The Irish

I have decided that I should write a few lines about the Irish culture, language and country. Let's first start with the Irish version of the English language. To be honest, their written form is surprisingly similar to that of the UK; no news there. Nonetheless, the spoken form is quite different!

NOTE: my subjects are inhabitants of the city of Limerick; accents, cultures and such change as you move around Ireland.

The accent is one of the main differences; I must apologize to the readers, but there is absolutely no way I may describe the accent, even less reproduce it. Another difference can be seen in their expressions. For example, the younger generation has some expressions that the older doesn't. Expression such as putting like at the end of a sentence; this is analogous to America, where something rather similar is done (in which case "like" is placed at the beginning of a sentence).

Example:

"The weather is nice; I might go for a run, like."

"Like," is nothing but a space filler and can be removed from any sentence without any harm whatsoever. The older generations, as well as the younger ones, also use "so" at the end of a sentence. This is also a space filler and plays no mayor role in the grammatical structure of their English.

Example:

"Go on, so." or "Will you fix that for me, so?"

Expressions

There are several expressions used, commonly, everywhere in Ireland. For example, to be "taking the piss" means to be "joking around" or "f!@£$%^& around."

Example:

Fellow 1: "I failed the test."

Fellow 2: "Are you taking the piss? You have got to be taking the piss!"

Also, "your man" and "your one" refer to "that man" and "that woman" in a sentence.

Example:

"Did you hear about your man Bush the other day?"

"Your one, Hillary, is absolutely nuts!"

Notice that the person being referred to may be known personally, by either the speaker and/or the listener, or not.

The next expression may seem a bit strange to many American English speakers. It is commonly refereed to the "craic" (pronounced like "crack") as the fun in Ireland. When placed accordingly in a sentence this word might seems a bit extreme.

Example:

"Where is the craic?" Pronounced as: "where is the crack?" (see what I mean?)

There is a big difference between the Irish and the U.K. use of the word "grand." In the U.K. "grand" is commonly utilized to refer to an event or thing that is above average, maybe even outstanding. While in the Irish English it means okay, yes just okay.

Example

"My day was grand." "That movie was grand, like."

There are, almost, a countless number of other Irish expressions in existence. Although, I feel that I have remarked the most important or most common ones so far.

Gaelach

Irish (Irish Gaelic) is one of the, only, four remaining Celtic languages (Scots Gaelic, Breton and Welsh are the other three); Celtic languages are a sub-family of the Indo-European family of languages. Before the Germanic invasions of the British and Irish islands, the were many Celtic tribes with their own languages and cultures. There are written records of almost 10 other forms of Celtic languages.
Nowadays, there are very few areas of Ireland where Irish is used as the primary language. And not even a decade ago Irish was considered to be on the very verge of extinction. Nonetheless, quite recently, there has been some effort done by the Irish government in order to bring Irish Gaelic back from the dark side; similar efforts have been seen in Scotland, Wales and France. These efforts include bilingual public signs, all Irish schools and funding for students majoring in Irish.
I have come to appreciate the beauty of this language and decided I would really like to learn some of it. Quite frankly, I have no idea how far I will get but I have the moral support of the Murphy family; as well as their knowledge of the language.