There was a thing going earlier this year about how modern urban Irish speakers and the Gaeltacht crowd are finding it increasingly difficult to understand eachother. Is the language splitting up somewhere in the middle?
This has been discussed quite a lot on IGTF, as you can imagine.
My take is that the language will tend more and more toward urban Irish, as that’s where speakers are concentrated these days. I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing either…if the language is to survive, it needs to move forward…not remain enshrined in the Gaeltacht.
I suspect that rural speakers will find their speech gradually tending this way as well…even if they don’t like to speak to people from the cities, TG4 and the gaelscoileanna are likely to move their children’s speech in the urban direction.
Redwolf