Gabh mo leithsceal, ca bhfuil an cultúr?

Posted On March 16, 2026

In the last few months, I’ve decided to extend my linguistic chops in a whole different direction. Thanks to the fact that I grew up speaking English and French, I have a brain that’s pretty well wired for languages so I’ve picked up a fair bit of Spanish and some Italian. Romance languages hold no terrors for me. The spellings vary, but the sentence structure and word constructs are similar enough that it’s not much of a stretch. 

And then there’s Irish. Nothing lines up intuitively. Sentence order is flipped on its head, grammar and spelling rules are erratic if they exist at all, and pronunciation has no actual connection to the phonetic sounds of the letters. It’s absolute linguistic chaos and I freaking love it. 

It’s music to my soul and calls to the rebellious core in my DNA in a way few things do. We’re talking about one of the oldest written languages, Ogham, translated into the Roman alphabet by monks and scholars, many of whom are reported to have been converted druids. I can fully see them throwing in the 4 extra consonants and triple vowel sounds out of sheer spite. 

I’ve gotten in the habit of starting my day with this delightfully bizarre, alphabet soup of a language. Unlike most Duolingo programs each sentence is cobbled together from a few different voices and no two pronounce the words exactly the same. Not once has the program asked me to pronounce a single word, and, irony of ironies, it’s the only language on Duo that doesn’t allow you the benefit of the doubt with typos.  Italian, “Oh you completely forgot this letter in that word for the fifth time, probably just a typo.” Utterly impossible to spell Gaelge, “Oh feck no, you did not forget that f that inexplicably comes after the h. Absolutely wrong, do it again!”

It is a thing of beauty and healing in a way it took me a few weeks to put words to. When my father moved us to the middle of nowhere, partly so that my sister and I could reclaim our ancestral language of French, I didn’t appreciate it. I was 4, it was overwhelming, and kids can be sodding assholes. I came to appreciate it as I became the only one of my cousins who could converse with my great-grandfather and other relatives in their native tongue. Now, learning the other major language of my ancestry feels deeply grounding in a way that I never expected. 

I remember reading something in anthropology class about how the descendents of immigrants experience a sense of isolation and disconnection, a mourning of sorts for their lost culture. This was a million years ago and may have since been disproved, but I think it has serious merit. Think about it. The reason that none of my cousins speak French is because my grandparents experienced high levels of bullying about their accents in school and chose to encourage English only in their kids. They themselves didn’t speak French outside of the house. The goal was to pass. To seem less French. 

I’ve no doubt it’s similar in many other cultures. With each generation people lose a little more, words, songs, foods from the old country. Pieces of identity that were once anchoring become things to shed in order to blend in. But to what? We’re a nation of immigrants. Where is the American culture? Is this one of the reasons that people here tend to base so much of their identity on politics? I’m not trying to start anything, but it does make me wonder. 

I started this piece weeks ago, but it’s only appropriate that I am finishing it on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, a problematic celebration of a non-Irish missionary that nonetheless gets everyone claiming whatever tiny portion of Irish they have. But hey, absolutely do it. Maybe just go beyond the green beer and corned beef and learn your favorite phrase in Irish. Just don’t ask me for help on the pronunciation. I’m not there yet.