The history of the Irish language begins with the period from the arrival of speakers of Celtic languages in Ireland to Ireland's earliest known form of Irish, Primitive Irish, which is found in Ogham inscriptions dating from the 3rd or 4th century AD. After the conversion to Christianity in the 5th century, Old Irish begins to appear as glosses and other marginalia in manuscripts written in Latin, beginning in the 6th century. It evolved in the 10th century to Middle Irish. Early Modern Irish represented a transition between Middle and Modern Irish. Its literary form, Classical Gaelic, was used by writers in both Ireland and Scotland until the 18th century, in the course of which slowly but surely writers began writing in the vernacular dialects, Ulster Irish, Connacht Irish, Munster Irish and Scottish Gaelic. As the number of hereditary poets and scribes dwindled under British rule in the early 19th century, Irish became a mostly spoken tongue with little written literature appearing in the language until the Gaelic Revival of the late 19th century. The number of speakers was also declining in this period with monoglot and bilingual speakers of Irish increasingly adopting only English: while Irish never died out, by the time of the Revival it was largely confined to the less Anglicised regions of the island, which were often also the more rural and remote areas. In the 20th and 21st centuries, Irish has continued to survive in Gaeltacht regions and among a minority in other regions. It has once again come to be considered an important part of the island's culture and heritage, with efforts being made to preserve and promote it.
Early history Indo-European languages may have arrived in Ireland between 2400 and 2000 BC with the spread of the Bell Beaker culture when around 90% of the contemporary Neolithic population was replaced by lineages related to the Yamnaya culture from the Pontic steppe. The Beaker culture has been suggested as a candidate for an early Indo-European culture, specifically, as ancestral to proto-Celtic."Almagro-Gorbea – La lengua de los Celtas y otros pueblos indoeuropeos de la península ibérica", 2001 p.95. In Almagro-Gorbea, M., Mariné, M. and Álvarez-Sanchís, J. R. (eds) Celtas y Vettones, pp. 115–121. Ávila: Diputación Provincial de Ávila. J. P. Mallory proposed in 2013 that the Beaker culture was associated with a European branch of Indo-European dialects, termed "North-west Indo-European", ancestral to not only Celtic but also Italic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic.J. P. Mallory, 'The Indo-Europeanization of Atlantic Europe', in Celtic From the West 2: Rethinking the Bronze Age and the Arrival of Indo–European in Atlantic Europe, eds J. T. Koch and B. Cunliffe (Oxford, 2013), pp. 17–40
Primitive Irish
The earliest written form of the Irish language is known to linguists as Primitive Irish. Primitive Irish is known only from fragments, mostly personal names, inscribed on stone in the Ogham alphabet. The earliest of such inscriptions probably date from the 3rd or 4th century. Ogham inscriptions are found primarily in the south of Ireland as well as in Wales, Devon and Cornwall, where it was brought by settlers from Ireland to sub-Roman Britain, and in the Isle of Man.
Old Irish
Old Irish was the first written vernacular language north of the Alps, and it first appeared in the margins of Latin manuscripts as early as the 6th century. Old Irish can be divided into two periods: Early Old Irish, also called Archaic Irish (c. 7th century), and Old Irish (8th–9th century). One of the most notable Old Irish texts was the Senchas Már, a series of early legal tracts that are alleged to "have been redacted from a pre-Christian original by Saint Patrick."
Stories of the Ulster Cycle were written primarily in the Middle Irish period, but many of the heroes featured were initially described in Old Irish texts. Many early Irish literary texts, though recorded in manuscripts of the Middle Irish period (such as Lebor na hUidre and the Book of Leinster), are essentially Old Irish in character.
Middle Irish
Middle Irish is the form of Irish used from c. 900 to c. 1200; it is therefore a contemporary of late Old English and early Middle English. It is characterized by an increased amount of linguistic variation compared to the relatively uniform writing of Old Irish. In Middle Irish texts. writers blended together contemporary and older linguistic forms in the same text.
Middle Irish is the language of a large amount of literature, including the entire Ulster Cycle.
Early Modern Irish
Early Modern Irish (c. 1200–1600) represents a transition between Middle Irish and Modern Irish. Its literary form, Classical Gaelic, was used in Ireland and Scotland from the 13th to the 18th century. The grammar of Early Modern Irish is laid out in a series of grammatical tracts written by native speakers and intended to teach the most cultivated form of the language to student bards, lawyers, doctors, administrators, monks, and so on in Ireland and Scotland.Rolf Baumgarten and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh, 2004. Electronic Bibliography of Irish Linguistics and Literature 1942–71. Accessed 27 December 2007.
Nineteenth and twentieth centuries
It is believed that Irish remained the majority tongue as late as 1800Goram Wolf, Technical University of Dresden, Celtic National Languages in the British Isles and Ireland, July 2007 but became a minority language during the 19th century.According to the 1841 census Ireland had 8 175 124 inhabitants. In 1841 4 million people in Ireland spoke Irish. (John O'Beirne Ranelagh, "A Short History of Ireland", Cambridge 1994, p. 118) It is an important part of Irish nationalist identity, marking a cultural distance between Irish people and the English.
A combination of the introduction of state funded, though predominantly denominationally Church delivered, primary education (the National Schools), from 1831, in which Irish was omitted from the curriculum till 1878, and only then added as a curiosity, to be learnt after English, Latin, Greek and French,Erick Falc’Her-Poyroux. ’The Great Famine in Ireland: a Linguistic and Cultural Disruption. Yann Bévant. La Grande Famine en Irlande 1845-1850, PUR, 2014. halshs-01147770 and in the absence of an authorised Irish Catholic bible () before 1981, resulting in instruction primarily in English, or Latin. The National Schools run by the Catholic Church discouraged its use until about 1890.
The Great Famine () hit a disproportionately high number of Irish speakers (who lived in the poorer areas heavily hit by famine deaths and emigration), translated into its rapid decline.
Irish political leaders, such as Daniel O'Connell (, himself a native speaker), were also critical of the language, seeing it as "backward", with English the language of the future.
Economic opportunities for most Irish people arose with the Second Industrial Revolution in the English-speaking British Empire and United States. Contemporary reports spoke of Irish-speaking parents actively discouraging their children from speaking the language, and encouraging the use of English instead. This stigma towards speaking Irish remained strong long after independence.
It has been argued, however, that the sheer number of Irish speakers in the nineteenth century and their social diversity meant that both religious and secular authorities had to engage with them.See the discussion in Wolf, Nicholas M. (2014). An Irish-Speaking Island: State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770-1870. University of Wisconsin Press. This meant that Irish, rather than being marginalised, was an essential element in the modernization of Ireland, especially before the Great Famine of the 1840s. Irish speakers insisted on using the language in the law courts (even when they knew English), and it was common to employ interpreters. It was not unusual for magistrates, lawyers and jurors to employ their own knowledge of Irish. Fluency in Irish was often necessary in commercial matters. Political candidates and political leaders found the language invaluable. Irish was an integral part of the "devotional revolution" which marked the standardisation of Catholic religious practice, and the Catholic bishops (often partly blamed for the decline of the language) went to great lengths to ensure there was an adequate supply of Irish-speaking priests. Irish was widely and unofficially used as a language of instruction both in the local pay-schools (often called hedge schools) and in the National Schools. Even after the 1840s, Irish speakers could be found in all occupations and professions.
The initial moves to reverse the decline of the language were championed by Anglo-Irish Protestants such as the linguist and clergyman William Neilson, towards the end of the 18th century, and Samuel Ferguson; the major push occurred with the foundation by Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, of the Gaelic League () in 1893, which was a factor in launching the Irish Revival movement. The Gaelic league managed to reach 50,000 members by 1904 and also successfully pressured the government into allowing the Irish language as a language of instruction the same year.Hindley, Reg. 1990. The Death of the Irish language: A qualified obituary London: Routledge pp. 24 Leading supporters of Conradh included Pádraig Pearse and Éamon de Valera. The revival of interest in the language coincided with other cultural revivals, such as the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association and the growth in the performance of plays about Ireland in English, by playwrights including W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Seán O'Casey and Lady Gregory, with their launch of the Abbey Theatre. By 1901, only approximately 641,000 people spoke Irish with only just 20,953 of those speakers being monolingual Irish speakers; how many had emigrated is unknown, but it is probably safe to say that a larger number of speakers lived elsewhereHindley, Reg. 1990. The Death of the Irish language: A qualified obituary London: Routledge pp. 19 This change in demographics can be attributed to the Great FamineHindley, Reg. 1990. The Death of the Irish language: A qualified obituary London: Routledge pp. 13 as well as the increasing social pressure to speak English.Hindley, Reg. 1990. The Death of the Irish language: A qualified obituary London: Routledge pp. 17
Even though the Abbey Theatre playwrights wrote in English (and indeed some disliked Irish) the Irish language affected them, as it did all Irish English speakers. The version of English spoken in Ireland, known as Hiberno-English bears similarities in some grammatical idioms with Irish. Writers who have used Hiberno-English include J. M. Synge, Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and more recently in the writings of Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan, and Dermot Bolger.
This national cultural revival of the late 19th century and early 20th century matched the growing Irish radicalism in Irish politics. Many of those, such as Pearse, de Valera, W. T. Cosgrave () and Ernest Blythe (), who fought to achieve Irish independence and came to govern the independent Irish Free State, first became politically aware through Conradh na Gaeilge. Douglas Hyde had mentioned the necessity of "de-anglicizing" Ireland, as a cultural goal that was not overtly political. Hyde resigned from its presidency in 1915 in protest when the movement voted to affiliate with the separatist cause; it had been infiltrated by members of the secretive Irish Republican Brotherhood, and had changed from being a purely cultural group to one with radical nationalist aims.