A sociolinguistic analysis of a national language: Irish in the nineteenth century

The notion of the visibility of a particular language is relative. In nineteenth-century Ireland, observers tended to underestimate the number of speakers of Irish. In the twentieth century, under the influence of the prevailing nationalist orthodoxy, there was gross exaggeration in the opposite direction. This article is an attempt to re-assess the number of speakers of Irish and the pace of change; in so doing we will draw on recent statistics concerning speaker numbers, and offer a re-appraisal of the notion of native speaker.