Will Irish ever become the majority language in Ireland?
Anonymous
If you made Irish the only official language of Ireland, then you'd be cutting off 96% of the people from access to any government services. How do you possibly think that would help the country?
Enguerarrard
There are problems with Irish. The spelling is atrocious and anything but phonetic with multiple silent consonants and strange rules about mutations. It's an older language than English,and has more 'archaic' features - what I consider archaic, anyway. It's easy enough to learn phrases and vocabulary, but that's not fluency. Nevertheless, I encourage anyone to study it.
Sarcastatron
Hopefully, but unfortunately the enthusiasm isn't there for Gaeilge to be An Chéad Teanga Arís. What would be ideal is to get more people from the Gaeltacht to actually teach it, rather than people that can't tell the difference between Kerry & Galway Irish. But personally as a Leinster Man I would prefer to see Leinster Irish be spoken over other dialects. Only problem is Leinster Irish went extinct a century ago. Though maybe one day people might follow Ráth Chairn and make more towns and villages primary speak Irish.
Sebastian: Check out this example
Check out this example: Brittany is part of France, yet Breton has more speakers than Irish does. Another example, the Netherlands was part of Spain once, yet not many Dutch people speak Spanish
Ibis405
Not a chance.
Orla C
I'm not ashamed of it.
Robsteriark
Probably never. That’s not to say it won’t continue to grow, but most of the media, the internet, and academic articles that young Irish people consume is in English. Many young Irish people will also get to a point in their education where they can choose to either continue to learn a language only spoken amongst Irish people, or to learn a language which is commercially useful, such as many Oriental and European languages. They’ll also need an excellent command of English for the many call centres in Eire which serve the English-speaking world and for the much larger employment market in the neighbouring UK to which they have free and unfettered access with immediate rights of any UK resident citizen under the Common Travel Area which will continue after Brexit.
Fred
possible
Anonymous
I don’t think so sadly our language was stolen from us and because of evolution we may never get it back as a majority language but hopefully more and more people will be able to speak it fluently.
boy boy
its not irish ..its gaelic ...and if you knew anything about ireland you would know there is more than one form of gaelic ..the wild mountain men of connemara speak a different dialect ...how you gonna sort that one?