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The Irish language belongs to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Within the Celtic branch, it represents the Goidelic tradition of insular Celtic, with the other insular tradition being Brittonic, or British, which comprises Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. Celtic speech was most likely first introduced to Ireland during the great expansion of the Celtic peoples in antiquity, almost certainly no later than the sixth century BC.
There are no written records of the history of Ireland in that period. It may be assumed, however, that Celtic settlers in Ireland lived in relative isolation from Celtic communities in Britain and on the Continent, and that a specifically Irish variety of their language would inevitably develop. The earliest evidence for such a specifically Irish variety of Celtic, the Goidelic linguistic tradition which had evolved in Ireland among the descendants of the Celtic settlers and of earlier inhabitants of the country, is preserved in OGHAM inscriptions dating from approximately the fourth century BC and later. These inscriptions are thought to date back to about one thousand years after the Celtic settlements, a time period long enough to bring about considerable change in the speech of any community. The small corpus of words preserved in OGHAM inscriptions, apart from personal and family names, includes the word inigena, or “daughter.”
The earliest historical records of ancient Ireland are thought to date back to the late sixth century. By then, although there is a continuing awareness of earlier ethnic differences, Goidelic, in the form now generally known as Old Irish, was the common vernacular throughout the island and was being firmly established in Scotland and the Isle of Man by missionaries and settlers from Ireland. Old Irish, including a slightly earlier variant, Archaic Old Irish, was the language of Ireland's Golden Age. It is the earliest variant of the Celtic languages, and the earliest of European vernaculars north of the Alps, where extensive writings are present. In Old Irish, the earlier inigena, or “daughter,” had become ingen, approximately pronounced in-yen.
By the end of the ninth century, Old Irish was beginning to evolve into Middle Irish, the variety of the language generally associated with the period 900–1150. At the beginning of the period, the Norse had already established a substantial presence in Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Scotland, and contact with them is revealed in the many words of Norse origin which have become part of the Irish lexicon; terms connected with seafaring and trade are particularly well represented. Although this was a period of political upheaval and strife, the continuity of the Irish literary tradition was maintained, and extensive writings in Middle Irish can be found. The word for “daughter” remained as ingen, its spelling and pronunciation more or less unchanged from the Old Irish period.
During the second half of the Middle Irish period, the Norse influence was in decline, and various dynasties strove for political control over Ireland and, subsequently, over Gaeldom. The powerful Ó Briain dynasty of Thomond, for example, imposed its rule over the old Norse kingdoms of Dublin, the Isle of Man, and the Hebrides at various times throughout this era. Such activity must not only have expedited the full re-Gaelicization of communities in which Norse had dominated during an earlier period, but was likely to have had a levelling effect on the regional linguistic variations which, by that period, are assumed to have developed extensively in the everyday speech of Irish, Scottish, and Manx speakers. A linguistic comparison of the dialects which are presently spoken in Ireland and Gaelic Scotland reveals few features of diversity which are older than this period. Thus, when Middle Irish was coming to an end, common speech throughout Gaeldom may well have been evolving towards a new koiné, or a uniform variety of speech, and the geographic spread of the language was at its most far-reaching following the cultural absorption of the Norse kingdoms. At that time, it was the language of Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the greater part of Scotland. Coincidentally, the middle of the twelfth century saw fundamental ecclesiastical reforms, which included the introduction of new religious orders from the Continent, and the secular learning which had previously been maintained by the older Celtic monasteries was passed on to schools run by an emerging class of hereditary lay scholars. These lay schools gradually developed a new literary standard more in harmony with the contemporary spoken language and, by the end of the twelfth century, this standard was being adopted throughout the Gaelic world. Thus began the Early Modern Irish period, a significant era of the language, lasting approximately from 1200 to 1650. The form of Early Modern Irish which was prescribed in the schools as a literary standard is now generally known as Classical Modern Irish, but the expressions Early Modern and Classical Modern are often used interchangeably. In the fully evolved Classical Modern Irish lexicon, the word for “daughter,” inghean, is spelled differently, but the pronunciation remains similar to that of the Old Irish period.
As Middle Irish was evolving into Early Modern Irish, the Anglo-Normans were beginning to settle in Scotland during the late eleventh century, and in Ireland during the last decades of the twelfth. As a consequence, the Irish language began to recede in Scotland, and within three centuries, it was no longer spoken in the Lowlands. Although the Anglo-Norman settlements gave rise to a period of greater linguistic diversity in Ireland, the Irish language remained dominant and other speech communities were gradually absorbed. By the early sixteenth century, almost all of Ireland’s population was Irish-speaking again. However, the authorities in the main towns required that English be used to conduct formal administrative and legal business. Thus Irish never became the language of urban administration, and the Irish-speaking population never again achieved full political autonomy. On the other hand, in Ireland and Gaelic Scotland during the Early Modern Irish period, powerful regional lordships which fully supported the Irish language and its associated institutions had emerged. The power of these lordships was successively destroyed as the monarchs of England and Scotland established centralized control over their territories. When Domhnall Dubh, the last Lord of the Isles, died in 1545, one of the most powerful Gaelic lordships of all time had reached an end. In Ireland, the Tudor and Stuart conquests and plantations (1534–1610), the Cromwellian settlements (1654), and the Williamite war (1689–91), followed by the enactment of the Penal Laws (1695), had the cumulative effect of eliminating the Irish-speaking ruling classes and destroying their cultural institutions. They were replaced by a new landowning and urban middle class introduced from England and southern Scotland, who established a polity in which English was the sole language of government and public institutions. The status of Irish as a major language was finally and irrevocably undermined. Irish continued as the language of the greater part of the rural population and, for a time, of the servant classes in towns. This was the period of Post-Classical Modern Irish in the written language, when the Irish literary tradition was maintained as best as possible by dedicated artisans, farmers, priests, and schoolmasters. The word for “daughter” was still spelled inghean, but it most likely had a thoroughly modern pronunciation. at this time.
From the middle of the eighteenth century, as the Penal Laws were relaxed and a greater social and economic mobility became possible for the native Irish, the more prosperous members of the Irish-speaking community began to conform to the prevailing middle-class ethos by adopting English. Consequently, Irish began to be associated with poverty and economic deprivation. This tendency increased after the Act of Union in 1800, and was devastatingly aggravated by the effects of the Great Famine (1846–48) and by the mass emigration which followed it. By 1891, the number of Irish speakers had been reduced to 680,000, and according to that year's population census, Irish speakers under the age of ten represented no more than 3.5% of their age-group. The language appeared to be on the point of extinction, but a vigorous restoration movement has helped to prevent such a fate.
Academic interest in Irish language and literature had begun as early as the late eighteenth century among the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. This development was accentuated by the 1789 publication of Charlotte Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry. Inspired by the Romantic Movement, this text marked the initially slow and sproadic beginning of the publication of secular literature in Irish. Literary interest later merged with a concern for the survival of spoken Irish as its decline became increasingly evident during the nineteenth century. Thomas Davis was an eloquent advocate for Irish and, in 1843, was the first to publicly declare it “the national language,” a description continued in the Irish constitutions of 1922 and 1937. The Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, founded in 1876, succeeded in gaining recognition for Irish at all levels of the educational system, from primary school to university. The Gaelic League, or in Irish, Conradh na Gaeilge, established in 1893 by Douglas Hyde, Eoin Mac Néill, Father Eugene O'Growney, and many others, successfully turned support for Irish into a mass movement. In particular, the movement valued the speech of the surviving Irish-speaking communities as the quintessence of a prized tradition. In education and in literature, therefore, the “speech of the people” came to be accepted as the canon which guided correct usage. This in turn gave rise to modernizing reforms of spelling and written grammar. These reforms were given final shape in an Official Standard published by the Government of Ireland in 1958. In this standard, the spelling prescribed for “daughter” is iníon, fully reflecting the modern pronunciation in which the second syllable is a simple, long vowel.
MÁIRTÍN Ó MURCHÚ
Source: http://www.forasnagaeilge.ie/language/default.asp?toggle=yes&lang=en&catID=6
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