The Irish language has roots stretching back at least 5,000 years, and shares words with Sanskrit, the ancient classical language of India.
Almost all of us can speak a little Irish, and often do. Words like “galore” and “brogue,” for example, or “smithereens” have all passed directly from Irish into English, often with little change to their original pronunciation.
So the next time you refer to a “banshee” or your “clan,” or the next time you sip a glass of “whiskey” – three more words that have made the linguistic leap from Irish to English – it’s worth noting that you’re actually using language that would have been comprehensible to the average person in an Irish village hundreds of years ago. Maybe even further back and much further afield too – the Irish language actually has roots stretching thousands of years into the past and a back story that links it with several European languages, and perhaps surprisingly, even some from much further afield.
The roots of modern Irish lie ultimately in a language spoken approximately 5,000 years ago in the area between the Baltic and the Black Sea. Known as Indo-European, this language is purely conjectural in the sense that no concrete evidence of it is extant, but using similarities between ostensibly unrelated languages (for example, the word “horse” is capall in Irish, caballo in Spanish, cheval in French, and cal in Romanian), experts have been able to surmise their derivation from a common ancestor.
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