Ok…
Never mind.
Just kidding. Um…this question has floated around in the back of my head for a while now and I’m sure some people here’ll be able to shed insight.
Why is it that the Irish language was so overtaken by English and Ireland speaks mainly English, but Wales, which is connected England by land still has such a strong Welsh speaking community (at least compared to Ireland)?
Does that make sense, what I’m trying to ask?
Yes, it does…someone else might be able to answer this better, but basically what I’ve learned through my studies is that the Welsh were able to preserve their culture longer than other parts of the British Isles because they did not suffer the same severity of various invasions from the Romans, Saxons, and Normans. Invasions caused the cultures to became diluted.
Like I said, someone else might be able to explain in more depth and with more authority… 
The Great Hunger has a lot to do with it. In the mid 19th century, a large part of the Irish-speaking population of Ireland either emmigrated or died.
Then there were the national schools, which were the only hope of most Irish children for an education. They campaigned to stamp out Irish, even sending children home with slates tied around their necks, which the parents were supposed to mark every time the child spoke Irish, so he could be punished for it at school the next day. While many parents refused to subject their children to such abuse, many more saw their only hope in education, and became willing accomplices in the campaign to destroy their language and culture.
Redwolf
The play “Translations” by Brian Friel deals with the replacement of Irish with English. In it the Irish are depicted as having a sound knowledge of greek and latin, which would make some sense as the catholic mass at the time would have been through latin.
Apparently one of the strengths of Welsh is that it was the language of the church.
my guess is that’s what made the difference, the Irish could change languages and keep their religious lives the same, this wouldn’t have been possible for the Welsh.
Actually thinking about it, the famine probably had a bigger impact, but maybe religion had something to do with it.
No, because your question is based on a false premise. Wales has no equivalent of The Gaeltacht, for example. You also forgot Scotland, which is connected to England by land and still has her own gaelic.
Teehee. The whole point of conducting services in Latin was so that indigenous folk wouldn’t understand a word being said. It added to the ‘mystery’ of it all. That’s also why the Catholic church ensured that books were written in Latin, and lessons taught in Latin, so that none of the peasants could possibly educate themselves, unless they joined the club of course (and membership was generally reserved for the wealthy). Thusly did the Church ensure its power and dominion, until the time came when they were finally obliged to share power with Governments.
Nuts, GK beat me to it (again). Distracting me with Folk Festivals, the prestidigitator. I was checking some facts, and I think your initial surmise is based on incorrect information.
In the 2001 census, Wales had 2.9 million inhabitants, of which 0.5 million spoke Welsh (but not necessarily as a primary Language).
In 1996 The Republic Of Ireland had 3.6 million inhabitants. I can’t find the statistic of how many speak Irish fluently, but I’m expecting it to be greater than 620,000. see link below, I was wrong
As Gary says, in the Gaeltacht, Irish is spoken as a primary language, whereas in Wales there is no such specific “Welsh Speaking” area. It’s spoken in North Wales and the more rural areas.
Both Languages are experiencing a resurgence of interest, and will hopefully not go the way of Manx or Cornish, but there are more folk of Irish descent round the world (America in particular) than Welsh, so I would hazard a guess that Irish has more fluent speakers than Welsh.
Historically, Wales became a principality of England during the reign of Edward I, the Hammer of the Scots, after the death of Owen Glendower.
Ted I’s son, Edward II, was the first Prince of Wales (and the first English King to die with a red-hot poker up his tradesman’s entrance).
Both Wales and Scotland maintained a degree of independence because of their inaccessibility (they have mountains), and thus the native tongues survived.
Edit:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0225_030225_irishlanguage.html
Nuts, edited to add link.
I believe the International Phonetics Association’s handbook (which includes Irish in its diagrammed languages) estimated about 80,000 - 90,000 speakers, but as I don’t have the book I can’t confirm it. That’s about the same statistic I was given by the director of the Oideas Gael language school, in the Donegal Gaeltacht (summer 2003).
The problem with usage surveys is that a lot of Irish people have just a few words, or maybe some basic phrases that they remember from school (where studying Irish is mandatory), and don’t use it in everyday life. There’s no way to tell whether people with that level of knowledge and usage are marking “yes” or “no” when surveyed about knowing Irish.
IIRC,
Elizabeth I encouraged Welsh language in the church to spread the protestant word.
Wales was another route through which the catholics could have invaded England.
Mukade
Thanks to everybody who’s shed insight.
Shwmae bawb. Here’s me wading in in my first post. Don’t wanna be forward but…
I can’t say much about Irish, although it does surprise some people that there are quite a lot more Welsh speakers than Irish speakers. So, this comes down to historical events and attitudes towards our languages.
Erm. This could be a long post (but it’s a complicated subject) so I’ll try to look at the situation of Welsh nowadays, firstly. Yeah, we have around half a million speakers but Avanutria’s point about judging who can actually speak a language is a good one. In the 2001 Census there were questions about people’s ability to speak, read and write Welsh and not all who had one skill could claim all three.
For example, there are more people who can speak the language than feel comfortable writing it (mind you, the same goes for many English speakers’ written skills, and no doubt for other languages as well) so, there can be problems of definition
Be that as it may, we can say that there are around half a million people who claim they can speak Welsh. Numbers did go up since the 1991 census. However, that is not the whole story. Whilst it’s good that there seem to be higher numbers of speakers, the number of geographical communities with high percentages of Welsh speakers went down. So, the number of places in which one can walk into a shop or pub and ask for a loaf of bread of a pint of milk (or a loaf of milk and a pint of bread, whatever…) is decreasing.
This has got serious implications for the viability of Welsh as a medium of day-to-day communication. These are the sorts of places where it is natural and normal to speak Welsh, and there are fewer and fewer of them. These areas are in primarily in parts of North and West Wales, by the way. They have been known as Y Fro Gymraeg – the Welsh area, basically - but some people think that this term is losing relevance as it has shrunk so much.
So, there are more speakers of Welsh in Wales than of Icelandic in Iceland but Welsh is the minority language. We face a battle to make Welsh relevant and normal for people. English is so powerful, globalisation is so prevalent, and Welsh is reaping a bitter harvest after centuries of neglect at best, and attempts to extirpate it at worst.
So there have been rising numbers of kids educated through the medium of Welsh in areas which have historically lost Welsh as the main community language – places like the South Wales valleys – but often those kids don’t use the language outside school hours, and forget it or ignore it after leaving school, or just don’t get the chance to use much of it. Those who learn the language as adults can often find few opportunities to use it outside class too. Then in traditional Welsh speaking areas there are smaller percentages of kids speaking Welsh than in the past, and We’sh can be seen as old-fashioned and boring… Don’t think there’s been much Welsh on MTV, for example.
It’s great that there are more Welsh speakers in absolute terms, but unless we can make Welsh a normal, relevant medium of conversation for more people, many of us believe that it will not survive as a community language. So, there are more Welsh speakers in Cardiff than in Caernarfon in north west wales, but the percentage is much higher in Caernarfon and you if walk into a pub there, it’s Welsh you’ll hear in the main.
This is one of the main things that makes people want to speak a language; it’s what makes it relevant to their everyday lives. So it’s partly a percentage game, as well as a numbers game. We need to increase both. Ain’t easy….
These problems face minority languages. Irish too, of course. It’s a hard life, aye.
Still, nil desperandum. There are people trying to save the language, and not all of 'em are as gloomy as me
And hey, I didn’t even start on the historical bit…
Please do! I’d like to hear what you have to say, as someone living in Wales. It’s one thing to read about it, and quite another to live it.
Be careful - last time someone asked me a simple historical question I still hadn’t finished within an hour… 
My last post is all disjointed too. Oh, the shame…
Quite. It’s a heck of a lot easier to read a language tolerably than to write or speak it.
You may want to look here</a](http://www.cso.ie/statistics/irishspeakerssince1861.htm">here</a)> at the official statistics for Irish speakers in the State (not the island).
Thanks Peter, that certainly makes a difference, and suggests that my initial impression was correct, that there are more Irish speakers per capita than Welsh speakers. In fact more than 50% of the population claim to speak Irish.
Of course we still have the question of what constitutes being a fluent speaker of Irish, but from the official statistics, it would seem that Irish as a language is in far less danger of disappearing than Welsh.