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Comment by dorchadas | Hacker News Reader

> but languages change over time.

I would argue there's a difference between natural language change among natives and language change because learners can't/won't learn something right. What we're actually seeing isn't language change, but language shift (in the Gaeltacht), where Irish loses all that separates it from English as English creeps in, and language formation (outside the Gaeltacht) as a sort of Gaelo-Anglo pidgin/creole is being formed.

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As a Spaniard living in Ireland I couldn't detect much difference in how the Irish I heard at the popup gaeltacht event sounded compared to English as a language (though when I first visited Kerry I thought some of the older men were speaking Gaelic because of how they spoke English)

I'd expect people to not want their Irish to sound so like English (jibberish English like the Simms) but it doesn't seem to be something learners or educationists care about or are aware of

There's two factors there though. The first is how English accents in those localities have been influenced by historic use of Irish there. The second is how the accents learners of Irish are now being influenced by English phonetics.

The biggest problem with the latter is a lot of learners don't grasp the Slender/Broad consonants distinction at all (it's a palatilization/velarization distinction similar to the soft/hard distiction in Slavic languages).

Honestly, most people don't know and don't care. They use their little phrase 'Broken Irish is better than clever English' to hide/dismiss any concerns as well. It's a huge issue though -- the native sounds are dying, and learners are killing them. Put off by saying "Oh, it's just my dialect" (it's not, you're not a native speaker; you don't have a dialect!)

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