Irisher Than Thou
Eventually, every student who decides to learn Irish is presented with the choice of which dialect to study. Will it be Munster-, Connemara- or Ulster-Irish? Or will it be the Caighdeán Oifigiúil (an artificially constructed “Standard Irish”) which would seem to have the advantage of a neutral, dialect-agnostic grammar and vocabulary, but is also apparently somewhat viscerally rejected by exponents of each dialect.
Perhaps the greatest splash of cold water in the student’s face is the degree to which internecine fighting among exponents of each dialect gets personal and nasty, as if every speaker of a different dialect is single-handedly responsible for the demise of Irish in Ireland, and every speaker’s own dialect can rightfully lay claim to the purest, most unadulterated form of Irish currently spoken.
Interestingly, the Irish-on-Irish insults hurled against speakers of dialects other than one’s own seem to be conducted as frequently in English as they are in Irish. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what this says about the current state of affairs. Far be it from me to say it’s reminiscent of a bucket full of crabs.
For my part, I elected at long last to study Connemara Irish because the study-aid best suited to my learning style teaches that dialect. I was also fortunate in that my family hails from that area of Ireland, so there was that additional incentive to learn Connemara Irish.
Imagine my surprise when one disgruntled student of Connemara Irish claimed that he’d supposedly “wasted” a year learning it and had since gone on to learn the supposedly purer Munster dialect. Apparently, the retention of certain older genitive verb-forms, considered antiquated in Connemara but still extant in Munster, qualified Muster as a “realer McCoy.” In fact, to hear him say it, Connemara Irish was to Irish what Ebonics is to US English.
I don’t know what to make of this. I keep coming back inexorably to the fact that, after many moons studying this language on my own, my American ears discern no differences among dialects that supposedly make one sound trashier or more refined to another, let alone make them mutually unintelligible. I have a Pimsleur course based entirely on Munster Irish and the greatest difference I can discern from it is that Munster Irish:
- Is melodious in a way that Connemara Irish is not;
- Pronounces the “s” in “anseo” and “ansin” as a pure “s” instead of a “sh” sound;
- Pronounces lenited consonants marginally differently.
3 comments:
Coinnigh an misneach! ;-)
For whatever reason this sort of infighting seems to be much more prevalent (and more vicious) on the Internet than it is in real life. I've spent several years in a university with an Irish department; dialect-based misunderstandings are rare (among fluent speakers, anyway) and dialect-based putdowns even rarer.
A Abigail, a chara! G'raibh m'at! OK, coinneoidh mé an misneach. :)
I'm heartened to hear this, because the level of mean-spirited, nasty attacks got pretty out of hand lately, in certain quarters.
It's difficult to watch. With everything Irish has going against it, the last thing needed is internal strife among its learners. I'll just chalk it up to internet trolldom and try to ignore it.
Drop me a mail or try and Skype me again next time you're on... hopefully I'll be near the computer next time.
I don't completely agree, or share your experience, Abigail, though I wish to reiterate the 'coinnigh an misneach' message, of course. It's an Irish trait to pretend things don't exist, as if doing so would make this so. But more of an American trait would be to talk about them, as discussion, validation of the experience helps us rise above or get over it.
Domhnall, I’m a fluent speaker living and working with Irish daily now, but an adult learner of Irish from the U.S. I do feel/hear pressure from others about dialect choice fairly often. Most often it’s done quite playfully, other times inadverently and only rarely meanly, but learners, no matter how fluent are pressured by different dialects. People like Abigail who might have a strongly held dialect from childhood, would not notice or ever be concerned by this; just as a New Yorker or a Londoner laughing at our accents in English wouldn't bother us in the slightest, but as a learner, it hits you harder, perhaps.
A friend from Kerry came to me quite recently and asked me why I still use the ‘baby-talk forms’ of tá mé, bhí mé, rather than táim, bhíos. It was a well-intentioned, gentle criticism, she quietly pulled me aside to advise me on this matter. Often people repeat your word, reworked to their pronunciation of it. This is a lovely, subtle way to correct someone, to help them improve without interrupting, but it still registers in your confidence meter as a dig, do you know what I mean? This is especially frustrating if they’re correcting for a pronunciation/dialect you weren’t ever trying for. Once someone did this, though, and then said, ‘No, I wasn’t correcting you there, I just was repeating the word myself’. He was agreeing with me but in his own dialect.
As a beginning learner, years ago, I remember being interrupted in mid-sentence for using ábalta, the Irish fluent speaker telling me that since my folks came from Galway I should be using in ann, not ábalta. A different, again, well-meaning Irish speaker told me, at an intermediate stage, to stop pronouncing acu, that Conamara people say /acub/. She stopped me at every instance, forcing me, in effect, to use this pronunciation or stop speaking. The same thing has happened with people from Conamara and Kerry correcting me and laughing at me for not using the hard CH sound /X/. In both of these instances, the speakers hadn’t noticed that these sounds weren’t pronounced this way in some of the Northern dialects. I had been accurately repeating sounds heard in Now You’re Talking tapes.
I have now come to realize that people in Ireland are very regionally chauvinistic – in a nice way, maybe it goes back to the time when there were lots of separate kingdoms, who knows! But for example, here, a Dubliner supports the Dublin team, no matter how good or bad they are, unless, they’re from somewhere else and just living in Dublin. At least that’s my clear impression of how sports affiliation works here. In the States, as a native Washingtonian, I could easily choose to support the Redskins or not as I see fit, would you not agree? We are not as loyal to our birthplace or not in the same way, and I don’t know, that somehow helps me understand and deal with the whole dialect issue. I found in the early days, using ‘Cad é mar atá tú?’ on my own mother, uncle, aunts— native speakers who don’t like to use their Irish, would always get a response out of them in Irish, albeit, one giving out to me for not saying ‘Cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?’.
I still try to find out as much as I can about all the dialects. There’s a new, free publication out called ‘Cur tú féin in Iúil’ that goes over some of the trickier dialectical bits like teagmháil vs. teangmháil, srl. That stuff is helpful, so you don’t keep thinking that you’re just spelling it wrong all the time, that your instints are correct, your eyes have seen the n there, your ears do hear it even if it’s not always written out.
Learning away from Ireland, as I did, I was forced to work with whichever dialects I heard, and I now try to lean toward one, but I like bits of them all. Someone on Raidió na Gaeltachta interviewed me about Daltaí na Gaeilge once and the first question that was fired at me, was about what dialect is used at these immersion weekends. I said, that you would hear every one of them, and even a few new ones -- traces of the New York or Texas accent, for example comes through in all but the best speakers!
So, my rambling comment basically comes down to: just listen to everyone, but don’t let anyone push you off of the path you’ve chosen. It will get easier as your Irish grows stronger, and as people’s ears are broadened by the more mixed dialect programs on TV and radio.
Just wondered – have you tried the free CDs from the Irish Independent? No grammar explanations, but some funny, useful expressions and lovely Kerry sounds. You can reach them from www.Gaeilge.ie. Click on the picture of Liam Ó Maonlaí on the left-hand side. Also, if you might enjoy Easy Reader. It will give you more grammar than you’ll ever need. A brilliant program that also has texts and words read in by native speakers in all three dialects. You can choose to install all three dialects or just one and even lets you record your own if you prefer! www.IrishForLife.com.
Ádh mór ort,
Colleen
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