How’s your velar fricative? A numerical guide to urban and rural Irish speakers
The Irish language combines rich sounds that make for muscular but mellifluous poetry with a sharpness that allows clarity and subtlety in prose. All governments since independence have promised to try to promote the use of Irish, and a slowly increasing number of city dwellers are counting themselves as Irish speakers. However, in the mostly rural areas where Irish is the first language (“Gaeltacht areas”), the population is declining.
In a piece in the Irish Times, Brian Ó’Broin noticed that his urban Irish-speaking friends often did not listen to the Irish language television and radio programs where Gaeltacht speakers predominated, and similarly, his Gaeltacht friends “grimace or change channels with city speakers come on. As for the hordes of Irish-speaking teenagers and parents who descend on the Gaeltacht during the summer months, they absolutely prefer to speak English with them. They say that the city folks’ Irish is simply too strange....The two groups... prefer to tune each other out or speak English with each other, rather than use Irish together. This seems to have all the hallmarks of a separation.”
Is there a real language divide among the Irish speakers? Ó’Broin, who teaches linguistics and medieval literature at William Paterson University, NJ, performed a small survey in an attempt to measure differences between Gaeltacht (mostly rural) and non-Gaeltacht (mostly urban) Irish speakers. Ó’Broin sampled from radio broadcasts. He does not describe the sampling process in detail: “I transcribed recordings of news reports compiled and read by Gaeltacht speakers on Raidió na Gaeltachta, and then by urban speakers on the two urban Irish-language stations, Raidió Fáilte in Belfast and Raidió na Life [pronounced “Liffeh”] in Dublin.” He compared the Gaeltacht and non-Gaeltacht speakers using the criteria of pronunciation, word-order, word-formation, and vocabulary.
“Phonetics, or pronunciation, is a major feature of any language”, writes Ó’Broin, “and particularly so for Irish, which uses pronunciation to mark things such as the case of a noun or the tense of a verb. Since Irish has very many distinct phonetic features, I chose only three for comparative analysis: slender dentals (the initial consonants of “teas” and “tí”, for example), velar fricatives (the initial consonants of “chaisleán” and “Chonnacht”, for example), and palatal fricatives (the initial consonants of “cheann” and “chiseach”, for example). Newsreaders on the Gaeltacht radio station missed these features between 0 and 7 per cent of the time (that is to say, not much), while newsreaders on the urban stations missed them between 21 and 66 per cent of the time, a fairly significant number.”
Ó’Broin’s analysis of word order showed that “Gaeltacht speakers produce 15 subclauses for every 10 sentences, while their urban counterparts produce between six and eight.” Ó’Broin notes that “the sentences of urban speakers are notably less sophisticated than those of their Gaeltacht counterparts”.
This is perhaps evidence of the target audience of the respective radio programs at least as much as evidence of linguistic differences. But another criterion was more convincing about the linguistic gap: “Irish has a fairly sophisticated morphological system” explains Ó’Broin. “That is to say, words can change form in several ways. The noun cainteoir, for instance, can mutate to gcainteoir, cainteora, chainteora, cainteoirí, and gcainteoirí, depending on its grammatical function. As we saw earlier, if the pronunciation of these mutations alters or fails, the entire grammatical system of the language becomes endangered. When I analysed the expected morphological changes in the nouns of newsreaders, I found that newsreaders on (the Gaeltacht radio station), reading the news and speaking off the cuff, missed a fairly unremarkable 2 to 6 per cent. Newsreaders on urban stations, however, missed 40 per cent of expected changes.”
Finally, under the “vocabulary” criterion, Ó’Broin looked at the much-derided phenomenon whereby Irish words are repeatedly interspersed with English ones – speakers who use “interjections such as ‘níl aon, really, excitement’ and ‘you know, sin grand’....Interestingly”, says Ó’Broin, “although language activists often decry the presence of English in the utterances of all Irish speakers, the highest level of English for any of the speakers was 4 per cent.” It is not clear from the context, but the sample for this last item may have included extra data from “segments of chat shows from the different radio stations” that Ó’Broin also transcribed, “in which the speakers were speaking freely”.
The evidence from vocabulary and sentence structure seems ambiguous or not very strong, but the difference between those living where Irish is the first language compared to others is striking when measured in terms of accuracy of pronunciation and grammar. Urban news readers may need to brush up on their velar fricatives.
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