The language of the printing-house: why so many books in Welsh and Scottish Gaelic were printed in 18th-century Ireland, and so few in Irish

Abstract

ABSTRACT Among the principal Celtic languages, Irish is conspicuous for the paucity of printed production between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Various explanations have been advanced for this by Irish scholars and historians. Among them number suggestions that, since printing was an urban phenomenon, and since towns in Ireland were largely English-speaking, printers therefore lacked the necessary language skills. This paper evaluates such explanations through an exploration of printing in Ireland of texts in Celtic languages other than Irish. More was printed in Welsh than in Irish in Dublin in the 1740s and 1760s, while two substantial collections of poetry in Scottish Gaelic were printed in Cork and Galway around 1800. The paper concludes that Irish printers could work in different languages, and their supposed lack of linguistic skills was not therefore a major factor in preventing the production of printed Irish.