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The history of the Irish language dates back thousands of years. The earliest Irish writing is found on the Ogham stones, which show a form of Irish writing that dates back to perhaps the 4th century CE. This writing is a version of Primitive Irish, the earliest form of the Irish language after it broke off from proto-Indo-European. During the following centuries, the Irish language slowly evolved in random ways, similar to how all languages changeover time. The island of Ireland was constantly fending off invasions from Normans and Vikings, and the Irish speakers spread from Ireland to what are today the Isle of Man and Scotland. While it can be kind of arbitrary to divide a language into developmental stages, linguists usually placeOld Irish in the 8th through 12th centuries, which then became Middle Irish from the 12th to 15th centuries (it was around here that Scots Gaelicand Manx broke off into separate languages). Modern Irish covers the Irish language from then to the present...

In the whole world, there are an estimated 1.2 million speakersof the Irish language. Of this number, only about 170,000 speak it as a first language. The great majority — about 98 percent — of Irish speakers live in Ireland itself. The 2016 census in Irelandfound that only about 10.5 percent of respondents spoke Irish on a daily or weekly basis, and that dropped to 4.2 percent when looking at regular, active speakers. There is a region of Ireland where Irish is spoken as a first language: the Gaeltacht. These are rural parts of the country that are scattered on the various coasts. While the language isn’t widely spoken outside of Ireland, there are some pockets of Irish speakers elsewhere in the world. The United States has the largest with 20,600, mostly in Boston, Massachusetts, but also scattered in other parts as a legacy of Irish immigration to the country. The United Kingdom also has about 5,700 speakers, almost all of whom live in Northern Ireland (the part of Ireland that s...