What Happened?

 

Social Change in 19th-century Ireland: The Decline of the Irish Language in Munster

(The Introduction to a paper I wrote long ago.)

               

 

            Most recent Irish historiography has taken the loss of the Irish language in large areas of Ireland during the 19th century too much for granted, and has failed to examine the circumstances of this loss and its implications for our understanding of modern Irish society. One gets the impression, in reading many contemporary general works on Irish history, that most Irishmen and women somehow simply woke up on some unspecified morning between the Flight of the Earls in 1609 and the onset of the 18th century and decided to speak English instead of Irish--except, of course, for the Aran Islanders. The death of the Irish language is thus commonly treated in the historiography as a minor and not very relevant occurrence, with few important implications for the development of Irish society: as a mere change of wardrobe. The Great Famine is often assumed to be one of the few real landmarks in this vague landscape, to that extent that it killed off the remnant Irish-speaking hordes in the West. The tacit conclusion seems to be that writings on pre-famine society should thus consequently include a perfunctory discussion of the existence of the Irish language, but that such a discussion is no longer relevant in works dealing with post-famine society.

 

                These standard views often associate Irish in post-17th-century Ireland specifically with the west of Ireland, with the fecund, sweaty, picturesque masses that toiled in a primitive Celtic half-light there, dwelling in an ignorance that was born of simple isolation from the modern world. English and modernity together, these views assume, flowed westwards from the areas closest to Dublin and the Irish Sea, but hadn't yet reached the distant western bogs, when the famine gave those remote Gaelic realm their death blow. Such a view regards language use, whether English or Irish, as a simple function of distance from England or from Dublin. Irish, in this standard historiography, survived simply as one aspect of a stagnant unchanging primitive society, like a slug under a rock in the middle of a bog, that was destined to wither in the light of the Modern Age. The truth, however, is rather different.  Much of the older generation in flat and fertile north county Meath, 30 miles from Dublin, was still Irish-speaking in 1890. Many older people in northeastern county Louth, 45 miles from Dublin, were still Irish-speaking in the early 20th century. At the same time, very remote areas like southwestern Mayo, and even Clare island in Mayo, were already English-speaking in the mid-19th century. Irish did not disappear in some mysterious overnight vague fashion, nor was its 19th-century existence associated simply with distance from the Irish Channel. It did not survive due to simple isolation or poverty. The process of language loss is very closely related to the profound changes that occurred Irish society in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and an understanding of this process has much to add to our understanding of the genesis of contemporary Irish society. 

               

             Vague, simplistic and unexamined assumptions about linguistic processes in 19th-century Ireland reveal more about the intellectual formation of modern Irish historiography than they do about actual linguistic and historical processes. How was Irish lost? What was the chronology of this loss? What was the effect of the famine on the survival of the language in 19th-century Irish speaking communities? Does the disappearance of the Irish language have more to tell us about the genesis of modern Ireland than has been assumed? Is the standard historiography mistaken about the nature and relevance of the process of language loss in 18th and 19th-century Ireland? If it is, then what are the nature of its mistakes, and what do they reveal about the tacit theoretical background of much of this body of work?  

           

 

                                    Irish in 19th-century Ireland

               

            The earliest available source of statistics on the Irish language was, until recently, the 1851 census. This document's most obvious drawback is the fact that it postdates the famine and provides information about a society that had just lost some one million people. It cannot provide us with information on the pre-famine linguistic situation, which might have been very different from the post famine situation. Dr. Garret FitzGerald (former Fine Gael taoiseach) however, published a paper in 1984 that uses the information provided by the 1881 census (the first census considered accurate as regards language) (N and 1851 and 1861 censuses for the pre-1801 period) in order to compute backwards the minimum levels of Irish-speaking ability in decennial cohorts born in decades from 1771-81 until 1861-71. It is possible to do this because the 1881 Irish-speaking population was broken down into age groups. The proportion of people who were, for example, between 50 and 60 years old in 1881 and who could speak Irish tells us something about the linguistic situation in their area when they were growing up.Such decennial groups provide a means of looking at the situation of the Irish language as far back as 1771-1781 (N).  The statistics are available on a barony level, and Dr. FitzGerald's paper thus allows us to examine 19th-century language ability on a fairly precise scale2. These are the statistics that I have used to identify patterns of language use in 19th-century Munster.

 

                Dr. FitzGerald's paper suggests that at least 70% of the generation born between 1801 and 1811 spoke Irish in all the baronies in Munster, except for those in central and northern Tipperary. The language was spoken by more than 60% of this generation in central Tipperary, but by less than 20% in north Tipperary. The proportion of these decennial cohorts speaking Irish was more or less stable in most areas of Munster in the decades leading up to 1801, but there had been a drop of 5% in the Irish-speaking proportion of these generations in certain baronies between 1801 and 1811. Such baronies were in Tipperary, in the immediate neighborhood of Cork city and in southeast Clare (Tulla).       

 

                Further change occurred in the 1811-21 generation in Tipperary, northeast Cork, east Waterford and east Limerick. There was a decline of some 10% in the proportion of this generation that spoke Irish in Fermoy, Barrets and Orrery and Kilmore baronies in northeast Cork, for example, and this high rate of decline characterized all the other areas just mentioned. The rate of decline increased in the 1821-31 generation in these regions, and declines of 20% were common in northeast Cork, Tipperary and east Limerick. Less precipitous rates of decline began to appear in some other areas of east Cork and east Clare in this decade. The 1831-41 generation showed calamitous declines in their proportion that spoke Irish in Tipperary, northeast Cork and east Limerick. The other areas mentioned above continued to decline, though more slowly. Decline also began in south and west Cork, in parts of Kerry and in south and west Limerick.

 

                Its clear from such figures that decline had already begun well before the famine in some areas that had been strongly Irish-speaking in the 17th-century. It is also obvious that rates of decline varied tremendously throughout Munster, and that it is possible to use these varying rates of decline to define the existence of four fairly distinct linguistic regions in 1801. The first of these (north Tipperary) was already well advanced in language shift in 1801. The second, made up of most of the rest of Tipperary, northeast Cork, east Limerick and the Tulla baronies in east Clare had generally been strongly Irish-speaking at the beginning of the period, but began to decline very quickly in the opening decades of the century. The third region consists of the bulk of the rest of the province, which began to decline at a rate of from 5% to 10% per decennial cohort in the years before the famine. The fourth (much of Clare, Kerry, parts of south and west Cork and of west Waterford) had stable proportions of their early 19th-century generations speaking Irish.

 

                What is the meaning of this pattern? One might look for an explanation in some intrinsic linguistic frivolity of the people of north Tipperary and northeast Cork , but it would probably be more useful, in establishing a basis for understanding their different linguistic situations, to examine the differences in the social and economic characteristics of these four areas, the contexts in which Irish existed. The criteria that I have chosen in order to do so are ....These criteria are by no means exhaustive, but do provide a general measure of differences among regions. My hope is that this process will help establish generalized regional social patterns that will provide a context for the linguistic change that has been documented by Dr. FitzGerald.