SEACHTAIN NA GAEILGE is often a time when people reassess their relationship with Ireland’s indigenous tongue.

As someone who became a fluent speaker of Irish as an adult, I am often asked by people for tips on what they can do to acquire a strong command of the language for themselves.

There is a lot of good advice I feel I can share with them based on my own experience, but there is one strategy I recommend above anything else.

If you really want to learn Irish, you should commit to raising your children through it and making it the language of the home.

To many, this would sound like putting the cart before the horse. How can you speak to your children in a language you don’t speak fluently yourself?

The answer is that it is easier than you think.

Where to begin

When a baby is born, a parent instinctively communicates in simple language with their child. As this involves only basic words and phrases, it is a good starting point for an adult learner to become more familiar with the language themselves.

A good example of this can be seen in my own home. When I told my wife Kathy that I wanted to only speak Irish to our (then unborn) children, she was very nervous. As an American, she had no Irish at all, and was worried that she would never understand what I was saying to our children.

But as our children came along and I progressed from speaking basic Irish to more advanced sentences to them, Kathy’s ability to understand Irish grew as well, because she was following the same developmental path as our children.

My wife and children haven’t been the only ones learning, however.

By the time our first child arrived in 2015, I spoke fluent Irish. But being fluent in a language is not the same thing as having complete mastery of it.

My research on creating a bilingual family environment showed that the best strategy was for one parent to speak the minority language exclusively. So from day one, I was determined that everything I would say to my children would be in Irish alone.

But while I spoke good Irish, I had never been in a home environment where it was used, and there were lots of gaps in my own knowledge. What was the Irish for driveway or basement, for example?

And of course, when you are talking to children, there is a wide vocabulary connected with magic and fantasy that one might never use if only talking to adults. So I quickly had to figure out how to talk about mermaids, vampires, trolls and dwarves as Gaeilge.

Ongoing process

The key to this approach was looking up any words I realised I did not know and using them regularly in talking to my children. They began using these words naturally and the richness of their vocabulary has grown as the children have gotten older.

This will be an ongoing process. Just last week I was talking to my eldest daughter about nutrition and I was stumped as to what the Irish word for “fibre” was. But a quick look at the online dictionary solved the problem!

While I had a strong level of Irish when my first child was born, this is not essential if you want to make Irish one of the languages of the home.

Another Irish man living in London, James McDonald had never had a longer conversation in Irish than his Leaving Cert oral exam when his son was born in 2016. Despite this, and the fact that he lived in the UK, he decided to speak only Irish to his boy.

This helped James grow into the language himself, as, in his own words, “[t]he repetitive nature of speaking to a baby turns out to be the perfect way for a learner like me to increase their vocabulary.”

To a lot of people, the idea of raising children in a language that one is not extremely confident in probably sounds crazy. But it already happened on a large scale on our island.

The language shift from Irish to English that took place in the 18th and 19th centuries was largely driven by Irish-speaking parents using whatever English they had to communicate with their children.

Advantages

Despite many parents having limited English themselves, they persevered in speaking it exclusively with their offspring. The uniqueness of modern Hiberno-English is the legacy of generations of people learning “bad” English as their first language.

Of course, in the 21st century, any parent looking to augment their Irish skills has a wide-range of tools available to help them. Online dictionaries (with pronunciation files), lessons, radio stations and television programs (often with subtitles available in English or Irish) are accessible at the touch of a button.

Another advantage Irish parents have if they want to increase how much Irish they
speak is to send their children to a Gaelscoil.

We primarily think of a Gaelscoil as a place that enhances the Irish language skills of
the students. But for parents who are interested, these schools can facilitate the growth
of Irish usage at home through children teaching their parents what they have learned. The famous revival of the Hebrew language in Israel was largely achieved in this manner.

Jewish settlers in Palestine in the early 20th century took advantage of the lack of a national education system in the Ottoman empire to create their own, one in which Hebrew was the language of instruction.

But what truly helped the language flourish was the fact that parents (who didn’t speak it themselves) insisted that their children only use Hebrew at home, which allowed them to learn as well and to make it the dominant language of the family. From a language that no-one spoke at home in 1880, Hebrew is the native language of five million people today.

So yes, raising one’s children through Irish, especially if one initially only has a basic command of the language, is a radical thing to do.

Yet making this commitment will allow you to create an Irish immersion environment that will allow you to acquire the fluency you always wanted, as well as give your children a gift they will carry with them the rest of their lives.

Caoimhín De Barra is an assistant professor of history at Gonzaga University, Washington.