My Great Grandparents Stopped Speaking Their Endangered Native Language
As I learn Irish, I recover some of what they lost
Like many Irish Americans, my mother knew Éirinn go Brách is Irish for Ireland Forever, and Céad Míle Fáilte means One Hundred Thousand Welcomes. She knew uisce means water and is the origin of the word whiskey. And mo chroí means my heart. She would not have said the provocative póg mo thóin but may have thought it once or twice. I learned these words too as a child and for a long time, I believed they were my only Irish. But serendipitously, I discovered otherwise.
Mom’s grandparents Jeremiah and Catherine Sullivan were from the Gaeltacht, which is the term for a handful of districts in Ireland where Irish is spoken in the homes. There were not many Gaeltacht regions a hundred years ago and there are even fewer today. Although Irish is an official language of Ireland, it is also an endangered language.
Jeremiah and Catherine both came to America from the Iveragh peninsula of County Kerry as young adults near the turn of the twentieth century. They spoke Irish in their new home in Springfield, Massachusetts. They named their second child Nora, but my mother only knew her aunt by the name of Nonie.
As a child, I knew my great-aunt Nonie as an elderly woman living in a nursing home. On our last visit, Nonie had recently had her leg amputated due to diabetes and was asleep in her bed. Seeing her so fragile prompted my mother to tell me that when Nonie was in first grade, her teacher told her parents that Nonie was “slow” and they should take her out of school to be trained as a maid. My mother held her aunt’s hand. “Poor Nonie,” Mom sighed, breathing in quickly to keep from crying.
My mother shared that Nonie’s first language was Irish and so she was not accustomed to speaking English when she entered school. The moment the teacher told Jeremiah and Catherine that their daughter was not worthy of education was the moment they stopped speaking their native Irish to their children.
On a trip to Ireland as an adult, I saw a daisy on a postal stamp with the inscription nóinín. I thought of Nonie and realized that Jeremiah and Catherine had given their daughter a nickname meaning daisy. Why was the third N dropped and was it about the time the family stopped speaking Irish? Did her parents continue calling her Nóinín when everyone else knew her as Nonie? The name Nonie does not mean anything to our family. But the name Nóinín did, if only to her parents.
To have stopped speaking their mother tongue at home was a loss and sacrifice for Jeremiah and Catherine. But they did it for their Nóinín as well as their other children. There was no future for their children in knowing two languages, one being impractical in America.
I have difficulty with spoken language. I mix up words, saying lunch when I mean dinner and out when I mean in. During my childhood, not wanting to be teased, I only spoke to people whom I trusted and never in big groups.
Although I speak more freely as an adult than when I was a child, I am often exhausted at the effort to communicate and sometimes find it easier to just remain silent. I wonder if I would still struggle with speech if my family had retained their language. Would I feel more at ease expressing myself in Irish?
I may value the Irish language more than I would if I did not have difficulty speaking. I am fascinated with Irish and love to research the meanings of Irish names, places, and words and often listen to songs in Irish. I want to see the Irish language continue, to survive despite being under threat, despite my great-grandparents’ necessary surrender of it.
When I was in college, my mother got a puppy. And if the dog barked loudly, she would tell him “esht.” Her four-year-old granddaughter would also say “esht” to Darby when he yapped. I assumed esht meant hush in Irish and that it was a word Mom remembered her parents telling their pet dog during her childhood. Mom’s immigrant Irish mother was not from the Gaeltacht but would have known some Irish. Mom’s American father, Nonie’s younger brother, a son of native Irish speakers, would have known a few words too.
It was poignant to me that one of the few words my grandparents and then my mother would pass down from a rare language would be a word used to quiet a pet. I wondered to myself, “so this is how a language declines, so this is how it disappears?” I was at the time enrolled in an Irish literature class and it was not lost on me that I was reading each of the works in English.
A few years after my mom died, on the same trip to Ireland when I saw the daisy stamp, I visited a music shop. To my surprise and delight, I came across a compact disc entitled “Éist, Songs in their Native Language,” a collection of songs in Irish. I bought it. Now I knew how éist was spelled and looked it up in a dictionary. The word does indeed mean hush. And it also means listen.
I imagine my ancestors spoke this word often to their children while instructing them to pay attention. I imagine them communicating through the generations to me too. I will Máthair Chríona and Athair Críonna. I may not speak well but I éist.
However incomplete or imperfect my attempts to study Irish are, I do wholly appreciate and love my family’s native and rare language, like a small, seemingly insignificant wild nóinín, with resilient and enduring roots.
*Irish words:
póg mo thóin: Irish for “kiss my ass”
máthair chríona: Irish for grandmother, literally means wise mother
athair críonna: Irish for grandfather, literally means wise father
For more information on rare languages, here’s a link to the UN’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger.
