Welcome to Gaeilge an Chuain/Bay Area Irish. This website is meant to be a resource to anyone on the land of the Muwekma Ohlone people (now called the Bay Area) who speaks Irish, is learning Irish, is thinking about learning Irish, or just generally wants to know what is going on with Irish in the Bay. 

 

 I started Gaeilge an Chuain two and a half years into my Irish learning experience. I found that there were a number of Irish language events going on but most were spread through word of mouth or several different collections of email lists. While I heartily approve of those forms of marketing, I thought it might be nice to have a public space in which information can be collected and disseminated. While I am by no means a computer person, I am wildly overconfident, and so the website was born. 

 

Now a little about me, as your wildly overconfident guide to Irish language in the Bay Area. My name is Fiona, I am an Irish learner and now teacher based in Berkeley, CA. I began learning Irish in 2023 at UC Berkeley after being unable to answer a question I had about the use of the passive voice in a translation from Old Irish into English. This is, perhaps, not the usual route one takes when learning a language. However, through the Celtic Studies Program at UC Berkeley, I was able to spend several summers in the Connemara and Ulster Gaeltachts before graduating with a double major in Celtic Studies and English. There, I didn’t just improve my Irish, but was taught how to care for a language. 

 

Irish is not just a language that I speak. It is a language that I hold. There is a responsibility one takes on when they learn a minoritized language, to nurture, grow, and celebrate its survival. I do not identify as Irish, but two generations ago family members I never met fled the poverty of a colonized Ireland and assimilated into the American settler state, leaving behind language, music, community. None of that reached me. I am not Irish. That part of my history is gone, obliterated by the violence of immigration. But by sheer chance, I have been able to return to the tongue that was cajoled, beaten, and starved from my ancestors. The attempts to eradicate the language have failed, resoundingly.

 

Now, as people trust me to teach this language, I take it as a duty to do so with immense care. Education has been a tool of language eradication, not just in Ireland but across the globe, including here in the Bay where the missions enacted unspeakable harms on the Ohlone people and their languages. Language should no longer be a tool of oppression. So as I teach Irish and attempt to gather resources for learners throughout this area, I hope to do so with a reparative method--embracing joy and care--and to remind my students, and all those who speak Irish here, that our language ties us to our past. And this past teaches us to fight oppression in all forms, not just our own. 

 

As James Connolly once wrote, “as we suffer together we must work together that we may enjoy together.” So welcome and let us work together that we may enjoy together.