Come Here and Get your Irish Folks!

I called my friend Lucia minutes before the my plane took off from Glasgow airport. ‘You know as soon as I touch down in Shannon, our English friendship is over’ I told her. She agreed, and that’s how it went, two large suitcases, $400 dollars in over-weight fees, and a new life in a new language.

Now granted, In a sense, I’m cheating. I speak Scottish Gàidhlig, the sister language to Irish. Many of the words, if not similar, are the same, with longer or shorter stresses on different vowels, and a handful of variations of grammar. I spent the past year in a Gàidhlig language immersion college on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. Five hours of class a day, Monday-Thursday, with meals and weekend adventures in the language, the language became as comfortable to me as an old worn sweater, and just as well loved.

For someone with out my background, moving to the Gàidhealtachd for eight months, with the goal of fluency (as is mine), would be a formidable challenge indeed. ‘They won’t speak the language with you if you don’t have it’, Lucia informed me on the way back to West Kerry, dodging pot-holes on the rain-splattered roads outside Dingle centre, the hill over-looking the town has more houses on it each time I return. The language seems to be leaving the town as swiftly as the unspoiled fields that once crowned the village.

I see the challenges my ‘Viking Gàidhlig’ will pose later in the week, when I call my old program director from my undergraduate study abroad, to ask him if I can use the Diseart building, (an old nunnery with Wi-fi access) to attend my on-line Scottish Gàidhlig courses. After a few days living with Lucia, hearing nothing but Irish, I feel confident enough to converse, ‘you’re going to have to speak local Irish or English with me,’ he says. The following day a taxi driver insists I have good Irish, we chat all the way into town, I’m elated, until the end of the trip, when he switches to English to explain his lack of a calibrator.

I’ll need time for adjustment. This first weekend in Ireland was spent in Killarney, at the Oireachtas; a festival through the medium of the language, where everyone speaks Irish, and speaks it was pride. Mohawk guy speaks Irish, spiked-high heels girl speaks Irish, pods of teenyboppers speak Irish, and I spoke something that the Irish speakers identified as vaguely Celtic and, at least, better than English.

My favorite memory of the weekend is a dinner with Griogair Labhruidh, on of Scotland’s best young Gàidhlig singers, Lucia, and an Irish-speaking piper from the Connemara Gàidhealtachd. Our side of the table spoke Scottish Gàidhlig, the other side spoke Irish, and every so often we all came together and muddled along just fine.

This is the change learning a minority language has brought to my life, I have the confidence to approach strangers I know have the language, and know that we’ll have a thing or two to talk about, a deeper bond will form, an instant gratitude on both ends to speak a language that is so often met with perplexity, and unfortunately, from time to time, downright animosity. Now that I’m outside of the Gàidhlig speaking community, meeting another speaker is something akin to spotting an allied badge across a battlefield; it comes with an almost euphoric rush of possibility and relief.

Slowly, at the house, things have been coming alone. I understand almost everything Lucia says now. Here I am, an American learning Irish from a Galician, here I am at the beginning again, training my mind again not to just learn a new language, but to differentiate between two that seem at times to be as intertwined as the herring-boned stone walls outside our home. At this point, I can comfortable say I’m speaking Irish as opposed to Gàidhlig, if still not speaking it well.

So far I’ve met with mixed reactions. At the Oireachtas, I bumped into a group of young guys that understood my Gàidhlig, and limited Irish. After explaining my history and interest in the languages in a hybrid of the two, a church-like hush fell over the throng, ‘fair play dhut’ (dhut-to you). In Killarney for the day this past weekend, the Oireachtas crowd long since departed and the town back to it’s Beurla-based normality, Lucia and I were approached randomly by an elderly woman in a tea-room. ‘It’s lovely to hear the Irish being spoken, my kids were wondering why you were speaking it.’ Why we were speaking it? She had no ideas we were foreigners. Why does speaking Irish make one a novelty in Ireland? Is there not something intrinsically backward in that?

The past year, I’ve grown accustomed to being a novelty. I was a novelty in Scotland for being an American and wanting to speaking Gàidhlig, for refusing to speak English and for wearing vintage clothes. I’m sure I’ll continue to be a novelty here for many of the same reasons. But what about someone raised in the Gàidhealtachd, with Irish as their first tongue. Are they themselves a novelty outside the plastic road- signs that mark the safety-zones for their language? Does that novelty ever wear off?