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In the Republic of Ireland, under the Constitution of Ireland, both languages have official status, with Irish being the national and first official language. [3] In Northern Ireland, English is the primary language for 95% of the population, and de facto official language, while Irish is recognised as an official language and Ulster Scots is ...
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]
[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.
Since the partition of Ireland, the language communities in the Republic and Northern Ireland have taken radically different trajectories. While Irish is officially the first language of the Republic, in Northern Ireland the language only gained official status a century after partition with the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act 2022 ...
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).
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 official languages of the Republic of Ireland are Irish and English. Each language has produced noteworthy literature. Irish, though now only the language of a minority, was the vernacular of the Irish people for thousands of years and was possibly introduced during the Iron Age.
Article 8 of the Constitution of Ireland states that Irish is the national and first official language of the Republic of Ireland. [46] English in turn is recognised as the State's second official language. [46] Hiberno-English, the dialect of English spoken in most of the Republic of Ireland, has been greatly influenced by Irish. [47]