Nicholas Wolf

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.