Dialects and Standard Irish

martinf

Hi all,

Given that the Government has an official policy of increasing the number or people who use Irish on a daily basis do you think that the new people will end up learning the more standardised Irish given that text books often seem to be written that way or will the dialects manage to hold on? I'm a bit ignorant of this as my irish is pretty basic, hence i'm posting in english, but I'm hoping to improve and I think it would be a pity if the dialects were to disappear over time. The advantage of course would be that we'd be able to understand each other easier and the number of speakers might increase.

Martin

PurpleFistMixer

Well, if "new" speakers (ie those who don't grow up speaking it from family etc.) all learn standard Irish (or book Irish as my gaelgeoir friend so charmingly calls it) then it seems it would become the norm and dialects would fade somewhat. I wouldn't say they'll die out, though. People would think that different accents in English would die out due to the ease of communication and travel etc., but it's obvious that there's still a wealth of different accents in Ireland.
Of course, accent is not exactly the same as dialect, but I'd say, regions will still have their differences.

Anyway, it's not THAT difficult to understand people with a different dialect. Just like a Dubliner talking to a Corkman and dealing with the different idioms etc.

dlofnep

I think that dialects will exist in each Gaeltacht, but outside it - it will be standardised.