E 2.7.1: Linguistic atlas and survey of Irish dialects: Vol. I: Introduction, 300 maps

by Heinrich Wagner

1958. xviii + 300 pp., 43 cm

Reprinted, with a bibliographical note and indexes

by Eoin McKendry

1981. xxvii + 310 pp., 30 cm

€50

ISBN 0 901282 45 6

Voll. II, III and IV (see below) present the full record from which the items in the maps were selected

From the Introduction

As a result of a discussion held at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1949, it was decided to entrust me with the task of compiling a Linguistic Atlas of Irish Dialects. Encouraged by Professor Gerard Murphy I had already published a plan in Éigse vi 23 ff.[ix, 1] During the following winter a long questionnaire was prepared on the lines of that drawn up by Professor R. Hotzenköcherle (Zürich) for his Swiss German Linguistic Atlas. Visits of varied duration to different Irish-speaking areas had enabled me to learn the characteristics of the three main dialect groups in Irish (i.e. the dialects of Munster, Connaught and Ulster). Unpublished vocabularies previously collected on the spot by field-workers of the Irish Folklore Commission proved very helpful in the search for suitable linguistic items to show both the major and minor differences between Irish dialects. The questionnaire was tested in various places, but had to be revised several times.

I started my systematic fieldwork in places 1-5 on the map. In order to give the work strict consistency I decided to do the fieldwork myself, with the exception of points 20 (Dunquin, Dingle peninsula) and 42 (Inishmaan, Aran) which were covered by Professors D. Greene and M. Dillon respectively. Both these scholars, as well as Dr. T. de Bhaldraithe, Dr. P. L. Henry, Professor T. O Máille (Galway), T. de Burca M. A. (Galway), Mr. Seán Ó hEochaidh (Gortahork, Donegal) gave valuable assistance in other places also.

Holding professorships at the Universities of Utrecht (1951-53) and Basel (since 1953), I could do fieldwork only during the spring and summer vacations. By 1955 this part of the work was almost completed and preparations were made for the publication of the material. The 300 maps of this volume contain about one fifth of the material which we collected in each place, the bulk of which will be published in the near future in one or two separate volumes. It consists of grammatical forms, of technical terms as well as ordinary words, and of complete sentences, which we will give in phonetics with an English translation.

In order to hold the informants' interest during the hours of our long interrogations, the questionnaire was arranged according to subjects rather than to grammatical categories. It consists of sections concerning farm animals, the house and the work in and around the house (spinning, knitting, butter and bread making), terms of relationship (father, mother etc.), the parts of the body (head etc.), farmwork (hay-making, turf-cutting, ploughing, tillage), social functions (birth, marriage, death) and entertainment (card-playing, music, dancing, drinking and fishing). The terminology concerning the sea and sea-fishing could naturally not be obtained in inland areas. The questions were asked in their natural order, each item emerging from the preceding one. This technique was adapted from the above-mentioned questionnaire of the Swiss German atlas. It is clear that this kind of a questionnaire could also be used as an instrument for learning the language. Paradigms had to be spread over by inserting them smoothly into discussions on matters of every-day life. The whole questionnaire contains well over 2000 items. In about 30 places, a shorter questionnaire of about 900 questions was applied.

There is no place in Ireland where English is not now understood by the majority of adults; monoglots, apart from small children, have become extremely rare. I therefore applied a direct method in order to get the material required: my informants were asked to translate English words and sentences into their Irish. This method made it possible to collect morphological material systematically, without losing time by suggesting a certain form indirectly. It might be thought to defeat its purpose, in that much of the Irish might be mere translation, not presenting the form it would have taken if the sentence in question had not been suggested in English. In order to avoid that risk I conversed freely in Irish with my informants intermittently during my stay in a given place. For obvious reasons I endeavoured to get lodging as close as possible to the locality of my informants.

In other countries the material for linguistic atlases has been collected by asking informants to translate from a standard language into the dialect of that language. This method is undoubtedly more prone to errors than ours, but has proved successful.

My main problem was to find out where native Irish was still available. Irish is rapidly dying out practically everywhere despite having been fostered strongly by Irish governments. There is no Irish left in the province of Leinster. Before I commenced the fieldwork, Mr. Kevin Danaher M. A., under whose direction thousands of gramophone records were made by the recording unit of the Irish Folklore Commission during the last ten years, outlined to me all the various areas where people could be found who at least in their youth spoke Irish, and could therefore be considered native speakers. I followed his suggested itinerary right through and did not meet with disappointments. For county Cork I relied on previous research work carried out systematically in the whole area by Dr. B. Ó Cuív. In East Galway (points 25-35) I followed in the path of Dr. T. de Bhaldraithe who had previously been working in that area. In County Donegal my guide was Mr. S. O hEochaidh of the Irish Folklore Commission who is indisputably the greatest authority on folk tradition and the position of Irish generally, in this last stronghold of Ulster Irish. Valuable information was also provided by Mr. S. Mac Réamoinn of Radio Éireann, and by others too numerous to mention. My definition of an Irish native speaker was as follows: a person brought up to speak the Irish dialect which still is, or was once spoken in a given place. I claim that such a person is a representative of this local dialect. In order to eliminate the influence which written Irish might have had on the local dialect of a native speaker, I dealt, as a rule, with people who could neither read nor write Irish. As this is the case with almost all of the older generation of native speakers, the average age of my informants was well over seventy. People who came from outside areas, or, which is rare in rural Ireland, who had travelled a lot in different areas, would have been of little value for my purpose. A person, however, who had spent a certain amount of time in Britain or America, i.e. in an English-speaking environment, often proved to be an excellent informant on the local dialect of the place in which he was brought up. I worked successfully, in a few cases, with informants who had spent a large part of their life abroad.

I was most anxious to collect my material as soon as possible in those places where there were only a very few native speakers left. I worked only with people whose first language had been Irish only, or both Irish and English. As a rule I did not bother with persons who had heard some Irish words or phrases in their youth, but had never spoken the language themselves. In most parts of rural Ireland, even where Irish is dead for a long time, the local English dialect contains a certain amount of Irish words which could have been useful to me. I left this section of my work, however, to future investigators of Anglo-Irish dialects, and confined myself to the study of the speech of people who, at least in their youth, spoke the Irish dialect of their locality. In most places I was dealing with people who had not spoken Irish for, perhaps, upwards of sixty years, English having become the vernacular of the place at an early stage in their lives. Thus, it was seldom possible to get all the words and grammatical forms needed for my questionnaire. Most of my subjects were aged between seventy and ninety-five years, and although they did their best in trying to answer all my questions, they were inevitably at a loss from time to time, as their Irish had become rusty. Many of them were not in the best of health, some being blind or deaf. A number of those interviewed had been bedridden for years, including some who were inmates of hospitals and institutions.

I have reached the conclusion that, with regard to grammatical forms and to sounds, our informants have invariably given genuine material. As regards syntax and idiom, much of our collection may be corrupt, from the point of view of students of the older language, but most of these sentences may be heard in areas where Irish is spoken and would be used freely by our informants, if Irish was still spoken in their native place. If we have "corrupt" material en masse, i.e. sentences which are mere translations of our English questionnaire sentences, it is not due to inefficient methods of interrogation, but to the fact that most of our informants have not spoken Irish for many years. If Irish were to become their vernacular once more, it would be different in many ways from the language spoken by the preceding generation who knew very little English. We are concerned with linguistic reality. Our material will, therefore, also show the influence which English has exercised on Irish during the past hundred years.

From a methodical point of view, our work is, in a negative sense, fairly unique. Our approach is inevitably not strictly synchronical, as most of our subjects have not spoken the language for a long time. We are not dealing with a language spoken over a wide area, but rather with the ruins of a language. We compare our work with the archaeologist's task of reconstructing an old building from a few heaps of stones, lying here and there in the place where the original building stood. Whether it was worth the trouble may be left to critics to decide. As for ourselves, we see innumerable interesting problems arising from the maps[x, 1], which should interest students of history also. The grammatical and lexicographical material, published in the following volumes, will be useful for students of Irish grammar and lexicography. The 300 maps which feature about 370 items, must be considered sufficient in order to show the structure of a "Sprachlandschaft" which has now ceased to exist.

In each place I contacted a few subjects who were able to give me the maximum information possible to collect in four or five days, and who were prepared to spend hours being questioned. The quality or extent of the material gathered in a given place depended upon, and therefore reflects the position of the language in that place. In this way we got a fairly clear idea of the present situation of Irish. If, say, an old man of eighty-five years of age has neither spoken nor heard any Irish for about forty years, we may assume that spoken Irish was dying in his district more than fifty years ago. Thus, our collection reflects the different degrees of decay of the language throughout the country. Fortunately there are still a few small areas where Irish may be preserved as a spoken language, if properly fostered.

We shall now try to describe, geographically, the linguistic situation in all the places we have visited and were able to contact native speakers who gave us the material required by the questionnaire. We shall also mention the names of our chief informants. Most of these places were isolated, representing the last pockets where Irish is available in the areas in question. Indicated by arrows on our map (p. XVII) are those areas where native speakers are in the majority. In general it was just a matter of tracing the last refuge of the language in a district.

There is neither a city nor a town in Ireland where Irish is spoken. As a type of settlement, the town is, undoubtedly, a non-Celtic element in Ireland, and was introduced by the English. Its ancestor is the Germanic "Dorf" (village). We have to consider the type of settlement when we study the structure of a geographico-linguistic unit. The single holding surrounded by a certain amount of land, has always been the main type of homestead with insular Celtic people. An Irish village does not consist of a large cluster of houses, but of holdings scattered over a fairly big district; a locality might contain a few houses, but is not a real village ("Dorf") in the Germanic sense.[xi, 1]) In a small place like Dunquin (pt. 20) there is a number of localities each having its own name. I stayed ar an gCeathrúin (εrə g´a'rhu:n') "on the Quarter" where there were only a few houses together. There are some old fishing villages, found in points 1, 7, 22a, 23, 59, 69, which in my opinion represent quite a different type of settlement. Taking placenames like Helvik and Baile na nGall "the village of the foreigners" (pt. 1) into account, as well as the fact that the fishing terminology in Irish is widely of Norse origin, I believe that, as a type, fishing villages consisting of a number of houses built closely together are Norse in origin. The numbers on our maps, therefore, seldom refer to a large community, but to a small locality of not more than half a dozen houses. As a rule, these houses were the most remote and inaccessible ones in the entire district. In Knockadoon (pt. 7) for example, our best informant, a man aged more than seventy-five years, was living in the last house of the village, directly at the seafront.

The social stand of my informants does not vary. Irish is the language of small farmers and fishermen who kept their native language in the remote areas where civilization has not changed since medieval times. The change of civilization, however, taking place since the first world war, has brought the final decline of the language and the victory of English even in the last strongholds of this Celtic language.

Footnotes to the Introduction

Footnote on page IX (first page of Introduction)

For similar schemes previously planned cf. S. Pop, La Dialectologie pp. 941 N. 2, 942 N. 6.

Footnote on page X (second page of Introduction)

cf. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 73, 288 ff.

Footnote on page XI (third page of Introduction)