Learning other languages is good for your Irish

Not as good as directly studying Irish, but still pretty good

A sign that amused me the last time I was in Italy

Something I hear fairly frequently from Irish people: ‘I will get around to Irish eventually, but I really want to work on X Language first. Oh God, I know that’s terrible of me, you must think I’m an awful traitor, [etc etc, insert assorted Hibernian guilt].’

They tend to be surprised by my answer: ‘Go for it if you want to, it’s probably the best thing you could do for your Irish besides directly studying it’.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of reasons why.

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Confidence

The word ‘can’t’ simply doesn’t feature in my approach to language-learning. It is an amply evidenced fact about me that I am capable of learning languages; the only question is whether I want a given one badly enough. Even when the process is painful or boring or embarrassing, I know there’s light on the other side of the tunnel, simply because I’ve barrelled out of it many times before.

This confidence is not a magical gift. It’s just that I’ve been there, done that and purchased all relevant t-shirts.

Especially if you choose a language that’s more similar to English than Irish is, or one where not many speakers have good English — that ease of acquisition and of practice will show you that you can do it.

I don’t subscribe to ‘manifestation’ in the hokey sense that imagining an outcome will necessarily cause it to materialise. But I do think that if you believe Irish is theoretically attainable, you are likelier to take daily action to bring it about. That’s common sense: it would be weird if we weren’t likelier to do things we see as actually being effective. Learning another language is one way of giving yourself a directly lived trust in that efficacy.

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Reducing Béarlachas

‘Béarlachas’, or English-influenced vocabulary and grammar, can be a controversial topic in Irish. There’s a school of thought that says it’s elitist to complain about it, or even to want to avoid it in one’s own speech.

I disagree. What’s actually elitist is shaming second-language speakers for making mistakes. Whether those mistakes come from English is irrelevant; it’s never a good look to mock someone who’s trying to learn.

It’s fraught even trying to make an objective distinction between Béarlachas and legitimate modern Irish. ‘Bhuel’ is Béarlachas if the definition is ‘a usage borrowed directly from English’. If we narrow the definition to ‘borrowed from English after a certain point in history’, then what year exactly? Is a word first recorded in Irish on 31 December 1949 kosher, but unforgivably Saxon if heralded on 1 January 1950?

But once we take the shaming and the judgement out of it, I do think it’s important to respect that Irish has its own subjectivity. That’s not to say anyone should beat themselves up for accidentally reproducing English structures. But it’s good to be curious about them, and open to changing them once you notice them. Tackling Béarlachas isn’t a tedious hassle; it’s a fun opportunity to expand your mind through language.

Learning other languages helps with this, simply because you’re more aware of what’s unique to English. Let’s say I want to say I miss something in Irish and have forgotten how. If I only spoke English, I’d probably say something like: ‘Caillim é’, because in English you ‘miss’ a person the same way you ‘miss’ a class. But I’m aware that it doesn’t work that way in French, Spanish, German or Italian, so I’d be unlikely to assume it did in Irish. Even if I couldn’t recall ‘Braithim uaim X’ on time, I’d find some way to get across what I meant that didn’t rely on translating from English: ‘Tá brón orm nach bhfuil X ann’, or whatever.

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Circumlocution

Very much related to the above.

When people don’t know an exact word or phrase in Irish, I find they tend to give up a lot more easily than non-native speakers of English do. An Italian speaking English in Dublin can’t just say it in Italian with most people, so they build the skill of circumlocution: describing the meaning of the word, or rephrasing the concept, until the person gets it.

This is a skill I have in Italian myself. I remember once being at a hotel and needing to borrow a charger. Mid-sentence I realised I’d forgot the word, so — without any panicking or embarrassment — I just asked for ‘la cosa con cui si carica il telefonino’: the thing you use to charge your phone. The interaction went fine; there was no awkwardness over it.

That flexibility carries over into my Irish. It’s not something I even have to think about; circumlocution is ingrained in me from other languages where it’s not so normalised to bring in English. The result can be slightly wordy sometimes. But if we believe Kneecap that ‘Gach focal a labhraítear i nGaeilge, is é piléar scaoilte ar son saoirse na hÉireann’ — every word spoken in Irish is a bullet fired for Irish freedom — then an rud a úsáidtear chun fuinneamh a thabhairt don ghuthán póca nets us ten bullets more freedom than luchtaire anyway.

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Pronunciation

This is another topic that can be controversial, so I want to be clear that I mean ‘pronunciation’, not ‘accent’.

Accent bias is real in Irish. There’s a perception in certain quarters that urban Irish is somehow less ‘genuine’. The extension of that logic would be that a Dubliner who speaks with the closed vowels they learned from their family or teachers or peers is somehow less ‘authentic’ than me because I use the open ones I picked up from randos on the radio.

So I’m absolutely not saying that anyone should have to put on a different accent to have their Irish respected.

But heavily anglicised pronunciation in Irish can sometimes produce genuine misunderstanding. If I say at a party that the paper object beside me is ‘a cupán’, that’s different to saying it’s ‘a chupán’: I’ve said it belongs to the woman on my left rather than the man on my right. Even if someone were importing their English phonetic toolkit wholesale into Irish, with zero new sounds, it would be more communicatively effective in that scenario to pronounce chupán as ‘hupán’ rather than ‘cupán’.

Other languages help with that flexibility because you learn not to be so wedded to the letters on the page. Learn French and you will never again complain about Irish phonics.

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Having realistic standards

This is the biggest one, to be honest.

People who’ve never successfully learned a language without intensive childhood immersion can only really imagine two experiences: sounding exactly like a native speaker, or speaking badly. The first time they try to learn a language the hard way, they assume that if they’re not the former then they must be the latter. It’s difficult to imagine the many levels in between if you’ve never personally accessed them.

The last time I was in Italy, a woman complimented my fluency — that was the word she used — by saying she liked the flow and speed of my Italian. It struck me that this is actually a far more lexically accurate definition of ‘fluency’ than ‘foreign-accent-free’ or ‘grammatically perfect’.

We have a weird, culturally loaded definition of fluent Irish. I understand the impulse to protect the language. But it’s so divorced from how widely spoken languages use the term, in a way that I think ultimately does Irish a disservice. If we define fluent Irish as never flubbing a single case declension, I’m not sure any speaker in the history of the language has been fluent. And who’s defining this objectively correct Irish, anyway? Arguably the best-known work of Irish-language fiction is the Caighdeán.

I’m not saying Irish shouldn’t uphold the same standards as widely spoken languages. But my experience moving through other languages, living through them, and being accepted as fluent even though nobody was remotely mistaking me for a native speaker — that’s something that made me realise how unnecessarily hard on themselves most Irish people are about their Irish. When I make even the most minor mistake in Irish, it hurts me on a level it doesn’t in the other languages. But my experience with those languages lets me contextualise and deal with the emotion rather than being doomed to accept it uncritically. Even when, irrationally, I still feel ashamed, I can reason with myself: if I’d messed up some stupid little preposition in Italian, I would have just kept going, and that flow itself is quite literally what makes me fluent.

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To be clear: the most effective way to learn Irish is of course by directly learning Irish.

But you’ll get further by associating it with pleasure than with pain. If it would feel like a chore to work on Irish when you’d rather be learning Spanish, learn Spanish first. Come back to Irish once you truly want to. The Spanish will help you anyway, for all the reasons above and many more.

Ádh mór.

Le meas,

N