This is just a short post to address a very
superficial point of terminology that some people may have wondered about.
It has come to my attention that some visitors to this
blog may be uncomfortable with the way this blog uses the terms ‘Irish dialects’,
‘Gaelic dialects’ and ‘Irish’ and ‘Gaelic’ interchangeably.
Some people may argue that the correct name of the
language which calls itself Gaeilge –
and many variants besides (see below)
– should always and exclusively be ‘Irish’
in English. To refer to it as anything else, they might say, is ignorant at
best and insulting at worst, as it risks implying that Gaeilge is somehow not the language proper to Ireland.
While I understand this point of view, as a researcher
of Gaeilge as a Goidelic (Gaelic)
language in its Goidelic (Gaelic) dialect continuum context, I use both ‘Irish’
and ‘Gaelic’ as synonyms in an attempt to broaden understanding of the existence and nature of that continuum – a continuum
and a linguistic closeness that has always been there, and always will be there, no matter
how observers and speakers of these languages attempt to close themselves off
from this fact and from one another.
Referring to Irish as ‘Gaelic’ is a simple linguistic
fact – because Irish is a Gaelic
language and its dialects are always Gaelic dialects, called such by their speakers.
Scottish Gaelic is also a Gaelic language by simple linguistic fact, called
such by its speakers. Manx (Gaelic) is also a Gaelic language by simple
linguistic fact, called such by its speakers. It would of course be cumbersome and repetitive to refer to Gaeilge as
Irish Gaelic in every instance on this blog.
The entire point of this blog is to put the Irish
Gaelic dialect once spoken in county Dublin – one irony being that
people rarely have any socio-political difficulties with terms like ‘County Dublin’ or any of the
other counties, despite their historical origins – in its wider sociolinguistic and
dialectological context from Cape Wrath to Cape Clear. That point will not
change regardless of what sort of terminology is used.
Another irony here is that limiting our thinking to ‘Irish’ rather than ‘Gaelic’ wilfully obscures the possible closeness of the Irish Gaelic of Dublin – and the dialects of South East Ulster (which include Louth in a linguistic and historical sense, incidentally) and of Meath for that matter – to for example Manx. If you are interested in the Irish Gaelic of Dublin, I would hope you are also interested in what might have been closest to it linguistically – even if such dialects lay outside the island of Ireland.
We can of course play a game of wishful thinking in
which we limit ourselves to the Irish language in Irish Ireland, and imagine a
hermetically sealed set of dialects which could have been standardised based on the
Irish of Athlone or of north Offaly, historically the most central dialects; conversely, if we wish, we can go the other way, with a pan-Gaelic central point in East Ulster Irish – probably the dialect of Down,
in fact. But such mental exercises, while fun, are futile; the sad irony is
that the surviving dialects in Ireland are separated from one
another by hundreds of kilometres, and seem so inconveniently different to one another today because the dialects once linking them have vanished. This is tragic, but it was not
historically the case, and this blog attempts to fill in some of those ahistorical gaps.
Therefore, one must understand that ‘Gaelic’ is not
and should never be an offensive term. It is a helpful synonym that originates in the one single word that unites speakers of all these dialects, despite its many forms: Gaeilge, Gaelainn, Gaeilg, Gaeilig, Gaedhlag,
Gaeilic etc. At no point did they (or do they) call their language Éireannais,
so I fail to see why it is so important that we should.
Given all this, I hope there is now understanding as to why this blog uses ‘Irish’ and ‘Gaelic’ and ‘Irish dialects’ and ‘Gaelic
dialects’ more or less interchangeably – as a simple statement of underlying linguistic reality. There
are no plans to change this approach, either.
sgot—a scott
sgotbhearla—the Irish tongue
sgotbhearlach—a speaker of Irish
sgotbhearlacht—speaking Irish
Finally, in the same dictionary, Ó Neachtain also refers twice to Scottish Gaelic, calling it 'hilland Irish' (i.e. Highland Irish) each time, ironically enough.
