Law, Economics and Cultural Hegemony: The triumph of English and the loss of Irish in Ireland

I t has been calculated that in the early eighteenth century two thirds of the Irish population spoke Gaelic as their everyday language (1,340,000 from a total of just over two million) (Ó Cuív, 1951: 19). At the end of that century Whitley Stokes claimed that 'at least eight hundred thousand of our countrymen speak Irish only, and there are at least twice as many more who speak it in preference' (Stokes, 1799: 45); this meant that more than half the population were by necessity or choice Irish speakers. By the mid nineteenth century, however, the figures had started to reflect a significant and quickening shift: the 1851 census reported that only 1,524,286 (less than a quarter ofthe population) spoke Irish, ofwhom only 319,602 (less than five per cent) were monoglot. Despite the achievements of the Gaelic revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (its success was more notable for its politicai consequences than its linguistic effects), the waning oflrish continued apace: the 1911 census records 582,446 Irish speakers (slightly more than thirteen per cent) with 16,973 monoglots (just less than three per cent). Why did this extremely rapid triumph ofEnglish over Irish take place? How did a country in which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, more than half the population spoke the native language normally or by choice, become one in which, by the start of the next century, an ever-decreasing number of speakers knew it or used it? One explanation is that for centuries the colonists imposed English upon a reluctant people; that using the instruments of the state, primarily law and control of the economy, the rulers forced Irish people to speak a foreign language in order to foster politicai subjecthood and cultural assimilation. This process, it is argued, was exacerbated by the inclusion of Ireland within the United King dom after the passing of the Acts ofUnion in 1800. While in outline this account is accurate, there is one aspect of the process of language shift in Ireland which is puzzling. This is the fact that not only did the Irish acquire English, the language of economic opportunity and power, which makes sense in pragmatic terms, they also lost their own native language, which seems peculiar. The issue which this article will seek to address therefore is how and why the English language triumphed in Ireland, and, indirectly, how and why the Irish language was lost.