Languages and Literacy

Abstract

The discussion of the Pious Miscellany introduced the subject of popular printing and the linguistic situation in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ireland. The subject is worth examining in greater detail for the light it sheds not only on questions of literacy and of reading, but also of language shift, and more generally on the process of ‘cultural modernisation’ discussed in Chapter 11. This chapter will examine popular printing in the Irish language, focusing on three questions: first, what sort of literacy existed in Irish overall; second, what can be inferred from the printed corpus about print literacy in Irish; and finally, why so little was printed in Irish relative to English.