Dia Dhuit

Dia dhuit my friends,

I returned this evening from my first Spoken Irish class, very excited, very painfully aware of just how badly I've been pronouncing Irish words. Gaeilge? Give it your best go, but I still can't pronounce it.

The thing is, Irish is everywhere. Street names, campus signs, handouts...everywhere. The Irish always comes first in large letters, with the English written in smaller text underneath. Irish is making a comeback. As far as I know, all Irish students are required to take 13 or 14 years of Irish as part of their early schooling. Several parts of Ireland are classified as Gaeltacht, Irish-speaking regions in which Irish is the dominant language. We have a few Irish language groups at UCC. It's a big thing.

So big that it was a little overwhelming upon first arrival. Enter myself and dear mother, driving the rental car through downtown Cork like the superstar she is. Well, Cork does not adhere to a nice clean grid system (founded 915 by Vikings), streets change names like 10 times over a few kilometres, and the biggest letters on street signs are in Irish. My distance vision wasn't good enough to read the English version in time for us to actually decide to turn, so the Navigator was useless--and sometimes essentially convinced that there was no English version available. But pro tip, it was all good after we decided to give up on the maps and just ask directions.

The second very noticeable use of Irish is on bus displays: you know, that scrolling bar along the top of the bus that tells you where it's headed and when it's supposed to get there. Supposedly it switches between Irish and English, but most of the time you seem to find yourself looking at it in Irish mode. But no worries, you can usually detect some similarities between the Irish and English forms...either that or you learn fast.

Example: 'Cork' doubles in length in Irish to become Corcaigh.

Then there was my first day of classes at UCC. Enter that nervous, essentially freshman-reborn wymana. Armed with her shaking campus map and a clueless expression on her face, she power-walks to the O'Rahilly building 30 minutes early for her first class. Not only can she not pronounce O'Rahilly, but according to those at orientation, the O'Rahilly building is notoriously hard to navigate and acts as the Irish language department headquarters. Well, if that didn't exactly click for wymana before, it certainly does the instant she walks into the lobby. Everything is in Irish. She looks for the English--usually that's the small print at the bottom of a sign--but it doesn't seem to be there. She vaguely wonders if she is panicking too much to really see what's around her: an extremely valid possibility. But after walking down a hallway of long Irish words that wymana has no clue how to pronounce, much less understand, she resorts to lesson #1 of Driving in Cork: ditch the map and ask the person. So she marches right up to the front desk and asks security where the heck she has to go. It proves effective. Wymana makes it to her class with enough time left before lecture to stop hyperventilating and decide that she needs to learn some Irish pronto.

In sum: Most signs appear in Irish first, English second. This is really cool, because you start to pick up the words even if you don't have any clue on the pronunciation. I'm hoping my Spoken Irish class will help with that.