Gweedore - Language

Language

The predominantly spoken language of the district is Irish, but English can be heard and understood as well. All schools, religious services and advertisements are through Irish. Hundreds of students from all over Ireland attend a summer school at Coláiste Cholmcille (Columcille's College) in order to further their knowledge and understanding of the Irish language. This is a Gaeltacht area, where the Irish language is the first spoken, providing an unbroken link with millennia of Irish history and culture.

Since most of the inhabitants of the village are bilingual, it is common to hear English vocabulary used within an Irish sentence and vice versa. A rich subset of unique vocabulary and phrases has arisen from this bilingualism and owing to this, the village has attracted some curious interest from both lexicographers and etymologists in the past. For example, the Irish suffix -ailte or -eáilte is used to form a Gaelicised version of English verbs, as in wreckailte - tired.

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