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The Irish Language
Irish is the official language of the Republic of Ireland and since April, 10th, 1998, when it was signed the Good Friday Agreement, it has been officially recognised also in Northern Ireland. With 260,000 million speakers, Ireland is the country which includes the majority of Irish speakers, followed by the UK, with 95,000 million.History
Irish has been considered a live language from its origins up to the 19th century. From that moment on, it unfortunately went through a period of decline, and only Enlish was seen as the language of the future. Also political leadres, such as O'Connel, suported this idea of Irish as a minority language and Irish was finalle banned from National schools. Things got worse when the country was stricken by the Great Famine, which hit a great number of Irish speakers.At the end of the 19th century, thanks to the work of Neilson and other Irish Protestants, there was a revival of interest in the language. The process had its turning point in 1922, when Ireland became an independent country and, in the attempt of creating a united State with its own language, Irish became compulsory at school and to join the army. With the Official Language Act of 2003 Irish became compulsory, together with English, in any publication by governamental bodies. If we analyse Irish situation nowadays, the natural conclusion would be that the important promotion carried out by 20th century's political and cultural elite was not totally good for Irish. Indeed, the imposition of Irish as an official language by law produced the opposite effect: as people felt obliged to speak irish, they didn't want to do it. Nowadays, almost every Irish is bilingual, but the national language is used only in a restricted number of situations, as for everyday interactions English is usually preferred.
Dialects
Irish counts with several dialects, but if we consider the geographical distribution, three major variations areas can be identified: the provinces of Munster (Cúige Mumhan), Connacht (Cúige Chonnacht) and Ulster (Cúige Uladh).These dialects are almost unintelligible one with the other and it is difficult to define exactly to which extent they differ from standard language. Even simple, everyday phrases are carachterised by a surprising dialectal variation. If we consider as an example the question "How are you?", we see that in Ulster it is "cad é mar atá tú?" (which in English would sound as "what is it as you are?"), in Connacht is "cén chaoi a bhfuil tú?" ("what way [is it] that you are?") while in Munster they say "conas taoí?" ("how are you?").
Literature
The fact that Ireland is a small country didn't prevent a real explosion of literary creativity. Indeed, in all of its branches Irish literature counts with some of the greatest writers and playwrights of all times.It's complulsory to mention two 18th century's masterpieces such as "The Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift and "The Vicar of Wakefield" by Oliver Goldsmith. The style and the works of W.B. Yeats represented a model for the writers of the subsequent generation, which include literary genius as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, both of whom dominated 20th century's drama, poetry and fiction. Joyce was so skillful that he was considered the inventor of a new literary genre called "stream of consciousness", which is best exemplified in his popular work "Ulysses". The following generations of Irish novelists, for instance that of Brian O'nolan, were highly influenced by Joyce's modernist style. Finally, another important name of Irish literature is Bram Stroke, author of the popular novel "Dracula", which has became a great cinematography success.