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History of the Irish language. (Proper citing will be done in the final edit)'

Early Modern Irish →The Tudor dynasty sought to subdue its Irish citizens. The Tudor rulers attempted to do this by restricting the use of the Irish language while simultaneously promoting the use of the English language. English expansion in Ireland, outside of the Pale, was attempted under Mary I, but ended with poor results.

（Queen Elizabeth, however, I encouraged the use of Irish even in the Pale with a view to promoting the reformed religion. She was a proficient linguist and is reported to have expressed a desire to understand Irish, so a primer was prepared on her behalf by Sir Christopher Nugent, ninth baron of Delvin）added from wikipedia

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries It is believed that Irish remained the majority tongue as late as 1800[17] but became a minority language during the 19th century.[18] It is an important part of Irish nationalist identity, marking a cultural distance between Irish people and the English. added from wikipedia

→The first census to record the number of Irish speakers took place in 1851. Before then, many attempts were taken to record the number of Irish speakers with results ranging from as little as 1.5 million speakers to as many as 4 million speakers. The 1851 census recorded approximately 1.5 million Irish speakers with 319,602 of those speakers being monolingual in Irish only. →THe decades after this show a rapid decrease in the number of Irish speakers. By 1901 only approximately 641,000 people spoke Irish with only just 20,953 of those speakers being monolingual Irish speakers. → This change in demographics can be attributed to the Great Famine as well as the increasing social pressure to speak English.

(from wikipedia) the major push occurred with the foundation by Douglas Hyde, the son of a Church of Ireland rector, of the Gaelic League (known in Irish as Conradh na Gaeilge) in 1893, which was a factor in launching the Irish Revival movement. Leading supporters of Conradh included Pádraig Pearse and Éamon de Valera. The revival of interest in the language coincided with other cultural revivals, such as the foundation of the Irish Athletic Association and the growth in the performance of plays about Ireland in English, by such luminaries as W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Seán O'Casey and Lady Gregory, with their launch of the Abbey Theatre.

The Gaelic league managed to reach 50,000 members by 1904 and also successfully pressured the government into allowing the Irish language as a language of instruction the same year.

Even though the Abbey Theatre playwrights wrote in English (and indeed some disliked Irish) the Irish language affected them, as it did all Irish English speakers. The version of English spoken in Ireland, known as Hiberno-English bears similarities in some grammatical idioms with Irish. Writers who have used Hiberno-English include J.M. Synge, Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde[citation needed] and more recently in the writings of Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan, and Dermot Bolger..(from wikipedia)

The Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language was formed in 1876 for the purpose of preserving Irish. In 1878, it succeeded in passing legislation that included Irish in Intermediate Exams. In 1879 it succeeded in passing legislation that allowed schools to teach Irish outside of normal class hours until 1900 when optional classes were allowed to be taught during regular school hours. pg.23

Independent Ireland and the Language (Will be included in text about Irish after 1940) Irish has undergone spelling and script reforms since the 1940s to simplify the language. The orthographic system was changed and the traditional Irish script fell into disuse. These reforms were met with a negative reaction and many people argued that these changes marked a loss of the Irish identity in order to appease language learners. Another reason for this backlash was that the reforms forced the current Irish speakers to relearn how to read Irish in order to adapt to the new system.