How to learn Kilkenny/Ossory Irish?

Want to learn how to speak Kilkenny Irish? Great choice. How is it done though?

This is a good question and possibly something I could have thought about and posted earlier on.

Kilkenny Irish is unfortunately extinct with no living speakers in decades but I do think it can be learned to a high degree of authenticity. There are few resources to learn and unfortunately, possibly the most important document, a thesis written by Risteard (R. A.) Breatnach on the dialect, is locked up unpublished in UCD where it is not available for me to read.

You could use this thesis and other materials to learn Kilkenny Irish from scratch although I think it would probably be extremely difficult.

A better way would be to first learn a living Irish dialect to a middling level and adapt your Irish until it conforms with the materials currently available. This is no doubt the easiest way and using the Irish of Waterford (and Tipperary, another dead dialect) to supplement your learning would be very helpful as the dialects are quite similar.

A number of excellent materials exist for learning Waterford Irish. Phonology, grammar and idiom from this region are all very well documented with a sizeable corpus written in the dialect so this is definitely a great help.  

That’s basically it. How am I learning Kilkenny Irish? With difficulty!

Currently what I am doing is constantly listening to the audio from Pádraig de Paor trying to memorise it and figure out the general sound of the dialect. This presents a few difficulties. The audio is not clear and can be difficult to make out. De Paor is telling a story and so presumably using a storytelling register different from casual speech and de Paor likely also hadn’t been used to speaking the language in several decades and there is a good bit of interference of English in his Irish.

This is manageable though and any details missing from records of the dialect are possible to reconstruct through other means. The original intonation, for example, may be worked out from neighbouring regions or from the speech of people whose English retains many features of Irish.

I have also tried listening to recordings from Waterford and Tipperary on doegen.ie and repeating the phrases but changing any minor bits of pronunciation to match how I think it was in Kilkenny. This helps to add some fluency and energy and is also generally just good practice.

I hope that’s helped anybody interested in learning this dialect and if you’re thinking about doing it I’d absolutely urge you to give it a go. It is packed with interesting features and is a dialect historically spoken in Leinster. It has an interesting spot in the dialect continuum sharing qualities with Irish from all provinces and for anybody from the historical area of Ossory, it is of course the dialect of our recent ancestors whose language died too soon.

Until myself and others are able to make our own materials, learning Kilkenny Irish will be a struggle compared to any living Gaelic dialect but it is definitely worth it.