THE DIALECTS ARE THE LANGUAGE 33 



of another, only picture-writing will veil the dialect. 

 As a matter of fact all the Irish written at the present 

 day is dialectic, no matter how it is spelled. Perhaps I 

 ought to make an exception in favour of certain recent 

 imitations of 'Keating, unsuccessful imitations in my 

 opinion. But I am thinking now of the living 

 language, not of deliberate archaisms. If you speak 

 or write natural living Irish, you cannot avoid dialect. 

 Nothing else is left. The dialects are the language. Saving 

 the language means saving the dialects. When they go, 

 the language itself is gone. A common standard is of course 

 much to be desired. But this is not to be manufactured 

 by the aid of archaic lettering, or by pretending that nothing 

 has changed during the last three hundred years. Which- 

 ever dialect has most writers and most readers has a chance 

 of being accepted as the standard if it can only be kept 

 long enough alive ! 



This brings me back to the question: "What will be 

 the effect of a simplified spelling on the dialects ? " I 

 cannot do better than quote the answer of Dathi 6 

 hlarlatha in a series of articles on the spelling of Irish 

 which he contributed to the Gaelic Journal. In November, 

 1905, he wrote : 



" But, it will be objected, we shall in this way have 

 not one language, but an indefinite number of dialects, 

 and our efforts to attain a standard literary medium will 

 be farther off than ever. The reply is that the exact 

 representation of words as they are uttered, as far as this 

 is attainable with the material at our command, will neither 

 increase nor lessen the dialectic varieties existing, it will 

 merely enable the reader to pronounce with certainty 

 where he may now be in doubt, while sparing the writer 

 a considerable amount of worse than useless labour." 



The advocates of spelling reform are prepared to face 

 this question boldly. As long as there is no generally 

 accepted standard, if we are not ashamed to speak in dialect 

 we need not be ashamed to write in dialect. And surely 

 a simpler and more accurate method of writing the spoken 

 word would familiarize the reader, to an extent impossible 



