Sadly, though a tiny number, it is more than most Native American languages. Today, at its lowest ebb, 20 000 people speak Irish Gaelic as their home language in the States. Spoken most often by the illiterate, devoid of its voice in the pages of history, Irish Gaelic in America is historically found among the working class and the socially marginalized, though it has always been present in some form or another in the U.S.A.'s rich linguistic tapestry.
So Irish Gaelic has flourished and languished on the perimeter of American society, with the greater culture (as in bigger - bigger not always being best!) oblivious to its vagaries. Through the centuries a myriad of Greek, Roman, and English experts have graced Harvard and Yale - yet hardly a professor or scholar of Gaelic between them. Irish Gaelic’s lack of standing within the American College system (the current Irish language department in Notre Dame being a notable exception) might also be said to have had an influence on it being over looked in the search for the etymology of many an American English word.
#ARE THERE ANY MONOLINGUAL IRISH SPEAKERS PATCH#
Current English in Ireland isn't a patch on the exuberance and color of my grandparents' version of the language. And that is a more recent generation again. My own grandparents for instance, who hadn't a word of Irish, used innumerous words and sayings borrowed from Irish in their English. To add a little more to this theory, the English spoken by many Irish people in the 19th century was more of a Creole, for want of a better word, taking much of its color and vitality from Irish and mixing it with English. If a proportion of the Irish immigrants spoke English, that is, we had a foot in the door to carve out our linguistic influence on American English, so to speak. The truth of this is hard to surmise, but if we say for argument's sake that this is true, it might allow for even more of a dialogue between the language communities. One of the main arguments against the Irish Gaelic influence on American English is that there was a large number of monolingual English speakers or bilingual speakers amongst immigrants from Ireland in the 19th century, and thus linguistically they would have assimilated very quickly. In my own opinion they played more of a part in the forming of American English than people are often willing to realise. It is an esoteric subject, as the people who would have forged the majority of this influence - that is, the Irish of the 19th century - were mainly poor, marginalised, and illiterate. Problematically, the actual scale of its influence is contentious and almost impossible to be definitive about. The influence of the Irish language on American English is, to me, a really interesting subject.
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