What's our national language really? Not Irish - but not 'English' English either

IN AUTHOR PAUL Howard’s hugely enjoyable new novel A Nation Once Again, which is part-satire and part-blueprint for the reunification of Ireland, a cast of oddball characters on both sides of the border wrestle with a litany of head-wreckers to be tackled en route to attaining a 32-country nirvana.

What class of new flag would be acceptable? What to do about an all-island national anthem? (This one is particularly urgent, in my opinion, for fear we’ll be stuck with ‘Ireland’s Call’). Do we build a neutrally-located parliament in the dead centre of Ireland, in order to ensure equal inconvenience for politicians of every party and persuasion?

Vexed questions to be sure. O very vexed indeed. They could even usher in a new golden era for RTÉ’s Liveline, it being the natural home of reasoned and rational debate.

However – using the thoughtful philosophy which never leads to bad decisions and flashing blue sirens – we may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb while we’re at it.

It’s high time our native tongue takes its place among the nations of the earth.

No, not Irish, our official first language which is beloved by many but fluently spoken by few.

And no, not English either, which became our second official language thanks to the beneficence of our next-door neighbours a few centuries ago.

Hiberno is what we now speak, all day, every day.

And while it is of course recognisably the English language, it has evolved linguistically, grammatically, emotionally and intellectually into something way beyond a quirky collection of dialects expressed in a charming range of regional accents.

Our own spin on things

The notion that so-called Hiberno-English is an expression of our Irishness and a deliberate divergence from British-English isn’t new. As in so many language-related things, James Joyce was way ahead of the rest of us, the auld wizard. In Ulysses, he took the spoken street vocabulary of the ordinary citizens of Ireland, muttered abracadabra over it, and conjured up a work of high literature which is hailed as a masterpiece of modernism. And no better buachaill to do it.

Brian O’Nolan aka Flann O’Brien/Myles na gCopaleen wasn’t far behind, being a writer of prodigious skill who moved effortlessly between Béarla and Gaeilge – sometimes within the same sentence. He celebrated Irish, while simultaneously puncturing the pomposity of Irish language purists, and was a genius at demonstrating how English becomes a different form of speech entirely when left to the mercy of his fellow countrymen and women. Even when satirising the lazy use of language via his recurring gag, the Catechism of Cliché, in his newspaper column, he was highlighting a form of everyday communication that was utterly familiar to his readers:

“What is it that a final drink will not do us?

“Harm.

“What is the condition which, by reason of the long time we will be subject to it, supports the theory that it would be safe to have one more?

“The condition of being dead.

“For what service maintained by the rating authority is it permissible to have still another final drink?

“The road.

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“And upon what did a bird never fly?

“Wan wing.”

Who among us hasn’t cast this conversational stone?

For years Irish authors have rewritten the English language to reflect the actual world they inhabit, proffering a blithe “We will yeah” to suggestions they should play nice in the Anglo-sandbox. Nowadays, there’s a hape of Hiberno writers, stretching far and wide from small town storytellers Donal Ryan and Kevin Barry to chroniclers of the capital such as Roddy Doyle and his Barrytown trilogy penned in pure Dublinese, and Paul Howard’s Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, a character fluent in the southside argot of Dortspeak. (In time we may pardon Americans for the sin of foisting Donald Trump on us, but we’ll never forgive them for exporting vocal fryyyyyy to Ireland).

The growing influence of Hiberno isn’t to suggest that Gaeilge is deader than the Monty Python parrot and is kipping on its back whilst pining for the fjords. Not a bit of it. But while the top-line figure in the 2022 Census declared that an impressive 1,873,997 people (about 40% of the population aged three and older) in the Republic of Ireland declared that they can speak Irish, as usual the divil is in the detail. When questioned further, 55% have only the cúpla focail and only 71,968 people speak Irish daily.

Therefore, returning Irish to its full pre-colonisation glory is a goal as unattainable as Dublin’s MetroLink finishing under-budget and on-schedule. Furthermore, several generations of former schoolkids still break out in hives at the sight of a copy of ‘Peig’, whose account of life on the sunlit uplands of the Blaskets inspired a host of bands such as The Smiths, Joy Division and Nine Inch Nails.

Instead of being taught Irish as the unfettered, expressive and earthy language that it is, most of us of a certain vintage were bludgeoned into bored submission by An Modh Coinníollach, and wanted no more truck with Gaeilge after exiting the school gates.

But more recently, the teanga’s a-changin.

It does be everywhere

Hiberno-English is in full blossom; our version of English has always been underpinned by Irish syntax and grammar and awash with Irish derivations and words borrowed from Irish, (think abú, bockety, fooster, flaithiúlach, plámás). We speak of doing the messages, acting the maggot, and slag off gurriers, gobdaws and goms. Yet no Dub would ever deploy the Cork word “langer” even in the heat of battle. And naturally the word “ride” is approached with great caution. Moreover, everyone knows that the National Word of Ireland is “grand”, an utterance of such nuanced complexity and sophisticated simplicity that even Joyce himself would’ve thrown his hat at it.

In fact, maybe “GRAND” should be printed across the new Irish flag.

Irish is everywhere, not as a standalone language but woven into everyday English speech. Apparel companies abound offering clothes festooned with Hiberno slogans, such Cork’s Hairy Baby tees (‘Shook As A Hand At Mass’); Waterford Whispers (‘Sure You Know Yourself: [phrase] mystic riddle issued by Irish people to fill the void in conversation and confuse’) and Fukil’s collection (‘Sin é’, ‘tír gan teanga, tír gan anam’).

And then there is the recent explosion of music steeped in Irish, entwined with English. Hiberno Central, where Irish and English streams cross seamlessly: the Fontaines DC’s Skinty Fia, CMAT’s Euro-Country, bands such as Ispíní na hÉireann, Madra Salach, Lankum. And leading the current charge is Kneecap, the Belfast hip-hop trio who have tapped into the understanding that Irish is mutable and Hiberno isn’t simply one evolving language but is an evolving identity which takes in politics, history, a sense of place. It’s non-elitist and springs from the ground up. And anyone can join in.

There was a great man, lexicographer and former English professor, the late Terry Dolan, who compiled this living, thriving language into several editions of the Dictionary of Hiberno-English, a treasure-trove of our everyday words and phrases. Another sadly-missed collector of words, Manchán Magan, similarly wrote books to remind us of the beauty of our native language and how it’s woven into our landscape and our psyche.

And now writer/comedian Colm O’Regan is publishing his second book on Hiberno-English, Tipping Away this week, which has a section devoted to “fighting words”, (including my own favourite, “ructions”).

There’s a sense that the English spoken by dwellers on this island, all four provinces of it, is accelerating away from the linguistic mothership and that a linguistic – not so much reunification as reformation – is underway.

About time. Now we’re sucking diesel.

Lise Hand is a journalist and writer. This column runs every Wednesday.