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[129] [130] 6,000 people (0.3%) in Northern Ireland claim to use Irish as their main home language according to the 2021 UK Census with 71,900 people being able to speak Irish (circa 4% of population) and 228,600 people overall in the state (12.4%) having some knowledge of the language. It is the second most spoken language in Northern Ireland.
Irish (Standard Irish: Gaeilge), also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic (/ ˈɡeɪlɪk / GAY-lik), [3][4][5][6][7][8] is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language group, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. [7][4][9][10][6] Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland [11] and was the majority ...
In the 2016 Irish census, 8,068 census forms were completed in Irish, and just under 74,000 of the total (1.7%) said they spoke it daily. The total number of people who answered 'yes' to being able to speak Irish to some extent in April 2016 was 1,761,420, 39.8 percent of respondents. [2] Bilingual road signs in Scariff, County Clare
As in other parts of Ireland, Irish was the main language in the region of present-day Northern Ireland for most of its recorded history [citation needed].The historic influence of the Irish language in Northern Ireland can be seen in many place names, for example the name of Belfast first appears in the year 668, and the Lagan even earlier ("Logia", Ptolemy's Geography 2,2,8).
The history of the Irish language begins with the period from the arrival of speakers of Celtic languages in Ireland to Ireland's earliest known form of Irish, Primitive Irish, which is found in Ogham inscriptions dating from the 3rd or 4th century AD. [1] After the conversion to Christianity in the 5th century, Old Irish begins to appear as ...
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. [citation needed] There have been many notable Irish people throughout ...
The Gaels (/ ɡeɪlz / GAYLZ; Irish: Na Gaeil [n̪ˠə ˈɡeːlʲ]; Scottish Gaelic: Na Gàidheil [nə ˈkɛː.al]; Manx: Ny Gaeil [nə ˈɡeːl]) are an ethnolinguistic group [6] native to Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man. [a][10] They are associated with the Gaelic languages: a branch of the Celtic languages comprising Irish, Manx and ...
Irish is the first official language of the state, with 11% [39] 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.