The Irish Language: Why Ireland Became English-Speaking

Irish History Podcast

Fin Dwyer

History, Interviews, War Of Independence, Ireland, Norman Invasion, Vikings, Great Famine, Great Hunger, Irish History

4.7 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How did Ireland become an English-speaking country? Was it colonialism, the Great Hunger, the education system or emigration that drove the shift from Irish to English?

In this episode, I am joined by Dr Nicholas Wolf to explore one of the biggest questions in Irish history: how Irish, once the dominant language of the island, lost ground over the centuries.

Nicholas explains how this is a multifaceted story, beginning in the wars of the seventeenth century but continuing through the Great Famine of the 1840s and beyond.

While he explores the impact conquest, plantation and emigration, Nicholas also explains why English became so necessary in everyday life in Ireland.

About Nicholas Wolf

Nicholas Wolf is a historian and librarian at New York University, where he is co-head of NYU Library’s Data Services department and associate director of research and publishing initiatives at Glucksman Ireland House. He is the author of An Irish-Speaking Island (2014), a social and cultural history of Ireland’s Irish-language community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture and the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books. His research into the social and cultural history of the Irish language, Irish Catholicism, and Ireland’s population history has received grants and fellowships from the Gardiner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, and Newman College at the University of Melbourne.

Get An Irish-Speaking Island (2014) https://uwpress.wisc.edu/Books/A/An-Irish-Speaking-Island

Nicholas’s website: https://nmwolf.net

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-wolf-204a24335

Check out this digitisation project Nicholas was involved in, focusing on the bilingual historical newspaper An Gaodhal: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/angaodhal

Sound by Kate Dunlea

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Attitudes to the Irish language are rapidly changing in Ireland in the 21st century.
0:09.6	It's becoming more popular than I can ever remember with more and more people trying to learn
0:15.5	the language. But this all begs the question what happened to Irish to begin with.
0:26.2	Four centuries ago, the vast majority of people on the island spoke it on a daily basis, but within 200 years it was rapidly declining.
0:30.5	Now, you'll often read single-line explanations for this,
0:34.5	The Great Hunger, the education system, immigration, and sometimes even the Catholic
0:39.1	Church are blamed. This episode charts the history of the Irish language from the early 17th century
0:45.8	when it was spoken across all levels of society, from the castles of the Gaelic aristocracy
0:51.3	to the peasants in the field. It takes the story from that point forward
0:55.9	through the impact of colonisation, plantation,
0:59.6	the development of an education system in the 1830s,
1:02.4	the blow that was the Great Hunger in the 1840s,
1:05.6	and then emigration,
1:07.1	painting a picture of how and why the language spoken
1:10.5	across the island of Ireland
1:12.0	had largely shifted from Irish to English by the late 19th century.
1:19.3	Hello and welcome to the Irish History podcast. My name is Finn DeWire.
1:23.9	At the chart of the history of the Irish language, I'm joined by Dr. Nicholas Wolfe.
1:28.1	Nicholas is a historian and librarian at New York University, where he's the co-head of NYU Libraries, Data Services Department,
1:35.5	an associate director of research and publishing initiatives at Gluck's Man, Ireland House.
1:40.1	His 2014 book, An Irish-speaking Ireland, is a social and cultural history of Ireland's Irish language community in the 18th and 19th centuries.
1:49.0	Now, that's a multi-award-winning book, and I can't recommend it enough if you want to dive deeper into this story that we're going to talk about today.
	...

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