ABSTRACT
Despite its official status, Irish is from all other points of view a minority language, that is to say, one with a relatively small number of native speakers living within the domain of a much more widely spoken language a command of which is generally felt necessary for the pursuit of a full economic and social life. Irish is at the lower extreme of minority language decline in that speakers of Irish only (monoglots) are extinct except among youngest infants and there is not a single town, however small, in which it prevails as the normal community language. Nor does it prevail as the natural everyday speech of any territory comparable in size to an English county or a French department, except at best by summation of its small and scattered Gaeltacht fragments. Its official and honoured status is utterly belied by the inability of the great majority of the Irish people to speak it fluently, easily, and unselfconsciously, however much of it they learnt at school and however much they wish they could speak it as well as they do their real native language, which is English.
