Summary

[harp music]

Jeannine: Despite what it seems like, Ireland is a pretty diverse place, with over 182 languages spoken here because of the many immigrants being constantly welcomed into the country.
Here’s just a few of them:

Maya in Dutch Greeting:
Welkom naar Ierland. Ik hoop dat je een fijne vakantie hebt.

Victoria in Spanish Greeting:
Saludos de Irlanda, que te la pases bien en tu viaje

Jeannine in Icelandic Greeting:
Velkomin til íslands ég tala ekki islansku

Jeannine: But there’s more to being bilingual than knowing a few phrases. What’s at stake is the preservation of the culture itself and the ideas that only Irish can convey.

Elizabeth: We’re here in the small town of Dingle, Co. Kerry, to be exact. It’s in the heart of the Irish-speaking area known as the Gaeltacht (Gyel tickt), where a higher proportion of people speak Irish regularly than in other parts of the country. This ancient language, estimated to be over 2,500 years old, contains within it culture, ideas, and sounds that are uniquely Irish.

Elizabeth: We are Elizabeth, Victoria, and Jeannine, students from the UCSC study abroad program and in this podcast we're looking at the past, present, and future of Irish in Ireland.

Victoria: Today, We’re looking at bilingualism here in Dingle

Jeannine: Welcome to “A Country Without a Language is Country Without a Soul”. As we investigate bilingualism and the struggle to keep Irish alive we meet a few Dingle locals to give us the lowdown.

Shelly-Ann: Proverb says that tír gan teanga, tír gan anam, so a country without a language is a country without a soul and Bahatanga alert the speaking of the language is the living of it.

Victoria: That was Shelly Ann, an interpreter from the Blasket islands,

Victoria: Here’s Emma, the 9-year-old daughter of our hosts here in Dingle, Sean Pol and Lenka.

Elizabeth:
What's your favorite Irish word?

Emma:
I'm not really sure, but grá [Irish word],

Elizabeth:
And what does that mean?

Emma: Love

Jeannine: Emma’s dad, Sean Pol, also shared some Irish phrases with us and it's quite the tongue twister.

Sean Pol: An té thurecht tabac dom is tabac a gé is gan tabac a gom.Ní thuracht tabac dó is tabaca gom is gan tabac a gé. Ach an té ná thuracht tabac a dom is tabac a gé is gan tabac a dom. Ní Churn Tobachta is Tobachta Gae, Gum is Gan Tobachta Gae [Irish language] I suppose it is, it's a bit of a tongue twister but it goes to the person who gives me tobacco.When I didn't have tobacco [paraphrase translation to Irish], I would give him tobacco if he didn't and I did. Why say something short when you can say it longer in a tongue twister?

Jeannine: So it’s a proverb about generosity. Which, in a country where people have endured hardship and famine, it makes sense that a story encouraging sharing would be popular.
The sing-song cadence of this language is also part of what makes it special.

Elizabeth: Sean Pol’s wife, Lenka, is Slovakian, so they actually have a trilingual household.
And the kids, Emma and Benjamin will learn a fourth language when they get to their
version of high school.

Elizabeth: According to World Atlas, around 30 percent of the country’s population speaks Irish. But only about 5 percent routinely use at home and with their peers.

Victoria: There've been several political movements trying to revive the Irish Language.

Victoria: The Gaelic Revival was one of the strongest. In 1966, the fight against Irish language discrimination began.

Victoria: The Revival intended to protect and promote positive attitudes towards Irish and Irish Speakers.

Elizabeth: And some people are still doing their best to preserve it:

Micheal O'Callaghan: So I'm involved in the local Irish language movement, with a local Irish
plan promoting the language. I take part in amateur drama through the Irish language. A lot of
my friends that I went to college with we lived in a house that was just
Irish speakers only, from parts of Donegal, Galway, and Kerry.
Jeannine: That is our friend Michael O’Callaghan. He’s an archeologist from Dingle who has been a part of the movement to preserve Irish for most of his life.

Micheal O'Callaghan: There's another word. Every girl and boy should have it a sgiob [schkub]
─────────── S G I ─ O B ─ is a niche that you get on your upper lip just before you drink
whiskey. ────── And why should everyone have that? Everybody should drink a little
whiskey.

Jeannine: How do you say whiskey?

Micheal O'Callaghan: Uisce Beatha (Iskebaha)/[ˈɪʃcə ˈbʲahə]

Jeannine: Uisce Beatha

Micheal O'Callaghan: Uisce Beatha is, literally, the water of life.

Elizabeth: Unfortunately, this beautifully musical language is being lost. More and more people are only using English as their primary language, even though Irish is mandatory in school.

Elizabeth: Michael gave us his thoughts on how drastic a change it is to lose a language. In fact, the official languages of Ireland are English AND Irish.

Micheal O'Callaghan: We realize how fragile it is. ── You know, I mean, and I know there's
many languages in the world with even fewer speakers than there are of Irish, but I just think it's
an incredible thing to lose. To lose a language, ─ not just as a way of communicating with
people, but the whole repository of ideas. Past and present are all bound into, are all bound into
the language, and for me, it would be ─ unimaginable to lose a language.

Elizabeth: Music here from Eilis Kennedy, is sharing it in the heart of Kerry in dingle in the pubs.
Irish is as beautifully sung as it is spoken, heres eilis kennedy singing in irish

[Eilis singing]

Jeannine: Here’s our co-host Victoria sharing her thoughts on how important Spanish, her first language, is to her.

Victoria’s quote in Spanish:
Es triste pensar que yo podría perder el español porque es parte de mi identidad y mi cultura de ser latina.

Elizabeth: In Spanish, Victoria, tells us what a tragedy it would be to lose her language,
especially since it is such an integral part of her identity.
Sean Pol, who we spoke to earlier, has a more relaxed attitude towards the multi
linguistic state of Ireland and where the language is going:

Sean Pol: On an average day, in the O'Connor household, I speak Irish to them. If I'm having a
private conversation, one-to-one, I'll speak Irish, and they'll answer me back probably in
English, eighty percent of the time. And that's fine. They're going to school in the Irish language.
They're living in a place where Irish is spoken. They are able to speak it, even if they don't
always speak it back to me, I don't mind. That'll come in time, so I'm not worried about that.
[fade in instrumental Irish music]

Victoria: Our friend Michael O’Callaghan, feels more unsure about it:

Jeannine: Where do you think the future of Irish is going?

Micheal O'Callaghan: ──────── I wish I had an answer for that.

Jeannine: Some people still have a positive outlook. Shelly-Ann, the park interpreter from the Blasket Island, shares some words of hope with us.

Shelly-Ann: It's a real privilege to be here (The Great Blasket Island) and to speak and maintain the language and the life of the language and share it with the people that come to visit and hopefully evoke them and inspire them to keep the language going.

Victoria: There’s definitely a poetic quality to the Irish language that can't be replicated,
Jeannine: yea, we’ve seen this through the native speakers in our interviews.

Elizabeth: I agree, it's also uncertain what the future of Irish is but it seems to be optimistic
Jeannine: Yea, it seems like you’re either going to learn it in school or some families will pass it down generationally.

Elizabeth: Yes, like Sean Pol said, it's cool right now to speak irish amongst the youth. So there is hope in the younger generation to keep the language alive.

[pipe music fade in]

Victoria We hope there’s a future for the language. Here’s us giving it our best shot:

Us: “go raibh maith agat” Slan!

Jeannine: Thanks for listening! This has been “A Country Without a Language is a Country Without a Soul” with Elizabeth, Victoria, and Jeannine.

[pipe music fade out]