Pause and Backstory

11/15/2009

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I began this project back in 2005 as a side interest to my main research into the cultural history of the Irish language. Since that time, I've made halting progress on a few central problems that need to be solved in order to get to my goal: a clearer understanding of the timing and demographic features of Ireland’s nineteenth-century language shift. Last summer, after a few months of soaring success as I applied what appeared to be clear solutions to these problems, work came to a screeching halt when the numbers I was producing stopped making sense (more on this in coming posts).
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About this Project

08/12/2009

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1901 Census
Ireland, as it turns out, possess one of the earliest and most complete census counts of a population's linguistic features in the western world -- earlier than the United States or Great Britain, for example, and more complete than nineteenth-century statistics for certain parts of continental Europe. These statistics have been used consistently over the years by Irish historians as a means of coming to grips with the big story of the nineteenth century: the near-disappearance of Irish as a spoken language prior to 1900.
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