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A SEPARATE STANDARD FOR ULSTER GAELIC?

Panu Petteri Höglund, Åbo Akademi, January 2004

1. Introduction

The need for a separate standard Irish/Gaelic in Ulster has been articulated several times since the re-intellectualisation of the Irish language was commenced by the language movement in the beginning of the twentieth century. To start with, Irish was to be revived as it had been written by the classical authors, above all the 17th century Jesuit Geoffrey Keating (Seathrún Céitinn), as his style was in its own time extraordinarily colloquial and thus seemed to be appropriate as a link between classical Irish literature and modern colloquial language. The Keatingian approach to the revival is most often associated with the name of Richard Henebry, a.k.a. Risteard de Hindeberg (+ 1916); however, his stylistic ideals were attacked by those writers advocating an approach more accommodating to contemporary colloquial dialects, notably Patrick Pearse (Pádraig Mac Piarais) and Peadar Ua Laoghaire. Tomás Ó Floinn has in his reassessment of Henebry’s career as literary figure in Irish tried to nuance the traditional image of Henebry as an uncompromising archaiser; however, the conventional view can still be defended, in evidence of the quotations included in Ó HÁINLE . Peadar Ua Laoghaire himself was an avowed advocate of colloquial dialect as a source of enrichment for literary language, and he practiced what he preached.

Nevertheless, Ua Laoghaire’s rich literary production had a more profound impact upon the development of modern standard Irish than his personal opinions. Ua Laoghaire definitely preferred all writers to use their own dialects, so that a literary standard language would develop as a naturally mixed koine: ”The proper thing to do is to preserve most carefully all provincialisms [...]. Let us preserve, not only provincialisms, but even the most isolated localisms. Ink and paper are not very expensive. Certainly they cannot be turned to better use than the preservation [...] of our language.” However, the reality seems to have been, and still to be, to some extent, that Munster dialect, as used in his novels and other writings by Ua Laoghaire (a native speaker of West Cork Irish, still spoken to some extent in the Cúil Aodha – Muskerry Gaeltacht), became the model for second language learners and even for officialese. This tendency to favour southern dialects was reinforced by the fact that the autobiographies associated with the Great Blasket Island in Kerry became influential as school lecture. Even native writers seem, to some extent, to have tried to ”correct” their language to accommodate those proficient primarily in Munster Irish. Notably, the Central Donegal writer Seán Bán Mac Meanman introduces in his earliest writings typically Munster verb forms with synthetic endings: ”Rachad féin leis an chéad teachtaire a chasfar orm, mura stopa sibhse mé” (”Myself, I will go with the first messenger that I happen to meet, unless you stop me”) – in Ulster, you would expect rachaidh mé instead of rachad for ”I will go”. This quotation comes from a story which is set in a historical context , where the usage of synthetic forms can be perceived and accepted as archaism, but such forms are in those early writings found even in contexts where they have no such justification, such as in Seán Bán’s foreword : ”bheadh cupla ceann de na scéalta a chuireas [my emphasis] chuig a bhFeis-sean sa tiomsú seo” (instead of ”a chuir mé” ). In the same foreword (originally dated in 1915) he also tells us that he ”made use of the forms preferred by the best and most exact writers” (”rinneas úsáid de na foirmeacha atá ag na húdair is fearr is is beaichte”), which can be interpreted either as referring to classical and post-classical writers of earlier centuries, or as indicative of new revival writers – at this point in time, Patrick Pearse’s and Peadar Ua Laoghaire’s writings must already have been available to Seán Bán. He stresses his desire to reach to wider audiences beyond Ulster – ”tá súil agam go dtuigfidh an Muimhneach is an Connachtach an chaint chomh réidh agus chomh maith leis an Ultach” – and it is rather interesting that he seems to perceive the use of such synthetic forms as were only extant in Munster speech as relevant part of interdialectal understanding. In his later writings, though, Seán Bán reverted to more consequently Ultonian usage: actually, his greatest achievement as a writer is the fact that he made otherwise unrecorded Central Donegal words and phrases available, readable, and learnable.

Other Ulster writers, the Grianna brothers from Reann na Feairste (Ranafast) in the Rosses, have from the beginning shown a distanced, even facetious attitude towards what they seem to perceive as prescribed usage of Munster Irish. In his autobiography , Séamus Ó Grianna mocks the bad Irish of non-native speakers with the following paragraph :

”I gyown desna hepistiliv do scree Pole, Abstal naifay, hunn a Rivawnack, doh yin shay taggirt dosna cuspoaree ahaw reektanack hun shinnay do lawnoo. Iss shay an ched rud is aigin doon a yeinoo egg tossnoo yoon ar an mishoon so naw...naw...naw kest a hur orring feinig caw veel ar dreel...”

In a more Irish orthography, it looks like this:

”I gceann desna heipistilibh do scrígh Pól, Apstal naofa, chun na Rómhánach, do dhein sé tagairt dosna cuspóirí athá riachtanach chun sinne do lánú [or: leanúint?]. Is é an chéad rud is éigean dúinn a dhéanamh ag tosnú dhúinn ar an misiún so ná... ná... ná ceist a chur orainn féinig cá bhfuil ár dtriall...”

(”In one of the Epistles that Paul, the holy Apostle, wrote to the Romans, he referred to the objectives that it is necessary for us to fulfil. The first thing that we must do, beginning this mission, is to... to... to ask ourselves the question where we are heading...”)