A History of Ireland: Language, Literature, People and Politics

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The Irish language has a fascinating and turbulent history. From being the earliest and most copiously attested European vernacular outside the classical world of Greece and Rome, to a language on the verge of extinction in the late nineteenth century, few languages in Europe have endured such vicissitudes over a millennium and a half. Ireland is indeed unique in Western Europe in modern times in having been the colony of a neighboring country over a period of centuries. Not surprisingly, this colonial experience has left a profound and enduring imprint on the language and on its community of speakers. As much recent work on language endangerment around the world has brought to our attention, a language depends for its continued vitality on the entire material, social and cultural world, or "ecology," that sustains it. When this ecology is attacked and undermined, as occurs under colonialism, a language suffers as a result. The history of the Irish language is therefore a case study in the complexity of a particular human experience over a period of 1500 years; it is a history not of linguistic forms and expressions per se but rather the history of the people who have used and who still use them, of the institutions that have nurtured and been sustained by the language and of the political slings and arrows of fortune that have undermined and threatened (but ultimately failed) to extinguish it. It is therefore a holistic history, a history of Ireland which foregrounds language (principally Irish but also those other languages and their speakers with which it has interacted and competed) as its overarching theme.