Irish orthography: what do teachers and learners need to know about it, and why?

Abstract

Irish has significant State support, but lacks a research base to support the teaching of Irish reading. Current approaches to teaching Irish reading are presented, and outcomes summarised. Issues of consistency and complexity in Irish orthography are discussed in light of an analysis of a corpus of early reader texts, and the formulation of rules for discriminating between words which are regular by letter-sound and grapheme-sound rules is outlined. While the most frequent words show a high level of regularity, underlying rules are very complex. The need to target decoding skills early is discussed. Recommendations regarding the teaching of aspects of Irish orthography are presented.

Keywords:

• Irish
• orthography
• heritage language teaching
• teacher training
• teaching methods
• beginning readers

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Government of Ireland senior fellowship to the first author from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and by support from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Minnesota to the second author. The help of An Gúm and ITÉ is also gratefully acknowledged. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Notes

In Irish, the language is referred to as Gaeilge, and the term ‘Gaelic’ is derived from this. However, the term ‘Irish’ is preferred in Ireland when referring to the language in English, in order to distinguish it from (Scots) Gaelic.

In dialects, where nn, ll, rr, represent distinct phonemes from n, l, r, this number may be higher.

A digraph like eo functions like the single vowel in cód /ko:d/, identifying both vowel pronunciation and surrounding consonant quality. It regularly signals a long /o:/ following a slender consonant and preceding a broad one, functioning identically to ó, used when both preceding and following consonants are broad. The only fixed sequence that does not represent a long vowel is ei, which always represents short /e/ before a consonant. It is simply a quirk of Irish orthography that the grapheme e appears alone only in final position (e.g. te ‘hot’). Long /e:/ is also always written as a digraph before consonants, éi before a slender consonant or éa when it is broad. In what follows, we will treat ei as a regular digraph, since the i is essentially redundant with respect to consonant quality, but will consider the a which follows é and precedes a broad consonant to form a digraph with that consonant, according to the rule presented in (3). The a of the short digraph ea is usually the pronounced vowel, with the e signalling the quality of the preceding consonant and it is treated as a digraph with that consonant.

No studies are available for written Irish targeting adults (and non-learners), but we suspect that the vocabulary found in such works, apart from the commonest function words listed above, will most likely vary more than in children's literature, leaving open the possibility of greater irregularity across texts.