Use of The Irish Language
As per the 2011 census of Ireland :
Of the 1.77 million who indicated they could speak Irish, 77,185 said they speak it daily outside the education system. A further 110,642 said they spoke it weekly, while 613,236 said they spoke it less often. One in four said they never spoke Irish. The numbers speaking Irish on a daily basis outside the education system increased by 5,037 persons since 2006 from 72,148 to 77,185; the numbers speaking weekly showed an increase of 7,781 persons, while those speaking Irish less often showed the largest increase of 27,139
The above text is a direct quote from page 12 of the This is Ireland report produced by the Central Statistics Office of Ireland on 29 March 2012.
To place those figures in context, the same census report also contained details for foreign (i.e. not English or Irish) languages spoken in the home.
| Language | Number of speakers |
|---|---|
| Polish | 119,526 |
| French | 56,430 |
| Lithuanian | 31,635 |
Read more about this topic: Irish Language
Famous quotes containing the words irish and/or language:
“The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)