English in Ireland

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/17/00 4:16:26 PM Mountain Standard Time,
dlwhite at texas.net writes:

>One hundred thousand English arriving in Ireland over a hundred years is one
>thousand per year, which is not proportionally significant.

-- several hundred thousand English over a period of about 100 years.
Several thousand a year, in a population of very limited size.

Contemporary surveys indicate that the population of Ireland as a whole in
this period dipped well below 1,000,000, particularly in the mid to late 17th
century.  Half the people in the island may well have died between the 1640's
and 1680's; certainly over a third died, due to war and war-related famine
and plague.  And this was precisely the period of maximum English and
Scottish-lowland immigration.

The immigrants and their descendants numbered over 1/5th of the population by
the early 18th century; and they were concentrated in precisely the eastern
and northeastern zones where Gaelic first went extinct.

And they were thinnest on the ground -- a mere layer of landlords -- in
precisely the far western areas where Gaelic persisted for the longest
period, and remains down to our time.

The drastic shrinkage of Gaelic from western Ireland was a 19th-century
phenomenon, largley post-1846, quite distinct from the Anglicization of the
eastern half, which began in medieval times.

>the triumph (so to speak) of English over Irish in Ireland is largely a
>result of "elite dominance", not numerical preponderance.

-- both, in fact.  Elite dominance backed up by continuing contact with the
English-speaking homeland, and by a steady and substantial immigration of
native English-speakers.

(And Lallans-speakers, if you want to get technical.)