As part of my PhD research, I spend countless hours trawling the British Newspaper Archive for forgotten dialect writing. Occasionally, the net catches more than I was expecting.

So it was this week, when I was searching for some Black Country collocation or other. Because they’re often short – like doh yer (don’t you) – and because of OCR errors in the transcriptions, the chance for false positives can be really high.

But this false positive was a bit more interesting than many. The search had mistakenly picked out some Irish text in a 1924 edition of the Irish Independent. It turned out to be part of a regular “Teach Yourself” style column, Gaoluinn. That’s an alternative spelling of Gaolainn – the Munster word for Gaeilge, the Irish language, which suggests that it’s Munster dialect that is the basis for the lessons.

Now, newspapers and language learning lessons are nothing new – there was a giveaway in the early noughties (I can’t remember the paper) where you got a special edition Teach Yourself book with every copy (I still have that mini Teach Yourself Basic Italian somewhere!). But Gaoluinn looked to be part of a run of language lessons that built up readers’ knowledge across editions.

Gaoluinn – Newspaper Irish Lessons

An Irish lesson printed in the Irish Independent, 1924 (British Newspaper Archive)

It’s typical of the language learning of its time, taking a systematic grammar-based approach (you might remember this from my raving over Teach Yourself Polish 1948!). The particular week that popped up here explains plural formation in Irish, alongside a bunch of illustrative phrases with just a hint of the aphorism and sermon about them.

A lovely thing about the lessons is its attempt at ‘folk’ phonetic spelling alongside the Irish. You can imagine readers giving it a go – readers whose families had maybe lost the language a couple of generations ago, and wanted to reconnect with Irish.

There’s More Out There

There’s clearly loads more Gaoluinn to explore in the archive, but I haven’t investigated further yet. Of course, I have more pressing things to be getting on with on the BNA, as fun as false positives are!

But I’m intrigued by the find nonetheless. A quick peek shows that it ran from at least 1922 to 1925, and later on, often taught via the target language (how modern – the way I learnt to teach!). I have so many questions, though… Was it serialised from an existing course book, or was it turned into a course book later? Was it popular or well received?

It’s definitely something I’ll circle back to when I have a bit more time. And, incidentally,  I’m sure there’s some PhD material in there for anyone interested in the evolution of language teaching, too!