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[129] [130] 6,000 people (0.3%) in Northern Ireland claim to use Irish as their main home language according to the 2021 UK Census with 71,900 people being able to speak Irish (circa 4% of population) and 228,600 people overall in the province (12.4%) having some knowledge of the language. It is the second most spoken language in Northern Ireland.
In the 2016 Irish census, 8,068 census forms were completed in Irish, and just under 74,000 of the total (1.7%) said they spoke it daily. The total number of people who answered 'yes' to being able to speak Irish to some extent in April 2016 was 1,761,420, 39.8 percent of respondents. [2] Bilingual road signs in Scariff, County Clare
As in other parts of Ireland, Irish was the main language in the region of present-day Northern Ireland for most of its recorded history [citation needed].The historic influence of the Irish language in Northern Ireland can be seen in many place names, for example the name of Belfast first appears in the year 668, and the Lagan even earlier ("Logia", Ptolemy's Geography 2,2,8).
Official Gaeltacht regions in Ireland. A Gaeltacht (/ ˈ ɡ eɪ l t ə x t / GAYL-təkht, Irish: [ˈɡeːl̪ˠt̪ˠəxt̪ˠ], pl. Gaeltachtaí) 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. [1]
Irish (Standard Irish: Gaeilge), also known as Irish Gaelic or simply Gaelic (/ ˈ ɡ eɪ l ɪ k / ⓘ GAY-lik), [3] [4] [5] is a Celtic language of the Indo-European language family. [4] [6] [7] [8] [3] It is a member of the Goidelic languages of the Insular Celtic sub branch of the family and is indigenous to the island of Ireland. [9]
In the 2021 census of Northern Ireland, 20,930 people (1.14% of the population) stated that they can speak, read, write and understand Ulster Scots, 26,570 people (1.45% of the population) stated they can speak but cannot read or write Ulster Scots, and 190,613 people (10.38% of the population) reported having some knowledge of it. [31]
The dialect of English spoken in Northern Ireland shows influence from the lowland Scots language. [12] There are supposedly some minute differences in pronunciation between Protestants and Catholics, the best known of which is the name of the letter h, which Protestants tend to pronounce as "aitch", as in British English, and Catholics tend to pronounce as "haitch", as in Hiberno-English.
The two comparatively "major" Gaelic nations in the modern era are Ireland (which had 71,968 "daily" Irish speakers and 1,873,997 people claiming "some ability of Irish", as of the 2022 census) [1] and Scotland (58,552 fluent "Gaelic speakers" and 92,400 with "some Gaelic language ability" in the 2001 census). [56]