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  • 12 - Irish Gaelic

  • from Part II - Multilingualism in Britain and Ireland: The Celtic Languages
  • Edited by Susan Fox, Universität Bern, Switzerland
  • Book:
    Language in Britain and Ireland
    Published online:
    17 October 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024, pp 314-332

  • Summary

    A thousand years ago, Irish Gaelic was spoken by the entire population of Ireland. Today, it is spoken by a few thousand people. The first part of this chapter discusses how this language shift came about, focusing on historical changes in population due to various waves of colonisation. The second section describes a number of linguistic features which make Irish Gaelic distinctive. At the morphophonological level, these include consonant and vowel alternations and initial mutation, and at the syntactic level, (mainly) VSO word order and the two verbs to be: the copula and the substantive verb.