Irish in The Quiet Girl
July 20, 2023 12:40 AM Subscribe
The use of almost all Irish dialogue in The Quiet Girl is part of a widely discussed language revitalization through film. Bravo. I am wondering whether it is also realistic in the movie itself.
I am not questioning the benefit of the filmmaker's choice.
What I'm wondering is: does using Irish in this film have mainly a political/artistic meaning (and obviously a generative one, just by putting the language out in film) but not a realistic intent?
Or is it actually, in addition to its political/artistic meaning, also a realistic representation of how these people, in this region, would have spoken to each other in 1981?
I am not questioning the benefit of the filmmaker's choice.
What I'm wondering is: does using Irish in this film have mainly a political/artistic meaning (and obviously a generative one, just by putting the language out in film) but not a realistic intent?
Or is it actually, in addition to its political/artistic meaning, also a realistic representation of how these people, in this region, would have spoken to each other in 1981?
I'm also not sure what you're asking....the part of your question that's tripping me up is: "does using Irish in this film have mainly a political/artistic meaning but not a realistic intent". What do you mean by this?
I'm ASSUMING you mean, was the filmmaker trying to make some kind of "political statement" by using Irish, or was this near-exclusive Irish use something that could have been real. If that's what you mean - yeah, this is totally plausible. Irish is one of the official languages of Ireland, and in the west in particular there are many places where people use it amongst themselves. Many people are bilingual in both Irish and English, with Irish being used more commonly in the west and in more rural areas.
But even in cities many people choose to use both. A friend of mine is Irish and grew up in Cork City, and English is actually her SECOND language because her parents just plain forgot to speak English around the house until my friend was about three; she tried to play with some neighbor kids and walked up to them speaking Irish and they looked at her funny, and my friend's parents realized "oh, right." When I visited her family in 1990, the whole family (two parents and five kids) all spoke Irish amongst themselves and English to me.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:02 AM on July 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'm ASSUMING you mean, was the filmmaker trying to make some kind of "political statement" by using Irish, or was this near-exclusive Irish use something that could have been real. If that's what you mean - yeah, this is totally plausible. Irish is one of the official languages of Ireland, and in the west in particular there are many places where people use it amongst themselves. Many people are bilingual in both Irish and English, with Irish being used more commonly in the west and in more rural areas.
But even in cities many people choose to use both. A friend of mine is Irish and grew up in Cork City, and English is actually her SECOND language because her parents just plain forgot to speak English around the house until my friend was about three; she tried to play with some neighbor kids and walked up to them speaking Irish and they looked at her funny, and my friend's parents realized "oh, right." When I visited her family in 1990, the whole family (two parents and five kids) all spoke Irish amongst themselves and English to me.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:02 AM on July 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
There's definitely interior work going on, in that the one character we never hear speaking anything but English is her abusive father. There's realism in that, though, too. He's not a local man, he's more of an outsider even in his own family, which is both true and True if you get me. It's political in that it represents an alienation from the deep moral culture of the place thematically, but it's not in any way implausible from a realism standpoint.
posted by rikschell at 4:19 AM on July 20, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 4:19 AM on July 20, 2023 [4 favorites]
Response by poster: I am asking if it is a realistic representation that, in 1981 (as opposed to say 1821, or post-revitalization), even in the Gaeltacht, Irish would have been spoken so extensively, with as little code switching, as portrayed in the Quiet Girl.
posted by little striped mule at 5:40 AM on July 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by little striped mule at 5:40 AM on July 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Irish would have been spoken so extensively, with as little code switching
I haven't seen the film yet, but my impression growing up in 1980s Dublin is that the Gaeilgeoirí at the time seemed to be more... militant isn't quite the word I'm looking for, but it'll do. There has been a big change in acceptance of Irish, and promoting it since then, and that has changed attitudes both within and without the Gaeltacht communities. (TG4, formerly TnaG the Irish television channel only came about in 1996 for example.) To some extent, they felt themselves under siege, and that the governemt wasn't supporting them, with the result that they were more likely to insist on using Irish all the time.
The second point is that Ireland in the 80s was a lot more insular than it is now - people were more likely to stay within their communities (unless they emigrated!). Irish speaking communities were mostly interacting within themselves with schools, shops etc all Irish speaking.
If it were set today, I would expect a bit more code-switching than then, particularly thanks to the internet. And a lot of TG4's Irish language programmes do sprinkle in a bit of English slang (either directly or as Béarlachas - Irishified English).
posted by scorbet at 6:05 AM on July 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
I haven't seen the film yet, but my impression growing up in 1980s Dublin is that the Gaeilgeoirí at the time seemed to be more... militant isn't quite the word I'm looking for, but it'll do. There has been a big change in acceptance of Irish, and promoting it since then, and that has changed attitudes both within and without the Gaeltacht communities. (TG4, formerly TnaG the Irish television channel only came about in 1996 for example.) To some extent, they felt themselves under siege, and that the governemt wasn't supporting them, with the result that they were more likely to insist on using Irish all the time.
The second point is that Ireland in the 80s was a lot more insular than it is now - people were more likely to stay within their communities (unless they emigrated!). Irish speaking communities were mostly interacting within themselves with schools, shops etc all Irish speaking.
If it were set today, I would expect a bit more code-switching than then, particularly thanks to the internet. And a lot of TG4's Irish language programmes do sprinkle in a bit of English slang (either directly or as Béarlachas - Irishified English).
posted by scorbet at 6:05 AM on July 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
That's what Gaeltacht means, what do you think it means?
posted by Iteki at 6:06 AM on July 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by Iteki at 6:06 AM on July 20, 2023 [6 favorites]
Best answer: Numbers. 30% of the population aged 3+ spoke Irish in 1981; rising to 44% in Co Galway with the largest Gaeltacht.
The question in the 1981 census was "expecting the answer yes", though. You may choose to extrapolate backwards from 2016 data where the count is up to 40% . . . but questions included 'how often do you speak Irish'. Today there are only 70K daily speakers of Irish = 1-2% of all those aged 3 and over. Irish is compulsory in school, and when daily-speakers-in-school are excluded then it's nearer 1% than 2%. Obvs, daily speakers are going to be far more common in the Gaeltacht, but the book in set in Wexford where Irish speaking was/is a little less than average.
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:16 AM on July 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
The question in the 1981 census was "expecting the answer yes", though. You may choose to extrapolate backwards from 2016 data where the count is up to 40% . . . but questions included 'how often do you speak Irish'. Today there are only 70K daily speakers of Irish = 1-2% of all those aged 3 and over. Irish is compulsory in school, and when daily-speakers-in-school are excluded then it's nearer 1% than 2%. Obvs, daily speakers are going to be far more common in the Gaeltacht, but the book in set in Wexford where Irish speaking was/is a little less than average.
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:16 AM on July 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I grew up in a Gaeltacht, although not the one portrayed in that movie, in that time period and would have been around the same age as the ‘quiet girl’ in 1981. Yes, Irish would have spoken so extensively and still is in many places. I would guess that 80-100% of my daily conversations were in Irish then, and still are when I am at home. I knew families who lived in Dublin, spoke Irish at home, and were indistinguishable from local native speakers when they came west for the summer holidays.
For the parents portrayed in the film, English would have been a second language - one in which they were thoroughly fluent but (if you listen closely) not as comfortable in as Irish. For the grandparents, it would have been a foreign language: many would have been born before independence and would have spoken nothing but Irish at home or socially and only learned English at school. A little more code switching and use of loan words would not be unrealistic, as it did happen and now probably happens more, but I did not think the depiction in the movie was unrealistic either.
TL;DR: many families still only speak nothing but Irish day-to-day whether they live in the Gaeltacht or outside it. As has been pointed out, they are a tiny minority but they were there in 1981 and they continue to exist now.
posted by Grinder at 6:33 AM on July 20, 2023 [12 favorites]
For the parents portrayed in the film, English would have been a second language - one in which they were thoroughly fluent but (if you listen closely) not as comfortable in as Irish. For the grandparents, it would have been a foreign language: many would have been born before independence and would have spoken nothing but Irish at home or socially and only learned English at school. A little more code switching and use of loan words would not be unrealistic, as it did happen and now probably happens more, but I did not think the depiction in the movie was unrealistic either.
TL;DR: many families still only speak nothing but Irish day-to-day whether they live in the Gaeltacht or outside it. As has been pointed out, they are a tiny minority but they were there in 1981 and they continue to exist now.
posted by Grinder at 6:33 AM on July 20, 2023 [12 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks for these great answers, I consider this resolved! Fascinating film in light of the complexity of language continuity and revival under colonization.
posted by little striped mule at 11:25 AM on July 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by little striped mule at 11:25 AM on July 20, 2023 [1 favorite]
Self reporting of Irish language usage via census data for example has famously been unreliable, with overreporting out of shame/wishful thinking being prevalent and a lack of granularity making Irish speaking areas less visible. While the english language novella it is based on was set in Wexford, the irish language film is set in Waterfordin the literal Gaeltacht area of An Rinn as mentioned by DarlingBri in the first comment. This is a tiny area, zoom in on the point in this map slightly east of center on the south coast. That's the >70% band, in 2011.
posted by Iteki at 2:37 PM on July 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Iteki at 2:37 PM on July 20, 2023 [2 favorites]
I did some travelling in west Ireland in 1989, Galway, the Connemara. There were a few spots where the locals would first address me in Irish. Once they sussed my confusion, they'd quickly switch to English.
posted by philip-random at 8:01 PM on July 20, 2023
posted by philip-random at 8:01 PM on July 20, 2023
Best answer: I’m Irish, in Ireland, raised in Dublin. I was born around the time this film (which I have yet to see!) was set. I don’t speak Irish. Sure, I know a bunch of words, a baby’s handle on the grammar and syntax. But that’s it. (Yes, I see the irony in my name being of Connemara Gaeltacht origin.) I absolutely blame the way it was taught in schools here. But also, no one else in my family, even extended, speaks it. And my feeling is that kind of community, large or small, encourages and sustains it. In stark contrast to me, at least two of my school friends went to gaelscoil for primary, and one communicated in Irish at home with his family on a regular basis. Another school friend with an affinity for languages is also pretty fluent. None of them ever made a big deal about it. That’s the funny thing about Irish here: it’s both everywhere and nowhere, if that makes any sense?
posted by macdara at 12:55 AM on July 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by macdara at 12:55 AM on July 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
Response by poster: Now that we have these answers, I will say that my interpretation of the film is that Irish speaking is overdetermined here as a sign of cultural and national health and goodness, and English as an abject loss. The film isn't that simple, the mean Irish busybody speaks Irish too. And this reading of language ideology and its use in art does not replace or eliminate the realistic demographic fact of people speaking Irish. I was curious about how the latter matched up with its portrayal in the film. It's a great movie if you haven't seen it.
posted by little striped mule at 10:08 AM on July 21, 2023
posted by little striped mule at 10:08 AM on July 21, 2023
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In terms of intent, there is a thriving Irish language film culture here (I do some work for an Irish-language film festival) and while you cannot remove Irish language filmmaking from the broader political history of Irish, on an individual level, many films are just... made in Irish.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:24 AM on July 20, 2023 [9 favorites]