The Goidelic or Gaelic languages form one of the two groups of Insular Celtic languages, the other being the Brittonic languages.
Hiberno-English or Irish English (IrE), also formerly sometimes called Anglo-Irish, is the set of dialects of English native to the island of Ireland. In both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, English is the dominant first language in everyday use and, alongside the Irish language, one of two official languages.
Ulster is one of the four traditional or historic Irish provinces. It is made up of nine counties: six of these constitute Northern Ireland ; the remaining three are in the Republic of Ireland.
Leinster is one of the four provinces of Ireland, in the southeast of Ireland.
Irish Travellers, also known as Pavees or Mincéirs, are a traditionally peripatetic indigenous ethno-cultural group originating in Ireland.
A Gaeltacht is a district of Ireland, either individually or collectively, where the Irish government recognises that the Irish language is the predominant vernacular, or language of the home. The Gaeltacht districts were first officially recognised during the 1920s in the early years of the Irish Free State, following the Gaelic revival, as part of a government policy aimed at restoring the Irish language.
Ulster Scots or Ulster-Scots, also known as Ulster Scotch and Ullans, is the dialect spoken in parts of Ulster, being almost exclusively spoken in parts of Northern Ireland and County Donegal. It is normally considered a dialect or group of dialects of Scots, although groups such as the Ulster-Scots Language Society and Ulster-Scots Academy consider it a language in its own right, and the Ulster-Scots Agency and former Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure have used the term Ulster-Scots language.
Shelta is a language spoken by Irish Travellers, particularly in Ireland and the United Kingdom. It is widely known as the Cant, to its native speakers in Ireland as de Gammon or Tarri, and to the linguistic community as Shelta. Other terms for it include the Seldru, and Shelta Thari, among others. The exact number of native speakers is hard to determine due to sociolinguistic issues but Ethnologue puts the number of speakers at 30,000 in the UK, 6,000 in Ireland, and 50,000 in the US. The figure for at least the UK is dated to 1990. It is not clear if the other figures are from the same source.
English is the most widely spoken and de facto official language of the United Kingdom. A number of regional and migrant languages are also spoken. Regional English variant languages are Scots and Ulster Scots; indigenous Celtic languages are Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh. There are many non-native languages spoken by immigrants, including Polish, Hindi, and Urdu. British Sign Language is sometimes used as well as liturgical and hobby languages such as Latin and a revived form of Cornish.
The Irish language is, since 2022, an official language in Northern Ireland. The main dialect spoken there is Ulster Irish. Protection for the Irish language in Northern Ireland stems largely from the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
The culture of Ireland includes the art, music, dance, folklore, traditional clothing, language, literature, cuisine and sport associated with Ireland and the Irish people. For most of its recorded history, the country’s culture has been primarily Gaelic. Strong family values, wit and an appreciation for tradition are commonly associated with Irish culture.
Ulster English, also called Northern Hiberno-English or Northern Irish English, is the variety of English spoken mostly around the Irish province of Ulster and throughout Northern Ireland. The dialect has been influenced by the local Ulster dialect of the Scots language, brought over by Scottish settlers during the Plantation of Ulster and subsequent settlements throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. It also coexists alongside the Ulster dialect of the Irish (Gaelic) language.
Ulster is one of the four provinces of Ireland. Due to large-scale plantations of people from Scotland and England during the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as decades of conflict in the 20th, Ulster has a unique culture, quite different from the rest of Ireland. As all of Northern Ireland lies within Ulster and comprises about 90% of its population, the culture of Northern Ireland is very similar to that of the whole of Ulster. In particular, the Ulster Scots, or Scots Irish identity is strong among descendants of the Plantation, notably in counties Antrim, Cavan, Donegal, and Down. There is also a thriving indigenous Gaelic culture, largely attributed to the GAA and Conradh na Gaeilge.
Gaelicisation, or Gaelicization, is the act or process of making something Gaelic, or gaining characteristics of the Gaels, a sub-branch of celticisation. The Gaels are an ethno-linguistic group, traditionally viewed as having spread from Ireland to Scotland and the Isle of Man.
The languages of Scotland belong predominantly to the Germanic and Celtic language families. The main language now spoken in Scotland is English, while Scots and Scottish Gaelic are minority languages. The dialect of English spoken in Scotland is referred to as Scottish English.
The history of the Irish language begins with the period from the arrival of speakers of Celtic languages in Ireland to Ireland's earliest known form of Irish, Primitive Irish, which is found in Ogham inscriptions dating from the 3rd or 4th century AD. After the conversion to Christianity in the 5th century, Old Irish begins to appear as glosses and other marginalia in manuscripts written in Latin, beginning in the 6th century. It evolved in the 10th century to Middle Irish. Early Modern Irish represented a transition between Middle and Modern Irish. Its literary form, Classical Gaelic, was used by writers in both Ireland and Scotland until the 18th century, in the course of which slowly but surely writers began writing in the vernacular dialects, Ulster Irish, Connacht Irish, Munster Irish and Scottish Gaelic. As the number of hereditary poets and scribes dwindled under British rule in the early 19th century, Irish became a mostly spoken tongue with little written literature appearing in the language until the Gaelic Revival of the late 19th century. The number of speakers was also declining in this period with monoglot and bilingual speakers of Irish increasingly adopting only English: while Irish never died out, by the time of the Revival it was largely confined to the less Anglicised regions of the island, which were often also the more rural and remote areas. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Irish has continued to survive in Gaeltacht regions and among a minority in other regions. It has once again come to be considered an important part of the island's culture and heritage, with efforts being made to preserve and promote it.
Irish, also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic, is a Celtic language of the Indo-European language family. It is a member of the Goidelic language group of the Insular Celtic sub branch of the family and is indigenous to the island of Ireland. It was the majority of the population's first language until the 19th century, when English gradually became dominant, particularly in the last decades of the century, in what is sometimes characterised as a result of linguistic imperialism.
The official status of the Irish language has remained high in the Republic of Ireland from foundation. This reflects the dominance of the language in Irish cultural and social history until the nineteenth century and its role in Irish cultural identity. In 2022, strong recognition was added in Northern Ireland also. In the 2022 Republic of Ireland census 1,873,997 people or 39.8% of the population in the Republic of Ireland said that they had some ability to speak Irish, out of an overall population of 5,149,139. In Northern Ireland 228,600 people (12.4%) have some ability in the Irish language according to the 2021 census for Northern Ireland, out of a population of 1,903,175 people. It has been found, however, that while ideological support for Irish is high, actual routine use is very low, and that there is very little or rare correlation between personal fluency in the language and the perceived value of Irish as an identity-marker. Nevertheless, the language benefits from the support of activists who continue to use it as a social and cultural medium.
English is by far the most spoken, and the "de facto" national language of Northern Ireland,; it occurs in various forms, including Ulster English and Hiberno-English. Irish is an official language of Northern Ireland since 2022, and the local variety of Scots, known as Ulster Scots, has official minority status, with services in the language provided by public authorities. Northern Ireland Sign Language and Irish Sign Language have also been recognised with minority status since 29 March 2004.
Ulster Protestants are an ethnoreligious group in the Irish province of Ulster, where they make up about 43.5% of the population. Most Ulster Protestants are descendants of settlers who arrived from Britain in the early 17th century Ulster Plantation. This was the settlement of the Gaelic, Catholic province of Ulster by Scots and English speaking Protestants, mostly from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England. Many more Scottish Protestant migrants arrived in Ulster in the late 17th century. Those who came from Scotland were mostly Presbyterians, while those from England were mostly Anglicans. There is also a small Methodist community and the Methodist Church in Ireland dates to John Wesley's visit to Ulster in 1752. Although most Ulster Protestants descend from Lowland Scottish people, many descend from English, and to a lesser extent, from Irish, Welsh and Huguenots.
