HOW'S DEAR OLD IRISH AND WHERE DOES IT STAND?

PANU PETTERI HÖGLUND, (Åbo Akademi University)
Of the 80 000 native speakers today, only 30 000 live in the traditional Irish-speaking districts in the west coast (called the Gaeltachtaí; the singular form Gaeltacht is frequently used collectively, to refer to them all together). The others probably live predominantly in the bigger towns and cities, where the networks of the Irish-speaking subculture might be numerically very strong - in Dublin (Baile Átha Cliath), Cork (Corcaigh), and Belfast (Béal Feirste), there probably are much more Irish-speakers (i.e. even more first-language speakers; active secondary bilinguals probably exceed the number of the first-language speakers anyway) in absolute numbers than in the west coast villages, but procentually speaking, they disappear among the urban masses. Instead of a language community, urban speakers live in a subculture of networks consisting of Irish-speaking families.
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