Gaelic? What gall
Using Gaelic to practice his gift of the gab certainly got his kinsmen's Irish up.
DUBLIN — Gaelic -- or irish, as we call it here -- is the first official language of Ireland. (English is second.) And 41% of the population claim to speak it. But could that be true? To put it to the test, I set off across Ireland for three weeks in the summer of 2006 with one self-imposed handicap -- to never utter a word of English.
I chose Dublin as a starting point. The sales assistant in the first shop I went to said, "Would you speak English maybe?" I tried repeating my request using the simplest schoolroom Irish that he must have learned during the 10 years of compulsory Irish that every schoolchild undergoes. "Do you speak English?" he asked again in a cold, threatening tone. Sea (pronounced "sha"), I affirmed, and nodded meekly. "I'm not talking to you any more," he said, covering his ears. "Go away!"
I knew the journey was going to be difficult, just not this difficult. Language experts claim that the figure of fluent Irish speakers is closer to 3% than the aspirational 41% who tick the language box on the census, and most of them are concentrated on the western seaboard, in remote, inaccessible areas. What I had not factored for was the animosity. Part of it, I felt, stemmed from guilt. We feel inadequate that we cannot speak our own language.
I decided to visit Dublin's tourist office, which, presumably, was accustomed to dealing with different languages. The man at the counter looked at me quizzically when I inquired about a city tour. "Huh?" he said, his eyes widening. I repeated myself.
"You don't speak English, do you?" he asked coldly. I was already beginning to hate this moment -- the point at which the fear and frustration spread across a person's face. I asked if there was any other language I could use, and they pointed to a list of seven flags on the wall representing the languages they dealt in. To be honest, I could speak four of them, but I had promised myself not to, not unless it was absolutely necessary.
I might have been tempted to give up the journey that first day had it not been for some children who called into a radio station I was on that night in Dublin. They spoke fluent Irish in a modern urban dialect. They were outraged when I suggested the language was dying. These were 10- and 12-year-olds reared on Irish versions of "SpongeBob SquarePants" and "Scooby-Doo" on Irish-language television. They had Irish words for Xbox and jackass and had molded the 2,500-year-old language to the styles of Valley-girl slang.
