How did Ireland become an English-speaking country? Was it colonialism, the Great Hunger, the education system or emigration that drove the shift from Irish to English?

In this episode, I am joined by Dr Nicholas Wolf to explore one of the biggest questions in Irish history: how Irish, once the dominant language of the island, lost ground over the centuries.

Nicholas explains how this is a multifaceted story, beginning in the wars of the seventeenth century but continuing through the Great Famine of the 1840s and beyond.

While he explores the impact conquest, plantation and emigration, Nicholas also explains why English became so necessary in everyday life in Ireland.

About Nicholas Wolf

Nicholas Wolf is a historian and librarian at New York University, where he is co-head of NYU Library’s Data Services department and associate director of research and publishing initiatives at Glucksman Ireland House. He is the author of An Irish-Speaking Island (2014), a social and cultural history of Ireland’s Irish-language community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture and the Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Books. His research into the social and cultural history of the Irish language, Irish Catholicism, and Ireland’s population history has received grants and fellowships from the Gardiner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, and Newman College at the University of Melbourne.

Get An Irish-Speaking Island (2014) https://uwpress.wisc.edu/Books/A/An-Irish-Speaking-Island

Nicholas’s website: https://nmwolf.net

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-wolf-204a24335

Check out this digitisation project Nicholas was involved in, focusing on the bilingual historical newspaper An Gaodhal: https://www.universityofgalway.ie/angaodhal

Sound by Kate Dunlea

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The Irish Language: Why Ireland Became English-Speaking