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Table 2: 1901 Census returns of Urris: Irish-speakers
under the age of 20
Table 3: 1901 Census returns for Urris. Distribution% of Irish-speakers by age in four townlands.
*Shows the effect of heavy emigration in the 1860's. One outcome of the house-by-house approach was that I was able to debunk the suggestion that the British Army fort in An Líonán was a significant element in the final decline of the Irish language. Table 2 shows that, in fact, the townland of An Líonán held on to Irish better than anywhere else in Urris. The presence of soldiers did not hasten the decline of the language in the immediate area. The last person to be brought up with Irish in An Líonán,
according to the census, was Ellen Doherty who was born in 1893. Of
the seven Irish-speaking children born in Urris between 1890 and 1893,
four were born in An Líonán. The first children there
to be brought up with English rather than Irish were born in the mid
1870s. So, less than twenty years from beginning to end! The fatal
injection was administered much earlier, not by the Royal Artillery
monoglot English speakers but by local opinion leaders, many of them
bi-lingual in the towns and villages. |
To
examine language shift in Urris, I had to get statistics for an area
much smaller that the barony on lnishowen East. I came to the conclusion
that I would have to examine census return forms house by house. The
results of that study are given in Tables 2 and 3. They illustrate
the very end of the process of language shift. I was able to pinpoint
exactly when households gave up on the Irish language insofar as transmitting
it to the next generation was concerned. The census returns of many
households showed a succession of children described as Irish speakers
followed by one or more who were declared to speak English only. That
indicates the year of change. 
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