Irish language

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Irish (Standard Irish: Gaeilge), also known as Irish Gaelic (Gaeilge na hÉireann) or (primarily outside Ireland) simply Gaelic ( GAY-lik), is a Celtic language within the Indo-European language family native to the Irish people and indigenous to the island of Ireland. It was the first language of the majority of the population until the 19th century, when English gradually became dominant, particularly in the last decades of the century. Today, Irish is still commonly spoken as a first language in Ireland's Gaeltacht regions, in which 2% of Ireland's population lived in 2022. The total number of people (aged 3 and over) in Ireland who declared they could speak Irish in April 2022 was 1,873,997, representing 40% of respondents, but of these, 472,887 said they never spoke it and a further 551,993 said they only spoke it within the education system. Linguistic analyses of Irish speakers are therefore based primarily on the number of daily users in Ireland outside the education system, which...

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