Irish

About Irish

Irish, Gaeilge in the language itself and often called Irish Gaelic, is the first official language of Ireland and also has official status in Northern Ireland. In the 2022 census about 1.9 million people in Ireland said they could speak Irish, but only about 72,000 speak it every day outside school. It is still the community language of the Gaeltacht areas, mostly along the west coast. Scottish Gaelic is a close relative with its own Gaelic category.

Irish spelling follows its own rules, so words rarely sound the way an English reader expects. bh and mh usually sound like v or w, s before e or i sounds like sh and an accent mark, the síneadh fada, makes a vowel long, as in á. The three main dialects, Munster, Connacht and Ulster, differ in sounds and some words. Irish has no special polite "you": tú is for one person and sibh for more. The usual greeting is Dia duit, "God be with you".

FamilyIndo-European, Celtic (Goidelic)
Speakersabout 1.9 million able to speak it, about 72,000 daily speakers outside school (2022)
Official inIreland
Statusdefinitely endangered (UNESCO)
ScriptLatin alphabet
Codesga (ISO 639-1), gle (ISO 639-3)

Speaker numbers: Census of Population 2022, Central Statistics Office, Ireland. Classification: Wikidata. Retrieved 26 September 2026.

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