Native Tongue: When Our Irish Spoke Irish

March 8, 2015

Postcard of Tubbercurry c. 1910 with JF’s younger brother’s shop on the left, Digital image provided courtesy of William Coleman, a Leonard relative in County Sligo

Among the heirlooms passed down in my mother’s family are letters written to my great-great grandfather, John Francis Armstrong (1845-1893), from his brothers and sisters in County Sligo, Ireland.

Most of the correspondence is from the early months of 1887, when my great-great grandmother died, and the following spring, when two of JF’s sisters left Sligo for New York against their parents’ wishes.

Written in cursive script, the letters contain mostly family news and express sympathy and concern for JF and his children in Augusta, Georgia.

Examined together, they reveal the strong bonds and sometimes tense relationships between the siblings as well as their individual attitudes and expectations. They also show how closely tied JF remained to his family in Ireland after two decades in America.

Because the letters were written in English, I had assumed that JF and his siblings didn’t speak Irish. A few months ago, though, I came across some Irish census data from 1901 and 1911 that stated that JF’s parents, Francis and Anne Armstrong, and some of his siblings did speak the island’s native language.

If that information is correct, then it’s likely that JF spoke Irish, too, at least before he left for America in 1865.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I haven’t come across any evidence–not yet anyway–that the family could read or write their native tongue.

Although Irish was still widely spoken, particularly in the West, throughout the nineteenth century, its use declined after the Great Famine of 1845-1851.

Today, around eighty thousand of the Republic of Ireland’s 4.8 million citizens speak Irish on a daily basis. Irish is recognized as the country’s first official language and English, which is universally spoken, its second.

References

“20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language: 2010-2030.”  Irish government document at Gov.ie. No date. Accessed March 14th, 2015.

A more extensive list of bibliographical references may be found at John Francis Armstrong: a bibliography.