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A Beginner's Guide to Irish Gaelic Pronunciation

I have put this guide together as a service to traditional

musicians, radio announcers and anyone else who is interested
in traditional Irish music, and would like to be able to
pronounce tune titles, people's names and the like in Irish, but
is not familiar with the language or the spelling system.

This guide is not intended for linguists or people who are learning Irish as a
language. It is simply a rule of thumb for people who are unfamiliar with Irish
(e.g., most English-speaking people outside Ireland). As an example of what I
mean, most English-speaking people in California or the U.S. Southwest, seeing
the placename "San Joaquin", would pronounce it "San Wah-KEEN". This is not
exactly the correct pronunciation in Spanish. You would, however, be understood a
lot better by a Mexican than if you said "San JOE-a-Kwin", which is what applying
English spelling rules to Spanish would give you. In our part of the world most
people have a rough concept of the Spanish spelling system. If you are involved
with Irish music, why not try to acquire a similar knowledge of Irish spelling?

Never again need you feel uneasy when confronting words like bhfuil or Maedhbh!

Spoken Irish has three main dialects, Munster (Cork and Kerry), Connemara and
Ulster (Donegal). This guide is more or less based on the Ulster dialect.

Scottish Gaelic is quite similar but the spelling system is a little different. Actually
the consonants are much the same, but the vowels differ quite a lot. The other
Gaelic language is Manx which has a spelling system based on English. As a result
the spelling is totally unrelated to the grammatical structure. This is a bit difficult
to deal with. I generally read it aloud and try to translate it into Irish as the sound
of the languages is very similar.

Irish, Scottish Gaelic (which is pronounced "Gallic") and Manx make up the
Gaelic branch (sometimes called q-Celtic) of the Celtic languages. Irish is
sometimes called "Erse" (usually in crossword puzzles), but this is generally
considered impolite nowadays. The other branch is the Brythonic (p-Celtic) branch
consisting of Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Although the two branches can be seen
to be related by a professional linguist, to the ordinary person there is no
perceiveable relationship between the two—just as English is linguistically related
to Swedish, but the ordinary English speaker would find it difficult to speak or read
Swedish.
I've divided the rules up into the following topics:

 Vowels
 Simple Consonants
 Aspirated consonants
 Eclipsed consonants
 Diphthongs
 Accent
 Double consonants
 Exceptions

Vowels
Irish vowels are very easy. They are only single sounds, not diphthongs like
English vowels. They come in two varieties, long and short. Long vowels are
marked with an acute accent, called in Irish a fada (which simply means "long").

Simple Vowels
Long vowel Pronounced Short vowel Pronounced
á Eng. "Pa" a Eng. "ago"
é Eng. "Hey" e Eng. "peck"
í Eng. "Knee" i Eng. "pick"
ó Eng. "Woe" o Eng. "mock"
ú Eng. "Shoe" u Eng. "muck"

Consonants
For Irish consonants, things work a bit like Spanish or Italian. Note the two
different ways the letter "c" is pronounced in "cappucino" or "San Francisco". In
these languages, when a "c" is followed by an "i" or "e" it is pronounced
differently than if it is followed by "a", "o" or "u".

Irish does the same thing in a very systematic way. "i" and "e" are called slender
vowels, "a", "o" and "u" are broad vowels. Each consonant is pronounced either in
a broad or slender way, according to the surrounding vowels. Irish spelling
requires that the vowels match on either side of a consonant, which is summarized
as Caol le caol, leathan le leathan ("Slender with slender, broad with broad").
When foreign words are taken into Irish, extra "glide vowels" may be introduced to
meet this rule, e.g. California might become Caileafóirnia.

Irish has fewer consonants than English. As you can see, most of them are
pronounced very much like English. Actually, for the purpose of simplicity I am
leaving out a few subtle differences.
 Simple consonants
Broad consonant Pronounced Slender consonant Pronounced
b Eng. "b" b Eng. "b"
c Eng. "k" c Eng. "k"
d Eng. "d" d Eng. "j"
f Eng. "f" f Eng. "f"
g Eng. "g" g Eng. "g"
l Eng. "l" l Eng. "l"
m Eng. "m" m Eng. "m"
n Eng. "n" n Eng. "n"
p Eng. "p" p Eng. "p"
r rolled "r" r Eng. "r"
s Eng. "s" s Eng. "sh"
t Eng. "t" t Eng. "ch"

Aspirated consonants
Some consonants in Irish can undergo a transformation called séimhiú, which is
somewhat inaccurately (to a real linguist) translated as "aspiration". In the old Irish
script this was shown by putting a little dot above the letter. Nowadays Irish is
printed using the standard Western alphabet, and the little dot has been replaced by
the letter "h" following the consonant. "h" in Irish is not a letter, it is an operation.
That's why there seem to be so many "h"s in Irish.

("h" sometimes appears at beginning of a word before a vowel, or in words

borrowed from English. It is pronounced the same as in English when used by
itself before a vowel.)

The operation of aspiration changes the pronunciation of the consonants, and

naturally there is both a broad and a slender version for each.

Aspirated consonants
Broad Slender
Pronounced Pronounced
consonant consonant
bh Eng. "w" bh Eng. "v"
Like the broad
ch As in "loch" or "chutzpah" ch
version
Like "ch" but based on a "g"
dh dh Eng. "y"
sound
fh Silent fh Silent
 Like "ch" but based on a "g"
gh gh Eng. "y"
sound
mh Eng. "w" mh Eng. "v"
ph Eng. "f" ph Eng. "f"
sh Eng. "h" sh Eng. "h"
th Eng. "h" th Eng. "h"

There are a few exceptions to these rules. Broad dh or gh in the middle of a word is
usually pronounced "y", such as fadhb "fibe" ("problem"). Sometimes
broad bh or mh ("w") can result in a combination which is hard to say, like mo
bhróga ("my shoes"). In that case, a "v" sound is used instead. Also, sometimes a
"v" sound occurs when bh or mh is at the end of a word, such as creidimh "krej-iv"
("belief").

Eclipsed consonants
In English, in different grammatical situations, we sometimes change the end of
words, such as "child" becomes "children". We also can change the middle of
words, such as "man" turns into "men". In the Celtic languages, the beginning of a
word can also change. If you were learning to speak Welsh, for example, this
might produce difficulties for the beginner. If you see an unfamiliar word, you
could have trouble looking it up in the dictionary, because you might not be sure
what the first letter of the root form is.

In Irish, things are much easier. When the first letter of a word changes in what is
called urú or "eclipsis", the spelling gives first the letter as pronounced, followed
by the original letter before it was changed. The following letter combinations at
the beginning of a word should be interpreted this way:

mb, gc, nd, bhf, ng, bp, ts, dt

Note that bh is considered to be a single letter!

Diphthongs
This is the trickiest part of Irish pronunciation, when two vowels come together.
The reason it's tricky is that sometimes one of the vowels is favoured in
pronunciation, and the other is just a glide vowel. You remember that a glide
vowel simply changes the quality from broad to slender.

The slender glide vowel is easy because we have it in English. Irish tún would be
English "toon", Irish tiún would be English "tune". So the slender glide vowel is
sort of a very quick "y" sound.
Similarly, the broad glide vowel is sort of a very quick short "u" sound, almost a
grunt. In Munster dialect it can sometimes sound like a "w".

When two vowels are together, and one of them is long, the long vowel sound
predominates. There are only a few words in Irish where two long vowels come
together, in which case you simply say them one after the other. So the case we
really need to look at is when two short vowels come together.

Long diphthongs

These are written with short (non-accented) vowels, but actually you speak them
rather as if one of the vowels were long.

Long diphthongs
Written Pronounced
ae Eng. "tray"
ao Eng. "tree"
eo Eng. "Joe"
ia Eng. "see a"
ua Eng. "truant"

Note this can be followed by an "i", which just makes a slender glide vowel
afterwards.

Short diphthongs

These are combinations of two short vowel sounds. For most of them you simply
say the two vowels rather quickly one after the other. The table gives a few where
one vowel predominates and the other is strictly a glide vowel. I'm not putting in
the glide vowel in the table, but it should be added to the sound shown.

Short diphthongs
Written Pronounced Glide vowel
ea Eng. "mass" Slender before
io Eng. "miss" Broad after
ui Eng. "miss" Broad before

Accent
In Ulster Irish, the accent always occurs on the first syllable. Especially, please
note this includes the name "Clannad". In Munster Irish, things are different, but
we are not dealing with that.
The exceptions are a few words which were historically compound words. The
most common are:

anois ("a-NISH"), ariamh, arís, anall, arú, amháin, aneas

Double consonants
Some combinations of double consonants are hard to say together as written.
Normally an indistinct vowel sound is introduced between them. The Irish often do
the same in English, like pronouncing "Dublin" as "Dubbalin".

The introduction of such sounds does not affect the placement of the accent.
Thus gnóthach ("busy") is pronounced like "ga-NOE-hakh". The accent is placed
on the first syllable, the ó, because the little added sound doesn't count as a
syllable.

You can put in the added indistinct vowel wherever you find any of the following
consonant combinations difficult to say:

gn, lm, lg, bl, mn, nm, nc, rb, rbh, rch, rg, rm, rn, thn

Note that aspirated consonants are considered as a single consonant.

Don't confuse these with eclipsed consonants which appear only at the beginning
of a word, in which the second consonant is not pronounced. These double
consonants can appear anywhere in a word. They don't include the eclipsed
combinations, which even the Irish wouldn't try to pronounce!

Exceptions
Irish spelling is really quite regular, especially compared to English. Think about
"through", "rough", and "cough". Now tell me how Gough Street in San Francisco
should be pronounced!

But there are a few exceptions in Irish, like most languages. But just as Irish has
only 11 irregular verbs, the number of spelling exceptions are few. The most
important are:

 The word is is always pronounced "iss", although by the spelling rules it

should be "ish". It's said as though it were spelled ios.
 f in a verb ending is always pronounced "h". This is easy if you are actually
learning the language, but otherwise how to tell which is a verb? In simple
sentences the verb comes first. (The usual order is verb subject object.) The
most common endings are -faidh, -faimid, -far, -fainn, -fadh. These also
 have slender versions -fidh, -fimid, -fear, -finn, -feadh. There are a few
others but they are not so common.
 In Donegal the word ending -adh is usually pronounced "oo" as in "moon".
In Munster you would hear "ig" in this case.
 Munster Irish also has some other exceptions, but by sticking to Ulster Irish
you don't need to know about these.

So by looking back at our first examples, we see an bhfuil (the verb "to be" in the
present tense question form), the bh eclipses the f, and the u is just a glide vowel
making the bh broad, so we say "an will". For Maedhbh (a legendary
queen), ae diphthong is pronounced "ay", a slender dh is a "y", a slender bh is a
"v", so we say "Mayv". Simple, isn't it?