Experiential Education GABBING IN GAELIC

Keeping heritage and culture alive

In 1842, eight Irish friars of the Order of Saint Augustine founded a college to educate working-class Irish immigrants—it’s a story Villanovans know well.

“Villanova was established right around the time of the famine, when you had a huge influx of those Irish migrants fleeing Ireland and seeking refuge over here in the United States,” says Jonathan O’Neill, PhD, assistant professor of Irish Studies. “Irish was the majority language on the island at the time, and it's highly likely that many of those migrants were Irish speakers. It's also likely that the founders of the University had some ability to speak the language, particularly if they were ministering to Irish language speakers who were coming in.”

More than 180 years later, Villanova students of today are keeping that history alive, learning Irish Gaelic.

“It's nice to continue that tradition and to give students an experience of the language that may have been important to the people back then,” says Dr. O’Neill, who teaches all three of the University’s Irish language courses.

These courses are both an opportunity for students to connect with Villanova's history and, for some, a way to connect with their own heritage. Maeve Malone ’25 CLAS, who is double majoring in Environmental Science and Geography, took Gaelic as an elective during her senior year. Maeve’s father had immigrated from Ireland.

“I have cousins there, and they're in school now and they're learning Irish. So, I thought it would be a cool way to kind of connect to my culture,” she says.

Integral to learning the language is learning the culture, and one way Dr. O’Neill integrated this into the class was through a cultural exchange with the University of Galway. Villanova students met over Zoom with their peers in Ireland a few times over the course of the semester. It was through this experience that Maeve learned about barmbrack, a traditional Irish bread, and she decided to make it herself—to the delight of her grandparents.

In addition to the culture, John Snyder ’27 CLAS loved digging into the written language. As an English major, he keyed in on sentence structure, noticing the verb comes first in a sentence—unlike the English language—and there is no verb “to have” in Gaelic. He made some interesting observations, including one about the way English and Gaelic describe feelings.

“Instead of ‘I am sad,’ what you're literally saying is ‘sadness is on me.’” he says. “I think with English we internalize feelings a lot. It was cool to realize in some languages that's not how you speak it.”

John ended up taking all three levels of the language course and adding an Irish Studies minor.

Gaelic is an old language. Scholars theorize it arrived around 500 B.C. before written sources, says Dr. O’Neill. It’s deeply woven into Irish literature, history and culture. However, it is a minority language. In the Republic of Ireland, about 1.8 million people claim to know some Gaelic, but the number of people who speak it daily is much smaller. That number may be as low as 60,000 – 70,000. The language is still compulsory in the primary and secondary school systems in Ireland, because there is value in keeping it alive.

“There are all sorts of knowledge—local knowledge, sustainability knowledge—that can be stored in indigenous languages,” says Dr. O’Neill.

Maeve made this connection, too, at first when she was studying abroad in South Africa.

“I think they have 19 official languages. I couldn't even fathom that they are so different from the Romance languages, and it opened my eyes to how diverse language actually is,” she says.

Maeve took a conservation course as part of her Geography major during the same semester she was taking Gaelic. The course was focused on conserving endangered species using modeling software.

“While people were choosing plants and animals, for my final project I focused on global endangered languages,” she says. She used different techniques to trace the threats to language and identify potential factors, such as environmental factors, that may put some languages at greater risk of extinction.

 “That was a novel use of conservation software. It opened my eyes to not only linguistics in general but also how I can diversify the skills that I already have within my major.”

Maeve submitted her final paper to two journals.

Despite its status as a minority language, the diversity of Irish speakers has expanded.

“Modern Ireland is a diverse, multicultural community, and we have many language speakers and language advocates who are coming from new Irish communities,” says Dr. O’Neill. “People are coming from Nigerian Irish backgrounds or Vietnamese Irish backgrounds or any number of other backgrounds.”

This diversity is important for Dr. O’Neill to impress upon his students. Contemporary Irish society is multicultural, and he integrates that into his literature and culture classes as well.

“While of course I welcome students from an Irish heritage, it's important that any student on campus who has an interest in the language can come to class and feel like they are included.”