Newfoundland Irish

For Scottish Gaelic in Canada, see Canadian Gaelic.

Newfoundland Irish
Gaeilge Thalamh an Éisc
Native to	Canada
Region	Newfoundland, mostly on Avalon Peninsula
Native speakers	possibly none; moribund or extinct  (date missing)
Language family	Indo-European Celtic Insular Celtic Goidelic Irish Newfoundland Irish
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
The Irish Shore of Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula.

Newfoundland Irish (Irish: Gaeilge Thalamh an Éisc) is a moribund dialect of the Irish language specific to the island of Newfoundland, Canada. Its phonology and grammar resembled those of Munster Irish as spoken in the southeast of Ireland in the late eighteenth century, due to mass immigration from such counties as Waterford, Tipperary, and Cork.

Irish immigration

The Irish language arrived in Newfoundland as a consequence of British colonisation.

Sir Hubert Gilbert formally claimed Newfoundland as a colony of England In 1583. This, however, did not lead to permanent European residence. Attempts at settlement followed, however, and by 1620 fishermen from England's West Country dominated most of the east coast of Newfoundland, with the France dominant along the south coast and Northern Peninsula. After 1713, with the Treaty of Utrecht, the French ceded control of south and north shores of the island to the British, keeping only the nearby islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the south coast. The arrival of European settlers had a devastating effect on the indigenous inhabitants, both Beothuk and Micmac.

Irish were reported to be residing at Ireland's Eye, Trinity Bay by 1675, at Heart's Content in 1696 and at St. John's by 1705. Thomas Nash (Newfoundland), an Irish Catholic, was one of the later pioneers of Irish settlement in Newfoundland. A native of Kilkenny, he arrived on the Southern Shore in 1765, and eventually settled in the Branch area.

Between 1750 and 1830, and particularly between 1793 and 1815, large numbers of Irish, including many Irish speakers, emigrated to Newfoundland, known colloquially simply as "an tOileán" - the Island. A contemporary account from 1776 describes how seasonal workers from Cork, Kerry and elsewhere would come to Waterford to take passage to Newfoundland, taking with them all their necessities. A description of this enterprise (with a burlesque flavour) was given by the eighteenth century Munster poet Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Con Mara, describing his deep sea-chest filled with eggs, butter, bacon and other necessities:

Do thug an pobal i bhfochair a chéile

Chum mo mo chothuighthe i gcogadh nó i spéirlinn -

Stór nach g-caillfeadh suim de laethibh,

As cófra doimhin a d-toilfinn féin ann;

Do bhí seach bh-fichid ubh circe 'gus eunla ann

Le h-aghaidh a n-ithte chomh minic 's badh mhéin liom -

Cróca ime do dingeadh le saothar

As spóla soille ba throime 'ná déarfainn...

Kilkenny's contribution to this emigration was 25%, followed by Wexford (at least 23%), Waterford (at least 20%) and Tipperary (at least 15%), with Cork adding a further 6%. In Newfoundland, most settled on the Avalon Peninsula, with many in the main port and present capital of St. John’s. Wexford was the county of origin in which Irish was weakest. The other counties, mostly in Munster, were part of an area in which Irish was widely spoken until at least the middle of the nineteenth century. An illustration of this is furnished by the estimated percentage of Irish speakers for the decennial period 1771-1781 in the following counties: County Kilkenny 57%, County Tipperary 51%, County Waterford 86%, County Kerry 93% and County Cork 84%. This is borne out by observations made in 1819 by James McQuige, a veteran Methodist lay preacher in Irish: “In many parts of Ireland I have travelled frequently twenty miles without being able to obtain directions on my way, except in Irish... I need hardly dwell on the Catholic counties, Cork and Kerry, where even the few Protestants speak their native tongue [i.e. Irish].... In some of the largest southern towns, Cork, Kinsale, and even the Protestant town of Bandon, provisions are sold in the markets, and cried in the streets, in Irish”.

Some Irish immigrants to Newfoundland moved on, some stayed, and many others were part of an annual seasonal migration between Ireland and Newfoundland. Most landed in Newfoundland ports of St. John's and Harbour Grace, and many moved on to smaller outports on the coast of the Avalon Peninsula. By the 1780s, the Irish had become the dominant ethnic group in and around the St. John's area, in a population of about 3,200. Many were engaged in fishing and had little formal education. Many were servants who came to Newfoundland alone, but others had families, in which the labour of women and children was essential. Most families had a small plot of land.

By 1815 the Irish in Newfoundland numbered over 19,000. Emigration was encouraged by political discontent at home, overpopulation and impoverishment. It was aided by the fact that 1803 legislation designed to regulate conditions on British passenger vessels, and which made the passage too expensive for the poorest, such as the Irish, did not apply to Newfoundland, which was viewed as a fishery rather than a colony.

Language and culture

The coast of the Avalon Peninsula, in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador

The use of the Irish language in Newfoundland was closely tied to the persistance of an ancestral culture preserved in scores of enclaves along the coast. That culture, in the Avalon Peninsula and elsewhere, included feast days, holy wells, games, mumming, poetry, faction fighting and the game of hurling. Church services were often conducted in the Irish language. The post-1815 economic collapse in Newfoundland after the Napoleonic Wars caused many of these Irish-speaking settlers to flee to the nearby Maritime colonies, bringing their language with them.

Court records show that defendants sometimes required Irish-speaking interpreters, as in the case of an Irishman in Fermeuse in 1752..

Ecclesiastical records also illustrate the prevalence of Irish. In the mid-1760s the Reverend Laurence Coughlan, a Methodist preacher, converted most of the North Shore of Newfoundland to Protestantism. Observers credited the success of his evangelical revival at Carbonear and Harbour Grace to the fact that he was bilingual in English and Irish. There are references to the need for Irish-speaking priests between 1784 and 1807. In letters to Dublin, the Catholic Bishop James Louis O'Donel, when requesting a Franciscan missionary for the parishes of St. Mary's and Trepassey, said that it was absolutely necessary that he should be able to speak Irish. O’Donel himself was an Irish speaker, and the fact that his successor Bishop Patrick Lambert (a Leinsterman and coadjutor bishop of St John’s from 1806) had no Irish may have contributed to the mistrust shown towards him by Irish-speaking Newfoundlanders.

Last traces

The identities of the last speakers of the Newfoundland dialect are largely unknown, but scholars at Memorial University of Newfoundland have concluded that Newfoundland Irish became extinct in the first half of the twentieth century. The dialect left traces in English, such as the following: scrob "scratch" (Irish scríob), sleveen "rascal" (Irish slíbhín) and streel "slovenly person" (Irish sraoill), along with grammatical features like the "after" perfect as in "she's already after leavin'” (Irish tá sí tar éis imeacht).

The most notable local scholar of Newfoundland Irish after it had perished (some time after the First World War) was Aloysius (Aly) O'Brien, born in St. John's on 16 June 1915. He died there on 8 August 2008. O'Brien's paternal grandmother, Bridget Conway, had spoken Irish but his father did not. O'Brien taught himself Irish by means of language records, cassette tapes and the booklets of Father Eugene O'Growney, a notable figure in Ireland’s Gaelic Revival. O’Brien was thus enabled to become an authority on the many Irish words in the local English of the area, and became a respected tutor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He claimed, despite this, that he himself was not fluent in the dialect, lacking opportunities for immersion.

Current status

There is no evidence of any current attempt to revive the Newfoundland dialect of Irish. There is some interest in the language generally, as indicated by the fact that Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, employs one of the Irish Language Instructors appointed every year by the Ireland Canada University Foundation to work in Canadian universities and support the Irish language in the wider community.

The disappearance of Newfoundland Irish may be contrasted to the continued use of Scottish Gaelic in Cape Breton, though the survival of Gaelic there is not assured.

See also

• Irish language outside Ireland
• Irish Newfoundlanders
• List of extinct languages of North America
• Scottish Gaelic in Canada
• Newfoundland English

References

• [1] Corkery, Daniel (1925). The Hidden Ireland: A Study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century. M.H. Gill and Son, Ltd. 

• De Brún, Pádraig (2009). Scriptural Instruction in the Vernacular: The Irish Society and Its Teachers 1818-1827. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. 

• Fitzgerald, Garrett, ‘Estimates for baronies of minimal level of Irish-speaking amongst successive decennial cohorts, 117-1781 to 1861-1871,’ Volume 84, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 1984.

• Kirwan, William J. (1993). ‘The planting of Anglo-Irish in Newfoundland’ in Focus on Canada, Sandra Clark (ed.). John Benjamin’s Publishing Company. ISBN 90-272-4869-9

• O’Grady, Brendan (2004). Exiles and Islanders: The Irish Settlers of Prince Edward Island. MQUP. 

Further reading

Ó hEadhra, Aogán (1998). Na Gaeil i dTalamh an Éisc. Coiscéim. 

External links

• Newfoundland: The Most Irish Place Outside of Ireland
• Dictionary of Newfoundland English Online