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Many Irish-speaking families encouraged their children to speak English as it was the language of education and employment; by the nineteenth century the Irish-speaking areas were relatively poor and remote, though this very remoteness helped the language survive as a vernacular.
In primary schools, most pupils are taught to speak, read and write in Irish and English. The vast majority of schools teach through English, although a growing number of gaelscoil teach through Irish. Most students at second level choose to study English as an L1 language and Irish and other Continental European languages as L2 languages ...
English is the most commonly used language, with 84% [40] of the population calling it their mother tongue. Irish is the first official language of the state, with 11% [40] calling it their mother tongue. Irish is the main language of the Gaeltacht regions, where 102,973 people lived as of 2022. The main sign language used is Irish Sign Language.
Although Irish (Gaeilge) was their main language in the past, today most Irish people speak English as their first language. Historically, the Irish nation was made up of kin groups or clans , and the Irish also had their own religion , law code , alphabet and style of dress .
The dialect of English spoken in Northern Ireland shows influence from the lowland Scots language. [12] There are supposedly some minute differences in pronunciation between Protestants and Catholics, the best known of which is the name of the letter h, which Protestants tend to pronounce as "aitch", as in British English, and Catholics tend to pronounce as "haitch", as in Hiberno-English.
For example, English has about 450 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as two billion speakers. [2] There are also difficulties in obtaining reliable counts of speakers, which vary over time because of population change and language shift.
Today, about 70 million people claim Irish heritage or ancestry worldwide, according to the Irish government.
Hiberno-English [a] or Irish English (IrE), [5] also formerly sometimes called Anglo-Irish, [6] is the set of dialects of English native to the island of Ireland. [7] In both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, English is the dominant first language in everyday use and, alongside the Irish language, one of two official languages (with Ulster Scots, in Northern Ireland, being yet ...