The aim of this work is to provide a critical look at the current state of basic colour terms in Modern Irish in light of the variation experienced in the current use of such terms. Irish is a Q-Celtic language and, although it is the first official language of Ireland according to Article 8 of the Irish Constitution from 1937, it is a minor language, with a small number of L1 speakers and a large number of L2 speakers.1 The Gaeltacht areas, where Irish is still a community language, are primarily remote scattered areas along the country’s western seaboard, and are thus surrounded by a sea of English. As a result of this, and of converging worldviews and value systems from constant language contact with a Germanic language, Irish is coming under increasing pressure in all of its domains, including vocabulary, syntax, morphology, and also how it sees and classifies colours.
Colour studies as a subject in itself has, in recent times, generated a lot of research into a wide variety of languages and aspects of colours. Berlin and Kay, whose 1969 book laid the foundations for the modern school of colour studies, were the first to take a scientific look at the evolution, development and denotation of colours in language. They list more than 100 works in their bibliography that predate the publication of their own work (Berlin and Kay 1969: 164–171), whilst Maffi’s (1991) bibliography from a later edition of the same work exceeds 230 works for the following two decades, i.e. from 1970 to 1990. Grossmann’s bibliography on colour theory and colour naming runs to more than 50 pages, starting with Werner’s work from 1814 (1988: 314–366). MacLaury (1997: 15) makes the claim that more than 3,000 works focusing on colours (‘manuscripts, articles, dissertations and books’) have been written since 1858, although he does not list them nor does he mention how he arrived at that figure, and it is also unclear whether these are limited to the field of linguistics only, or whether they also include other realms, for example those of the arts or sciences. Such figures can only be added to: the range of colour studies now covers disciplines as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, economics, the fine arts, linguistics, onomastics, philosophy, psychology, and various branches of the sciences. In recent times, studies of Irish basic colour terms have also occasionally appeared. Since 1997, the year of MacLaury’s estimation, Stahl (2006), Lucht (2007), Carey (2009), Swinkels (2015) and Ó Fionnáin (2017, 2019) have all contributed to an Irish-language perspective on colours, whilst Macdonald (1999), Lazar-Meyn (2006) and Bateman (2019) have contributed a Scottish Gaelic view. These can be added to the earlier research carried out on (chiefly Old) Irish colours by Pollak (1959), Lehmann (1969) and Lazar-Meyn (1978, 1991 and 1994, and unpublished talks given in 1987 and 1995). The paucity, however, of such research can be illustrated by a comparison with the list of works mentioned by Stanulewicz in her volume looking at the usage of (just) the colour terms for blue in Polish: she mentions 26 individual works and six collections of articles on Polish colour vocabulary in general, and then a further ten works are mentioned in specific relation to studies of the basic colour term blue in Polish, giving a total of 42 (Stanulewicz 2009: 19–20, and for a discussion of these 58–69). Irish is thus languishing far behind, with a current grand total in print of 11 at the time of writing, most of which, as is discussed in more detail in the first chapter, focus on colours in Old Irish (c. 600–900), and not on those of Modern Irish (from c. 1650 onwards, but especially the version of Irish as spoken today). It is evident that Irish—and the modern Celtic languages in general—have been overlooked in major colour vocabulary research, such as Berlin and Kay’s opus, and the project that arose from it, the World Color Survey.2
Thus, as can be seen, despite this massive industry of publications in the field of colour theory and studies, there is very little in print regarding Irish language colour terms and even those handful of works which do exist tend to have ignored the modern language. It is, therefore, to be hoped that this work will contribute to filling that gap in modern colour studies.
As a result of historical circumstances stretching back several centuries, Irish is nowadays very limited in its social and geographical range. When the native Gaelic order fell prey to British political machinations in the early 1600s,3 Irish speakers were dispossessed, excluded from the realms of business, education and politics and had their language linked with poverty and illiteracy.4 These blows were disadvantageous for the prestige of the language, which was deprived of any social status and had little chance to be used in various domains in society, and it has been in retreat ever since. The biggest blow to the language came in the form of the Great Famine (1845–1852), called in Irish An Gorta Mór ‘the great hunger’ or An Drochshaol ‘the bad life’, followed by mass emigration and evictions. The number of Irish speakers before the Famine was approximately four million out of a population of eight million,5 but fifty years later, by 1891, this figure had fallen to just under 665,000, of which there were less than 40,000 monoglots and somewhat less than 31,000 children under the age of ten being raised as Irish speakers.6 This decline has continued, albeit to a lesser degree, into modern times, even though Irish is a mandatory subject in school, one of the languages of the education system, and enjoys official status within Ireland, as well as being one of the official languages of the European Union. The numbers returned in the 2016 census, however, make for grim reading.
Out of a population of 4.761 million in the Republic of Ireland, 1,761,420 people (39.8 % of the population) claimed to be able to speak some Irish, but as the Census is based on self-assessment it is unclear how much Irish one needs to know to be able to claim to speak it.7 Of these, a mere 73,803 stated that they speak it daily outside of the school system, and of those living in the official Irish-speaking areas, only 20,586 (21.4 %) responded that they use the language on a daily basis.
Consequently, only in fairly isolated or remote areas primarily along Ireland’s coast is it possible to be an L1 speaker of Irish in a community of other L1 speakers. Although there are L1 and L2 speakers scattered throughout the whole of the country, they are lost in a sea of English, i.e. isolated from other Irish speakers. Even if one does happen to meet another Irish speaker, they are most probably an L2 speaker and, as an L2 speaker, subconsciously or not, bring with them their English-language worldview—including that of interpreting colour. As the sociolinguist Feargal Ó Béarra—a native speaker reared in the Gaeltacht—states (Ó Béarra 2007: 265):
In 1893, when Conradh na Gaeilge [The Gaelic League] was founded [with the aim of preserving the language], native Irish speakers made up over 90 % of the Irish speaking population with the remaining 10 % coming from the rest of the population. Today, the situation is the opposite with 90 % non-native speakers and 10 % native.
Ó Béarra goes on to make the point that, even if one is a member of that dwindling band of native speakers, there is a distinction to be made between the older speakers and those younger ones, who are more exposed to English (Ó Béarra 2007: 261–262):
By Traditional Late Modern Irish, I mean that language which was not only spoken in the Gaeltacht by both young and old up until about the 1960s, but that was also passed on to the next generation. This language, while still spoken, is now mainly limited to those who are in their 50s or older […] The influence of English on this type of Irish is minimal and is limited to lexicon. There is little, if any, English influence on the phonology, morphology or syntax. It is as if English never existed. The same cannot be said of the type of Irish spoken today.
As this was written almost fifteen years ago, such speakers of Traditional Late Modern Irish would now be well into their 60s or older, and their unique way of seeing the world—including that of classifying colours—is in danger of passing away with them. This is a point also made by Ciarán Ó Duibhín (2013) in his discussion on colour terms in Irish, and the fact that the English colour term ‘orange’ was traditionally covered by buí ‘yellow’ in Irish. He relates an evening in an Irish-speaking household, where an Irish-language learner was told by the old lady of the house, a native speaker, that his orange jumper was, in fact, buí:
Ar scor ar bith, bhí geansaí ar Shéamas an lá seo den dath a dtugtar “orange” air i mBéarla. Bhí an tseanbhean ag coimheád anall air, agus arsa sise leis go tobann “Nach deas an geansaí buidhe sin atá ort!” D’fhobair do Shéamas dhul fríd a chéile le hiongantas. “Buidhe?” ar seisean agus corraí air, “Buidhe? Níl sé buidhe! Tá sé oráiste!”
[In any case, Séamas was wearing a jumper that day the colour of which is called ‘orange’ in English. The old woman was looking over at him and she suddenly says to him: “Isn’t that a nice buí [yellow] jumper you’re wearing?” Séamas was almost beside himself with amazement. “Yellow?” he said, agitated, “Yellow? It’s not yellow! It’s orange!”]
Ó Duibhín regrets, on reflection, that he did not have with him the chart utilised by Berlin and Kay in their own research so that he could ask the native speakers there to name the colours and to see how they divided up the colour spectrum as opposed to the English-language division (as personified by Séamas above). He did not have the opportunity to follow up on this, but does note that someone should investigate the traditional Irish basic colour scheme, and that there is no time to waste:
Ach b’fhearr deifre a dheánamh, nó is goirid uilig a bhéas duine ar bith fágtha beo a bhfuil córas Gaelach na ndathann ina gceann, ar neamhchead do bhrú an Bhéarla agus do leabharthaí amaideacha.
[But it would be best to hurry because before long there will be no-one left who will have the Irish-language system of colours in their head, as a result of the pressure from English and stupid books.]
Ó Duibhín’s leabharthaí amaideacha ‘stupid books’ are those Irish books which have been translated from English and which tend to follow the English-language colour scheme in translating ‘orange’ as oráiste and not buí, and which are then introduced into the education system with the implication that these are the ‘correct’ or ‘more correct’ terms, as they have been officially produced by the State and are in use in schools. Such outside influence further emphasises the necessity of investigating the Irish basic colour terms of native speakers whilst there is still the opportunity.
The layout of the work itself is as follows. In Chapter 1, a brief history of the development of colour studies is given. The growth of major studies from earliest times is summarised before focusing in more detail on the modern development of colour studies, which really began in the 1960s with the publication of Berlin and Kay’s groundbreaking Basic Color Terms. Their Universality and Evolution. After this, attention is paid to the specific research that has looked at the colour system in Irish and, as can be seen, most of that which has been carried out has focused on Old and Early Irish, whilst there is very little on the colour scheme of Modern Irish, and almost none on its sister languages, Scottish Gaelic and Manx. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the main lexicographical sources from the previous centuries.
Chapter 2 takes a detailed look at the information on colour terms available in the three Goidelic languages as found in their chief lexicographical sources.8 The chapter starts with an analysis of the four initial Common Celtic9 colour terms which Lazar-Meyn states existed in Old Irish, and then moves into the historical period from Old Irish onwards, tracing the growth and rise of other colour terms, which had the tendency to restrict the semantics and use of the Common Celtic colour terms to varying degrees. Although this work has as its focus the basic colour terms of Modern Irish, it also looks at the lexical evidence available regarding its sister languages—Scottish Gaelic and Manx—both of which are offshoots of the original Old Irish, in order to trace relevant developments within them and to offer a more rounded picture of the evolution of the Common Goidelic basic colour terms, because they all derive from Old Irish and may contain earlier meanings that have been lost in their sister languages.10 The last two sections of this chapter look at unsaturated and specialised colour terms and then, finally, at a recent development in the language that has occurred due to outside influences, that of the growth of the colour term for ‘orange’.
Chapter 3 takes as it focus other essential sources which might be beneficial in the research of the use and semantic field of colour terms in Irish, namely sayings, proverbs and placenames. As these have been in stable use in Irish for centuries, it is unlikely that they would have come under the influence of English in any major way and, as such, contain information as to which colour terms were used, and how.
Chapter 4 introduces the results of the fieldwork carried out amongst native speakers of Irish, research which has not yet been done before, and presents the results in light of the previous, descriptive, research, in order to see whether the responses of the native speakers asked matches those given in the source material. In addition, it should allow insight into the actual use of the basic colour terms in Irish in people’s everyday lives, as opposed to the descriptions given in dictionaries or grammar books.
It should be stated here that this work does not include any detailed corpus research, although such historical corpora of Irish are available,11 as such investigations constitute a separate area of research. Such work could be conducted as a follow-up to that presented in this volume. However, as this work has as its focus the current status of basic colour terms in Irish and the issues that arise from them, reference has been made to blogs where such issues are discussed, self-learning material where such terms might be explained, dictionaries and other printed sources where examples of such use are provided.
The aim of this work, therefore, is to present the use of Modern Irish basic colour terms, as well as their representation in printed material, and to see whether this matches their actual use by native speakers, and thus help to fill in a major gap in modern colour studies, as well in the use of basic colour terms and terminology in Irish L2 coursebooks and teaching material.
As Irish is the first official language of (the Republic of) Ireland, it is not considered as such to be a minority language, merely a minor one: the European Union notes that ‘RML s [Regional and Minority Languages] are languages that are different from the official language(s) of a given state’ (Pasikowska-Schnass 2016: 3). In Northern Ireland, however, Irish has been accorded the status of a regional minority language within the United Kingdom. It is difficult to state exactly how many Irish speakers are native L1 speakers and how many are not, as this question is not posed in the Census in Ireland. Instead, people are asked whether they can speak Irish, how frequently they speak it, whether they speak it outside of the education system, etc. However, of the more than 1,700,000 people who claimed they could speak (some) Irish in 2016, the last year for which there is a detailed analysis available, only just over 20,000 lived in the officially designated Gaeltachtaí (Irish-speaking areas). For the 2016 census returns on the Irish language see
‘British’ is used here in the sense of the island of Britain, although it was predominantly English politics that was to the forefront. By this stage, Wales had been absorbed into, and was being administered as a part of, England, whilst there was constant tension between England and Scotland.
For a concise historical, political and linguistic context of the language, see, for example, Doyle (2015), although this commonly accepted view of the Irish-speaker’s lot is challenged somewhat by Wolf (2014).
There are no census returns available for Irish speakers before 1851, but see, for example, Ó Cuív (1951: 22), Hindley (1990) and Hughes (2001) for estimates regarding the number of Irish speakers before the Famine.
For details of the numbers of Irish speakers in every census from 1861 until 2006, see the first two tables at
See Ó hÉallaithe’s (2017a, 2017b) analysis of the 2016 Census returns.
‘Goidelic’ is used in this work to refer to the three Gaelic languages together, and to avoid confusion and ambiguity with Scottish Gaelic which is frequently referred to as simply ‘Gaelic’.
This is Lazar-Meyn’s choice of term for the ancestor of the modern Celtic languages, the other term being ‘Proto-Celtic’. As Lazar-Meyn started her initial research in the 1970s, it is likely she was influenced in her choice of terms by works such as Kenneth Jackson’s seminal Language and History in Early Britain from the 1950s, where he writes: ‘Indo-European (IE.). the hypothetical ancestor of a large family of languages, including the Celtic, has its normal sense. Common Celtic (CC.), rather than the more usual “Old Celtic”, refers to the time when Celtic had come into existence as an IE. sub-group but was not yet differentiated into the separate Celtic languages; the stage when IE. ē became CC. ī, ō became ā, p was lost or changed to a spirant, and so on’ (Jackson 1953: 3–4, and see also Jackson 1951a). However, in none of her works does Lazar-Meyn offer any definition of ‘Common Celtic’ for her readers, nor when it might have been spoken. Other scholars, even those writing around the same time as Lazar-Meyn’s initial work, for example Schmidt (1980), have opted for ‘Proto-Celtic’. The two terms are still in use today in works dealing with or referring to the language, and one may come across either (and not only those: Meid (2008: 179) refers to Common Celtic, Proto-Celtic and ‘Urkeltisch’). Interestingly, in Koch and Minard’s encyclopaedia The Celts: History, Life and Culture (2012) both terms appear, with Common Celtic defined as ‘a historical linguistic term that is used in this encyclopedia for the oldest form of prehistoric Celtic speech differentiated from the other Indo-European dialects; thus it is essentially synonymous in our usage with Proto-Celtic’ (2012: 217), whereas Proto-Celtic is merely ‘the reconstructed intermediate linguistic stage between Proto-Indo-European and the oldest attested individual Celtic Languages—in other words, the theoretical common ancestor of the Celtic languages’, with no cross-reference to Common Celtic (2012: 649). As both Common Celtic and Proto-Celtic refer to that period of time before Celtic branched out into the known Celtic languages, in this work both terms are used interchangeably, depending on the choice of the original author being referred to. Proto-Celtic itself is reckoned to have begun to diverge from its Indo-European ancestor around 800 BC, although some scholars, such as Schrijver (2016), put such an event much earlier, around 1300 BC, whilst other sources give both ends of the scale (e.g. Cunliffe 2018: 30, and see also Chapter 3 in the same work).
For a detailed account of the various stages and development of Old Irish into Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx, see McCone et al. (1994). In regards to this, Ó Baoill feels that Old Irish is a misnomer, as it later gave rise to three separate versions of Gaelic: Irish, Scottish and Manx, and thus terms it Old Gaelic (Ó Baoill 2010). See also, for example, the use of the terms in Clancy (2010) and Ó Maolalaigh (2013).
For example, Corpas Stairiúil na Gaeilge ‘The Historical Corpus of Irish’ (