An Ghaeilge
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2025
25:30 · 256K views · Nov 13, 2011
The first episode of the Irish TV series No Bearla, in which native Irish speaker Manchan Magan travels around Ireland trying to get by using only Irish. It documents the highs and lows of the attempt.
Cited in threads on minority languages as a funny but sad look at how hard it is to live in Irish.
3 comments from Hacker News
Hebrew is the only successfully revived language that I know of, and it was revived under circumstances that are really pretty unique. Irish has had "national language" status for 100 years, during which time it has continued to decline. Strong government support for the language - making it a requirement for government jobs, teaching it to schoolchildren, defining regions of the country where Irish should be the primary everyday language - weren't enough to prevent the continued decline of the language. I think the problem with the sort of language policy that Ireland pursued is that language is a practical tool for most people. A lot of people liked the idea of Irish coming back (especially back when speaking Irish was a political statement against English colonialism), but in everyday life in Ireland, English is vastly more useful. The last monolingual Irish speaker died in 1998.[1] You will never encounter anyone who only knows how to speak Irish. Back when there were monolingual Irish speakers, they lived in some of the poorest areas of Ireland and hoped that their children would learn English, so that they would have better opportunities. In some ways, the language policy backfired. Some people actually viewed it as oppressive, because they didn't see the point of learning a language that was of no practical use to them in everyday life, and they weren't able to get certain jobs unless they spoke that language. There's a funny TV series that explores how useful the Iris
By coincidence I was just watching an 8 year old Teilifís na Gaeilge (TG4) program in which the protagonist attempts to travel the length and breadth of Ireland speaking only 'as Gaeilge'. The scenes in which he attempts to get state-run tourist services to communicate with him in one of the official lanaguages of Ireland are painful. In particular his visit to the prison cell in which his grandmother (one of the 1916 revolutionaries) was incarcerated starts off badly: this video
> whose first language is Gaelic Is that really true though? I think it's a bit optimistic to say "first language". I know that many people do speak Irish, but the number of people who can speak Irish better than English is abysmal. No Béarla[1] is one of the saddest documentaries I've ever seen. It follows a native speaker who tries to do mundane tasks in Ireland using only Irish, but can barely get anything done. [1]: this video