Irish Language in Northern Ireland

Irish Language In Northern Ireland

The Irish language (also known as Irish Gaelic) (Irish: Gaeilge) is a minority language in Northern Ireland. The dialect spoken there is known as Ulster Irish.

According to the 2001 Census, 167,487 people (10.4% of the population) had "some knowledge of Irish" with the highest concentrations of Irish speakers found in Belfast, Derry, Newry and south Armagh, central Tyrone (between Dungannon and Omagh), and southern County Londonderry (near Maghera).

Read more about Irish Language In Northern Ireland:  History, Status, Education, Media

Famous quotes containing the words northern ireland, irish, language, northern and/or ireland:

    For generations, a wide range of shooting in Northern Ireland has provided all sections of the population with a pastime which ... has occupied a great deal of leisure time. Unlike many other countries, the outstanding characteristic of the sport has been that it was not confined to any one class.
    —Northern Irish Tourist Board. quoted in New Statesman (London, Aug. 29, 1969)

    For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.
    Stephanie Coontz (20th century)

    To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
    George Orwell (1903–1950)

    [During the Renaissance] the Italians said, “We are one in the Father: we will go back.” The Northern races said, “We are one in Christ, we will go on.”
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland ...
    Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)