ИСТИНА

Present-day usage of Irish cannot be confined to its traditional dialect varieties as even most Gaeltacht inhabitants are good bilinguals, whereas the majority of the country’s population, coming from English-speaking families, learn Irish at schools and universities rather than acquire the language as children do. In most cases L2 Irish learners never use the language outside educational institutions, English being the general (and most natural) means of communication in their everyday life. Still, some of them develop a good command of the language, though would hardly ever speak it on a daily basis. Although this L2 variety of Irish is characterised by the well-acquired phonetic inventory, particular sounds distribution does not necessarily coincide with what is found in the dialects. Palatalised and non-palatalised consonants present quite an interesting case in this respect as they can occur in positions where presence or absence of palatalisation is necessary to distinguish between word forms and different words.