After 1770, Ireland experienced the establishment of modern forms of Irish Catholicism, new engagement by the public with the political process, and the growth of the modern state, represented by new legal and educational systems. An Irish-Speaking Island investigates the role in these developments of the population who spoke Irish in their daily lives-whether as a first or second language-and links the history of language contact and bilingualism with the broader history of Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
As late as 1840, Ireland had as many as four million...