The Gaeilge revival: How to use your cúpla focal every day

Sian Conway is a writer and content creator based in Dublin whose work orbits around food, pop and queer culture through an Irish lens. Here, she writes about why we should use Gaeilge more in our everyday lives, and how to do it.

I used to kind of hate my Irishness, if I'm being totally honest. Maybe it’s a lack mentality, but what we had going over here never seemed as good as elsewhere. Not as big in the eyes of the world as the UK, not as shiny and expansive as America; as sunny and laid-back as Australia, or as chic and romantic as continental Europe.

Our weather was bad, our island was boring. The sound of my dad’s bodhrán thrumming along to a trad CD blaring from the sitting room first thing on a Saturday morning drove me up the wall. Our flag’s colours were ugly and unwearable and to top it all off, our language was crap — no one else in the world even knew it!

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Clearly, since then, I’ve done a lot of unpacking. I came to find it bizarre that I could speak better French and Italian than I could Irish, despite learning them much later than when I uttered my first sentence as Gaeilge at the tender age of four (it was 'an bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas', of course).

So I looked inward, picked apart my complexes and channeled more love into what is actually a beautiful and poetic language. Daily Duolingo sessions, tuning into Radió na Life or How to Gael’s podcast and watching more video content as Gaeilge ensued.

I was suddenly ravenous, like speaking predominantly English all my life wasn’t nearly as nutritional as a singular, remedial interaction with someone else in Irish.

I was slightly reticent to write this during Seachtain na Gaeilge, which itself has been promoting the Irish language since the turn of the 20th century. Partly because I didn't want it to sound reductive, like how some corporations break their backs to hoist pride flags on office windows on the first of June to "show solidarity" (while really doing nothing for the queer community on a more tangible level).

But mostly because I don’t want this to be a seasonal plea for you to use what little or loads of Irish you have, but rather an evergreen-white-and-orange one. They say a dog’s not just for Christmas and likewise, a language is for life.

The Gaeilge revival we’re currently witnessing is thanks to the efforts of so many. Most recently, the worldwide success of Kneecap and the 2022 film An Cailín Ciúin, which brought our language to the world stage and said ithe suas, a chairde.

But if it weren’t for the people who, in the face of declining numbers of Gaeilgeoirs and funding and investment in Irish language facilities and infrastructure, still kept speaking the language, we certainly would never have made it here. A people refusing to be stamped out even when they were ignored - same as it ever was.

Cut to the present day, where media in our native tongue is reaching people far beyond our little island. So much so, it’s become a language people actively want to learn in their own time.

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It’s sometimes surreal to see and hear non-native speakers on their self-directed Gaeilge journeys on the likes of TikTok (Joshua Scott Davis, a cheer instructor in North Carolina who has amassed over 30,000 followers thanks to his Irish-langauage videos, being one notable example).

The hashtag #gaellinn is a wonderful place on the platform, awash with ever-increasing content of people doing outfit of the day posts (feisteas don lae), translating common phrases and idioms as Gaeilge and people teaching the basic grammar some of us (who aren’t fluent) might have forgotten since school.

You are the culture you consume and I think for a long time on this island - particularly when we started getting a bit of money and fancying ourselves as European more than Irish - we were fed and thus consumed a lot of foreign media, namely English and American media. More often than not in my own childhood, what was reflected on my TV screens or in the books I read didn’t match my reality.

The more Irish that’s spoken, the more speakers it breeds. In music, Dublin-based singer-songwriter Holly Munroe released a version of her single The Water in Irish; and the band Madra Salach’s nu-trad sound with a mix of Irish and English lyrics have earned them a huge following alone. We’ve never seen so many prints, clothing and jewellery brandishing cute words as Gaeilge.

Around Fairview, I’ve seen the most heart-wrenchingly sweet graffiti scrawled on walls that read: táim ag foghlaim arís (I am learning again). For a nation so historically steeped in shame that it’s become a meme, it heartens me to see less of it about the level our respective Irish is at.

There's more focus on picking up where you may have left off, whether it was primary school, the leaving cert or even if you never learned it to begin with.

At the end of the day, it’s your language and it’s always going to be there for you - no matter how long it’s been.

So whether you’re líofa ar fad or just have the cúpla focal, use the language! Here are some starting points:

• Say go raibh maith agat to your bus driver or slán to the barista when you’ve picked up your coffee and are heading off.
• Places like Hynes bar in Stoneybatter offer a wee discount if you order your pint as gaeilge. Similarly, The Fumbally café have some signage encouraging you to order as Gaeilge freisin.
• Connolly’s Books in Temple Bar have drop-in tae agus comhrá sessions every Friday from 11am-3pm.
• There’s new groups like Craobh Chonradh na Gaeilge popping up all over the shop, organising yoga evenings, workshops and hangouts to encourage community-building as gaeilge.
• If nothing else, find a friend and challenge yourselves to just fifteen minutes of chat — even if it’s super basic. Don’t be afraid of mistakes, they’re natural. Perfection isn’t the goal, it’s simply practice.

We keep our gorgeous language - and by extension, our culture - alive by using it, engaging with it, creating with it and sharing it with others. A lot of us have dreamed of days like this, and I’m so happy to see our language blossoming in this new generation.

As we develop, so does it. All those nay-sayers, who’ve imposed their unwanted cynicism on others with their talk of "dead language", have been reeeeal quiet the last little while. I for one am relishing their silence.