The Irish language is older than English by more than a thousand years; and a form of the language has been spoken in Ireland for somewhere in the order of 2,500 years!
Irish has the earliest attested vernacular European literature outside the classical world of Greece and Rome; there is evidence for a literary tradition in Irish as early as the sixth century A.D. and evidence for literacy predates that.
There are rural areas of Ireland where Irish is still spoken daily to some extent as a first language. These regions are known individually and collectively as the Gaeltacht (plural Gaeltachtaí).
The English language is approximately 1,400 years old. It originated from a West Germanic language and was brought over to Britain in the mid 5th century by the Anglo Saxons (during a migration).
The establishment of the National School system of primary education by the state in 1831 had the teaching of English as one of its main aims. The use of Irish was discouraged, and led to the introduction of the notorious 'tally stick' where children were beaten if caught speaking Irish.
The Republic of Ireland endured a hard-fought birth. Ruled from Great Britain since the 13th century, its citizens, many of them suppressed Catholics, struggled to remove themselves from British domination for the next several hundred years. Ireland's situation changed dramatically at the beginning of the 20th century.
While people from Ireland, Britain, or Scotland tend to be genetically similar, genetic clusters show that even within countries, there are distinct regional differences, and this update captures some of that.
“Youse” is a word that was long ago banished from proper English usage, if it ever belonged there. It was invented by the Irish, as a kludge to correct for the fact that English has no standard second-person plural. The inventive Irish simply added an “s” to you to make it plural.
Irish ethnicity has diverse origins, primarily Gaelic (Celtic) people who settled at least 9,000 years ago, with later influences from Romans, Anglo-Normans, and English settlers.
Euskera is the oldest living language in Europe. Most linguists, experts and researchers say so. Euskera is a very old language whose origins remain unknown.
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands.
Irish is a Celtic language that, via Proto-Celtic (c. 1.000 B.C.), can be derived from the recon- structed Proto-Indo-European language that was spoken in the Neolithic c. 6.000 years ago. Through this ancestry, Irish is very distantly related to most European languages and to many more in the Near and Middle East.
Jesus may not have spoken English but he was certainly quite a linguist. In 2014 in Jerusalem, Pope Francis had a good-natured disagreement about Jesus's language skills with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. “Jesus was here, in this land,” Netanyahu said. “He spoke Hebrew.”
Irish is the oldest written vernacular language in western Europe, with texts dating back to the 6th century (long before other European languages took written form).
The term “Gaelic”, as a language, applies only to the language of Scotland. If you're not in Ireland, it is permissible to refer to the language as Irish Gaelic to differentiate it from Scottish Gaelic, but when you're in the Emerald Isle, simply refer to the language as either Irish or its native name, Gaeilge.
The Tudor conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the 16th century led to a second wave of immigration by English speakers, along with the forced suppression and decline in the status and use of the Irish language. By the mid-19th century, English had become the majority language spoken in the country.
Aramaic is best known as the language Jesus spoke. It is a Semitic language originating in the middle Euphrates. In 800-600 BC it spread from there to Syria and Mesopotamia.
This tradition survives today in the belief that Classical Arabic as spoken by Muhammad was "pure" and "undefiled." Muslims believe in a command to pray five times per day, known as salah, which often consists partially of recitation of passages from the Quran.
