World Language Map

Where is Irish spoken?

Irish (Gaeilge) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Ireland and the United Kingdom. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Irish is spoken

Irish is spoken in 2 countries: Ireland and the United Kingdom. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Ireland22%1,151,361
United Kingdom0.2%102,689

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Irish is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Irish.

How many people speak Irish?

Wikidata gives about 141,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 1 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Shifting. Glottolog lists it as shifting: the youngest speakers are adults, and children are growing up speaking another language.

Where Irish sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Irish as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Celtic
  4. Nuclear Celtic
  5. Core Celtic
  6. Insular Celtic
  7. Goidelic
  8. Modern Goidelic
  9. Irish

More about Irish

Codes: ISO 639-3 gle, Glottolog iris1253. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Irish

Where is Irish spoken?

Irish is spoken in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Unicode CLDR puts it at 22% of the population of Ireland, which is about 1,151,361 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Irish?

Wikidata gives about 141,000 first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 1 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2012).

Which language family is Irish in?

Glottolog places Irish in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Celtic, Nuclear Celtic, Core Celtic, Insular Celtic, Goidelic and Modern Goidelic.

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