ABSTRACT
The period between the Famine and Independence was one of serious transition for the Irish language as it lost ground to English in the country’s remaining bilingual strongholds and a serious revival movement to reverse this process took hold starting in the 1870s. The importance of gender to these linguistic developments have not received sufficient attention by scholars aside from occasional work on women’s participation in the Gaelic-revival movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries more generally. This essay thus explores the sociolinguistic comparisons between men and women with respect to the shift away from Irish, the gendered discourse surrounding the desire to adopt English, and the underexplored participation of female authors in the Gaelic revival movement that shaped the emergence of modern forms of the Irish language.
