Road signs and Irish Language

I think you'll have the Gaelgoirs giving out that the Irish name should come first.

It should be dispensed with at road works, I was once faced with a road works sign headed with a jumble of Irish when I had only seconds to make a decision on which road to take.

There's an argument to say that something like a road sign / instruction / direction is more important to be understood, than to be a political/social football. In my opinion, the most important thing about signage is that it is understood.

I won't be taking on the Irish language promoters though, not a fight I have in me.

no problem with multilingual signs and I tend to wonder how the English/Irish name was derived from either language. But I have issues with warning signs only in Irish. It doesn’t help the majority of the population. It is probably only a thing in the Gaeltacht.

An example I came across some years back was approaching Galway on the headford road coming from castlebar direction. There was a very long (a lot of writing) sign all in Irish. It was only when I reached a small bridge with a very sharp turn on top of it with a big dip on its far side that I realised why the sign was there at all. Lucky nobody else was approaching from the other side.

With my typographer’s hat on, I really wish they’d fix that uppercase A glyph in the Irish script. The N and M are marginal, and I suppose have some sort of basis in the old Irish alphabet, but the capital-A in old Irish was always triangular, never rounded.

I also don’t see the point of the oblique/italic text for Irish. It makes the signs less legible. There are a few very old signs that use the current design, but the Irish text in upright, which I think looks better. Here’s one that I can remember, but there are others: https://www.google.com/maps/@51.8855806,-8.4870811,3a,15.7y,34.34h,83.23t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1spp_wZ1tERw5NxvZrrqI2aA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

(The sign is tilted, not the text!)

Yep, it's called the tail wagging the dog, massively. Also called self delusion on a grand scale.

Official languages Act (thanks to Eamon O'Cuiv) states Irish comes first and equal prominence on public signage.

The sort of Act that should have seen a full referendum to enable it to be brought in. Given it's far reaching effects.

A nice compilation of signs that should encourage us to do better. I love the Irish redesign, it's so much nicer! I honestly don't understand how we ended up with our current awful signage when your examples show that Britain (Britain!!) has been doing clear, simple bilingual signs without fuss for decades, let alone the various other examples we have in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

There's so much insecurity around Irish in this country that it's hard to have any sort of rational conversation about it. A fair number of people who are normally very sensible lose their minds a bit whenever the language is brought up, and what should be a pleasantly dull conversation about colours and fonts on road signs turns into a competition to show how much they dislike Irish. It all gets very emotional.

Every other country in the world with two official languages is able to solve the question - identical prominence for both names, sometimes with different colours but usually not, and move on. Ireland is the only country I know of where the solution was "one language clearly more prominent and in all caps, the other in almost illegible italics, easy peasy." Where did that idea even come from?

Ireland is not unique in having bilingual road signage; several European countries do, including Scotland, Wales, Greece, Bulgaria, parts of Spain (the Basque country, Catalonia) and several of the Balkan countries. And there are more countries that have bilingual signage in border areas or tourist areas. Non-European countries with bilingual signage in at least some places include Canada and New Zealand.

SFAIK the only countries that use different coloured letters to distinguish different languages are Greece and Scotland. (The road sign that Barney suggests in post 5 is essentially the Scottish standard design). Ireland distinguishes between the two languages by putting one in all-upper case and the other in sentence case. One or two countries use different typefaces (or of course different alphabets, if the different languages involved employ different alphabets). Most countries do not distinguish between them at all. 

It’s long-established that text printed in upper case IS HARDER TO READ, ESPECIALLY AT SPEED. So if you need to contrast the different languages this may not be the best way to do it. But most countries seem to think that you don’t need to contrast the different languages at all.

The road sign that Barney suggests in post 5 is essentially the Scottish standard design.  A corresponding sign in Wales would be similar except that both languages would be in white, and the distinctive yellow colour would be reserved for the road number, which arguably is better, since some travellers - particularly those following audible instructions from a satnav system - will be primarily interested in the road number.

There's no evidence that bilingual road signs cause confusion, in Ireland or elsewhere. (And there have been plenty of studies looking into this.)

There are a few problems with this design.

First, and most important, there’s a hierarchy of information on a road sign, and this breaks it. The most important thing for an advance-direction sign on a a motorway to tell you is “where am I?”. That’s what the junction number tells you. That’s why it’s big, visually distinct, and at the top left - we start reading from top left, and placing it as white-on-black makes it catch the eye. Glance across the left image without reading it, and you will still catch “8”. That’s the most important thing on that sign (“You are approaching junction 8”), the rest is just nice-to-know.

The right-hand sign demotes that junction information to the status of a road-number. It also has lots of competing call-outs: glance across it, and you don’t come away with anything. It’s a jumble of white-boxes, black-boxes, a green one, and yellow text (I’ll come back to that in a moment). Moving the junction number down the sign hides it, and so will makes navigation more difficult. The other problem is the use of outlines on the road-number patches: these are all too close to the text, and they make it a lot harder to read the route-numbers. (Our N-road signage does not outline areas that are patched with a different colour precisely because that would make them harder to read). The chosen colour-scheme also strongly emphasises regional routes (bright white area deep black text) over national (dark green, yellow -- lower contrast than the normal text) or motorways (no distinction), which is the opposite of the status of those routes. This shows the only situation where R-Routes ever appear on a motorway sign, so why highlight it further?

Gold on blue is also a problem, as they’re opponent colours (the cells in your eye that detect colour are sensitive in three different ways: cyan vs. red, green vs magenta, and blue vs. yellow). When you use opponent colours against each other for text, it’s hard to read. The National Route signage is able to use yellow on green because green is not an opponent of yellow ( they are detected by different cone-cells). These are reflective signboards, and have to be read at night by the light of headlamps. You’re asking your eyes and brain to do much more work if you start adding colour opponency into the already difficult task of reading the sign.

To be honest, the only improvement I’d make to that sign would be to get rid of the odd typeface for Irish:

This makes it look very much like the Scottish signage, which I like (well, the white-backed version - I’m not keen on the green ones), but I’d still keep the English names uppercase, for reasons of legibility.

@Aontachtoir - why wouldn’t Britain do good road signage? The UK road signage system is widely regarded the best in the world, and it was the first system of signs to be designed by scientists, typographers and graphic designers. I do think it’s a bit odd that in two bilingual parts of the UK, there are different standards at work, but that’s partly political: Welsh has a very large speaking population, so its speakers demanded and got parity; the signs on the Scottish highlands, on the other hand are for a daily-speaking population that’s smaller even than Irish.

@whisky_galore Would you complain that you tried to take trip to Florence once on an Italian holiday, and you couldn’t find your way because not one sign said "FLORENCE"? Places outside the Gaeltacht are signposted in English and Irish even within the Gaeltacht itself, and it’s not like the Gaeltachts are big, so I think you might be over-egging things a bit. I can’t speak Irish, my experience of being taught the language was appalling, but I don’t get angry that it exists and that people speak it.

Not true in parts of Italy, but not relevant either. If a person who doesn't speak Italian can navigate to a city he knows as "Florence" by following signs for "Firenze", why would a person in Ireland who doesn't speak Irish not be able to navigate to a town he knows as "Dunquin" by following signs for "Dún Chaoin?"

@KrisW1001 My point about Britain is that the country as a whole (meaning the towns and villages outside London and the other major cities) is strongly monolingual with an ingrained cultural suspicion of languages that aren't English - just like in Ireland. The reception given to people who don't speak English in public places (outside of the biggest cities, at least, and yes, including in the predominantly English-speaking parts of Wales) reminds me of the filthy looks I've seen Irish-speakers get here. And yet they came up with far better bilingual signage than we did. Not saying I'm necessarily surprised, but I do find it interesting.

@Aontachtoir Agree with that, but I think they had a head start from building on such a good existing base. It’s still funny that they ended up with two different approaches in Scotland and Wales, but this is because the changes to the signage manuals had to be local: highways are one of the devolved powers, so Scottish and Welsh practice can diverge from English (even Northern Ireland has its own version of the traffic design manual).

As I said, I liked the Scottish approach on white-backed signs, but I think using yellow for destinations on the green-backed signs takes away from the use that colour to highlight the route number, especially as the UK design doesn’t make the route-number bigger than the destinations text (our signs do). If you apply that everywhere, you’re effectively training English-speakers to ignore whatever is written in yellow. (For example, on the pictured signboard with “Uachdar Thìre”, the text lines are yellow, white, yellow, white, yello-- oh, that’s the road number, not another destination).

On the original point of the signage being “ugly”, I do think a lot of that is down to the occasionally very poor execution of designs by roadbuilders. There are rules that must be followed, and the software that’s used for these automates them. But once you’re within those rules, spacings can be adjusted to make the sign look better without compromising legibility. On some road projects, you can see that the person doing the signage had no eye for it at all, and was just committing whatever the sign-plotting software spat out. That’s a real shame given the cost of these things, but signs are usually something of an afterthought on big projects, as there’s no “engineering” in a signboard design.

The basic point is being missed here. Road signs show the official names of places. If you don’t like it that some place populated by people who mostly speak Irish doesn’t have an official Anglicised name, well that’s just something you have to live with.

And as most of the names that were dropped in 2004 were just transliterations*, it’s not like you have to learn a new name, so much as spell it properly. Irish people really can’t feign ignorance of how Irish names are spelled and pronounced: if you can say “Saoirse” or “Donnachadh”, you can manage to figure out what “Heilbhic”, “Lios Pól” or “Baile an Fheirtéaraigh” are. Foreign tourists are already expecting names to be unfamiliar (and the “English” versions of those names use such old rules that they’re of little help to them anyway), so who exactly are we supposed to be helping here?

In the Western part of the country, most of the “English” place names in this country are some soldier’s attempt at transcribing what a local person said to them (the original Ordnance Survey of Ireland was carried out by the Army). If I say to you, in English, “This town is called Luleå”, and you spell it “Loolah”, that doesn’t make that the “English” name of the place - it just means you didn’t care how it was supposed to be spelled, and wrote down whatever looked right. But that’s basically what happened.

But there are places outside of Gaeltachts with only one official name, often from Irish - so what do we do with those? Should we bring back “Dún Laoighaire KINGSTOWN” as that was the official, English-language name, in the interest of being a bilingual country, or should we do something equally stupid like adding more cod-transliteration like “Dún Laoighaire DUNLEARY”, or how about making up something nobody would recognise, like “LEARYSFORT”?

(* But yes, Dingle was a mistake - because that was a name that was used widely. It has been fixed since, though )