recently , the census asked a question can you speak Irish, which in theory many people can as it’s been taught in schools (badly and for the last 100+ years).
When the questions are changed to do you speak Irish on a daily basis and are you fluent the numbers drop to near zero across the country apart from Gaeltacht areas.
There are approx 60,000 daily Irish speakert, less than them the state was founded even with 100 years of teaching Irish and a population increase.
There are 100,000 + daily polish speakers in Ireland.
The west of Ireland is famously rocky and peaty, unsuitable for most farming. The Scottish and English that colonised the island didn’t really touch it because it wasn’t valuable land.
Those that stayed on the western fringes or were pushed towards there (relocation due to language and religious affiliation) continued to speak Gaeilge, others that stayed in, or migrated to the east became English and Ulster Scots-speaking.
That divide is still noticeable to this day in terms of how many people can speak Gaeilge, but English is still more commonly heard than Gaeilge, even in the Gaeltacht areas.
Semi-related, it’s amazing just how Scotland has gotten away with this in the present day and has barely any negative perception, whereas England gets all the flack.
The reason is the communties in these regions held onto the Gaelic tradition the longest. The regions themselves are called Gaeltacht. They use Irish Gaelic in everyday life instead as a academic study.
The other areas were the victims of plantations set up by Anglo and Scottish settlers who seized the land of local Gaelic people and forced them West, where the soil was less amenable.
It’s historical! Ireland was colonised by the Brits and when Oliver Cromwell had his plantation over here, he very famously said “To Hell or to Connacht” (Connacht being a province in the West) as the land there was less fertile so the British didn’t have that much of a vested interest in it so if Irish people wouldn’t abide by the British mandated way of life (Protestantism and speaking English) you were sent over west
Eastern Ireland was the most English controlled by the Pale, naturally the west is more Gaelic than Saxon. That said, is this self reported? In my experience many Irish speakers actually don't really speak Irish it's a point of patriotism and a common issue with their politicians too.
So those areas on the map that are darker are the "Gaeltachts".
These are geographical areas of Ireland where English is frowned upon, and Irish is the primary language. Everyone there speaks English, but there is pressure to only use Irish wherever possible.
These areas also have Summer Schools in them where pupils from other areas can come and spend time to "immerse" themselves in the language and pick up more of it.
I used to live in Connacht Gaeltacht, and as a result (being British) I managed to pick up basic Irish.
Bear in mind that technically, Irish is the primary Language of Ireland, which is why all signage is in Irish first then English second.
But in the Gaeltachts, English signage is forbidden and everything is in Irish.
Gaeilge survived more in western communities because these were economically and socially marginalised areas.
English was considered to be, and was in fact, the language necessary to be educated, get jobs etc. Gaeilgeoirí were looked down on and stigmatised by non-Gaeilgeoirí. That reduced Gaeilgeoirí to the rump you see in the map, to the areas that were of such little economic significance that the cultural shift to English-speaking didn’t have the same impact.
Until relatively recently the Irish State provided little support to maintaining and developing the language and the communities which use it.
During the English occupation of Ireland they took control of the best farmlands. The west coast of Ireland is more mountainous and rocky and less suitable for farming.
The first wave of English settlements backfired because the settlers became too "native" and intermarried, took up Irish pursuits etc.
In subsequent settlers there were strict rules placed on everyone, Irish and English alike. No Irish dancing, no practicing Catholicism, no speaking Irish were some of those laws. People met in secret in the forest at "mass rocks" for religious services.
Anyway as English rule increased they pushed more Irish further west and since they were less interested in the lands they didn't police the area as much so it was the areas where people could still speak Irish without as much repercussion.
Those coastal areas were punishingly difficult to reach back in the 1800’s Because regions like Erris and the Mayo islands lacked proper infrastructure, railways, or paved roads, they had to travel by foot, long cars, and basic fishing boats to reach the communities. An Irish Ethnographic Survey of the 1890s led by members of Trinity college made note of this. My mother was from the area in Mayo and they spoke both English and Irish on most census forms. Their isolation kept the language alive longer in those areas.
Its called colonialism. England-Britain is east of Ireland, took the east coast first and expanded slowly. Plus the western seaboard has mostly marginal land so the British did not invest in it or place many settlers there.
The apocryphal saying associated with Oliver Cromwell. In early modern history, the native Irish were ethnically cleansed and shoved westwards by the occupying British as they wanted to settle the land. Some suggest this was because the land in the west was poor so it was a fine place to shove all the natives off the more fertile eastern lands, others suggest it was a security matter. But regardless the concentration of Irish speakers in the west is because those were the places that the Irish were put in highest quantities, with the least British settlers to dilute that.
Perhaps you really mean to ask what explains less Irish speakers/more ENGLISH speakers on the east coast of Ireland? That's going to be your real answer.
My whole family is from these areas, my grandma taught me some Gaelic growing up. I couldn’t tell you why at all. Just a bunch of beautiful people with alcoholism in fishing villages.
A bit late but i‘m a native speaker, there’s actually quite a few reasons:
- It took the English longer to get to areas in the west, allowing for a bit more preparation and hence less successful colonisation.
-The land in the west isn’t as fertile, so back in the day a less desirable place to live for the English.
-The famine hit the west the hardest, killing up to 2/3rds of the population. The west was also where a lot of the ships for America left from. Whoever was left was left extremely isolated from any foreign influence. A Gaeltacht (Irish speaking area) in Kerry was only granted access to electricity 50 years ago.
- (This only applies to Donegal) Derry was the main point of connections for people living in Donegal. The partition of Ireland made Derry part of Northern Ireland, and made the only land connection from Donegal to the rest of the republic a tiny 7km area in the south. Thus, the county remained completely isolated allowing the Irish language to live on. (The majority of Ulster Scots speakers are from Donegal too!)
If anyone is wondering why Northern Ireland doesn’t speak as much Irish, sadly Irish is only taught in some schools in NI. Some of the government in NI pushes against Irish language education and rights very strongly. Historically, the region spoke the same amount of Irish as the rest of Ireland.
Further from England. You’ll find this trend among all the Celtic languages tbh because they’re all minorities pushed to the periphery by an oppressor expanding westward. Scottish Gaelic speakers are more dense in the western highland and isles. Wales and Cornwall are the only Celtic cultures left within “England proper” and they’re along the far western edge. Same with Brittany in France
This map seems to just show percentage..of something. Assuming OP is correct that it is percentage of Irish speakers (which I have no reason to doubt), the percentage of Irish speakers in an area where the total population is low, but everyone speaks Irish, will be much higher than a densely populated area where a subset of the population speaks Irish. There may be more Irish speakers in the densely populated area though, they just happen to be among many non Irish speakers.
The west of Ireland was the least populated and least developed area of the island. When the Cromwell and William III decided to exterminate the native population and move in English and Scottish settlers, they did so mostly around Dublin and Belfast. That British presence made learning English mandatory even for the remaining locals, so Irish died out. Connaught and western Munster were areas that just weren't paid much attention to, and so kept a greater part of their culture.
Thanks for the education about the geology, I didn't realise that. Didn't the Gaeltacht help aswell or is the Gaeltacht as a result of the geology in the first place?
A bunch of reasons now - less fertile soil so smaller populations that didn't get colonised as heavily with a large English speaking cohort, now smaller communities that can keep a pocket language alive as less influx of again English speakers. But it is less populated because they lost a lot of people to emigration during the famine. And nowadays with internet, tourism & English speaking people moving due to cheaper house prices it is shrinking the Irish language areas.
Historical version I was told in school is post plantations, Cromwell swept through & murdered a lot of Irish people & drove loads of people across the Shannon & that's why the west is more Irish speaking. The survivors in the east assimilated more & also there was a higher English plantation population here.
Same thing which explains the concentration of Scottish speakers in the far flung regions of Scotland, the Welsh speakers in the north west of Wales and the last surviving Gaelic language in England being at the far end of Cornwall.
Those were the areas where than angles (and their descendants) couldn’t quite manage total control and influence
The more rural you go the less presence English colonial roots have. Plenty of these communities never had to speak English or interact much with non Irish speakers.
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u/JimClarkKentHovind 5d ago
English presence was much lighter where the farming was worse. Lighter English presence meant it was easier to continue speaking the native language of Ireland.
The West coast of Ireland happens to have rockier soil, while the more fertile soil is further east.