Discover Irish
The current website – Discover Irish – is intended as a resource for anyone studying the Irish language. This includes students at various levels, colleagues from linguistics outside of Ireland who wish to find out more about Irish and any other individuals who have an interest in language and in the Irish language in particular.
Apart from general information on the Irish language and the cultural context in which it arose and is currently embedded, there is a special focus in this website on the dialects of Irish and the different pronunciations of the language which they represent. There would seem to be a definite need for a linguistic guide to the dialects because textbooks on the Irish language rarely if ever give any advice about how the language is pronounced. The reason for this is that there are different pronunciations in different parts of the country but none is regarded as the standard. In this website the issue of varying pronunciations is given special attention and many sound files have been included to illustrate realisations in the diverse dialects of Irish still spoken today.
The material in this website is organised into sections, each of which corresponds to a menu on the top row of the desktop. Each menu then leads to a series of sub-menus which contain texts explaining various aspects of the topic of the particular menu.
The content of the website can also be displayed in tree form, to view it in this way click on Menus as tree on the desktop. Click on the first node of the tree and then on the button labelled Desktop (on the right) to return to the initial screen of the website.
Apart from the menus and the tree display, there is a site map for the entire website. This consists of a list of all modules organised into groups. The site map can be accessed from the desktop or via the following link:
A further means of accessing information is to go to the list of themes and choose a topic there. This list is somewhat different from the sitemap (which leads to the sections into which the website is divided) in that it is organised on a smaller scale and offers precise information on a particular aspect of the Irish language. The list of themes can be reached by clicking on the button Themes at the top of a text window or by clicking on the word themes in the desktop picture or by following this link:
A companion website to the current one and one which is concerned exclusively with the pronunciation of Irish. It contains much information on the phonology and phonetics of Irish with many sound files illustrating important points about the sound system of the language.It can be accessed via the following link:
Another resource centre by the present author with a similar structure and amount of information, this time for Irish English, which students or scholars might be interested in looking at, can be accessed via the following link:
Two further resources, again by the present author, with information about the history of English and varieties of English, intended for students or scholars alike, can be reached via the following links:
The information on this website has been deposited here so that users can access information on Irish with maximum ease in the hope that this will heighten their interest in and improve their knowledge of the language. The material here, the texts, the timelines, the galleries, the bibliographies, etc. have been compiled by the author of this website, Raymond Hickey, and if you use this data for your own work – term essays, publications, presentations or whatever – then you are asked to acknowledge this accordingly.
Constructive criticism concerning this website is welcome and may be conveyed to the author at the following address: raymond.hickey@uni-due.de
Raymond Hickey
February 2012
PS A word to students: websites do not replace books. They are intended to offer overviews and general information which students can use when beginning their study of a particular subject. When studying the Irish language, a website is particularly useful because many maps and sound files can be included. But remember that for linguistic details and analyses there is no substitute for books, so make sure that you progress from here to the printed word.
