Why This Blog?

Once upon a time (and longer ago than I care to admit), I was a kid growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. You don't get much more middle-American than Northeastern Pennsylvania — people tend to be unpretentious, everybody is no more than two handshakes removed from anybody else, and a "mixed marriage" is when a Catholic marries a Protestant.

Growing up, there were still a good many neighborhoods and even entire towns that were chiefly characterized by the common ethnic background of their inhabitants. I suppose I lived in a relatively mixed area (although there were a good many Irish families in close proximity), but my boyhood paper route a couple blocks away was in a decidedly Polish nabe. The next town south of us was pretty WASPy, and the town south of that — the self-proclaimed pizza capital of the world, if you please — was mega-Italian (go figure). The south side of Scranton was home to many a German family.

Unlike today, everybody spoke (or at least could speak) English — but it was commonplace for Italians to speak Italian at home and in their own churches and social groups. Likewise with Poles and Germans. And of course, the WASPs had everybody speaking their language!

Not so the Irish.

Growing up, I didn't know, or even know of, a single, solitary speaker of Irish. Supposedly we had a few distant cousins who spoke Welsh, but no Irish. One of our neighbors, an elderly lady, was from Ireland and even she didn't speak it! We were commonly told that Gaelic was a "dead language."

Anyway, the breakdown of family backgrounds for my hometown looks roughly like this:

• Irish: 30.3%
• Italian: 19.4%
• German: 15.7%
• Polish: 14.8%
• Welsh: 6.9%
• English: 5.8%

Think about that. Irish are, far and away, the predominant ethnic group — and they are the sole group with absolutely no vestige of its ancestral language.

For reasons that are not completely clear to me, this has always bothered the freaking hell out of me. Part of it probably stems from simplistic, adolescent jealousy; from earliest memory I've been fascinated by foreign languages and I kind of resented the fact that some friends of mine had this whole separate identity and tradition, not to mention a whole language of their own, over and above our shared American culture and English language. As I grew into adulthood, however, I discovered the factors that most strongly contributed to the decline of the Irish language, and I learned far more serious reasons to resent its loss.
This blog chronicles my experiences trying to learn my ancestral language, mostly on my own, here in the early 21st century. I'm indulging in this effort because since I first got serious about learning this language about a year ago, I've been thunderstruck at the many hurdles, booby-traps and pitfalls placed in the path of the average learner. The dearth of readily available learning materials... the abyssimal quality of the materials that do exist... the difficulty in finding a teacher... the lack of an official version of Irish that's taken seriously by the Irish themselves... the condescension from certain quarters allotted to people like me who take it upon ourselves to learn this language*... All of this seems to conspire to ensure that learning Irish is as difficult and off-putting as possible. I've been amazed. I'd bet good money that it's easier to learn Lithuanian, Swahili or Sinhala in most of the United States than it is to learn Irish.

With any luck, before too much time has passed (a year? two?), I'll be posting in Irish... but until then, I'll post in English and document my experiences along the path.

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* Hence the tongue-in-cheek name of this blog.