In Scotland Wales and Ireland (UK bit)

Irish is spoken every day in a few areas of Ireland. There is a lot of effort made to stop the language dying out.

I work with an English lady here in Dublin and we have a database of 100s of people that we contact periodically. She often has to ask me how to say names, and she has been here years. Like PP said, when you've grown up saying names, you forget how weird they look/sound to others. I remember her asking me about a lady called Síle

I am originally from Donegal though (and, no, we can't donate the county to NI to make things handier), and there are fairly noticable differences in pronunciation of names from north to south of the (entire) island - like Róisín - I say it to rhyme a bit with "washing" , down here it's pronounced Roe-sheen

In the Irish language, bh and mh are pronounced as a v.
S can be ssss or sh. You can see that in the name Saoirse.
When you address someone directly say "A" and then their name, which changes the case. If possible that will add a h as the second letter and usually an i in the last vowel group. So Tomás... a Thomáis.... and to complicate it further, in the example I've given, the ssss of Tomás becomes a ssh. And th has a h sound. Some consonants cannot take a h, e.g. Liam... A Liam... and many names don't take an i.

I'll get me coat.

S followed by an i or an e

Jazz bh also makes a V sound in Irish. Like in Meabh. It isn't easy if you haven't grown up with it, and even then I don't nessacarily know 'the rules' as such I just know how to pronounce things when I see them written down from practice.

Saoirse yes I was trying to work out how to explain the sound when Mh is at the beginning of a name- like a mix between a w and a v? No idea how to sound it out in English. It's almost like the sound at the beginning of Wirrel near Liverpool?!

Fair dues OP - Ireland is complicated :-) As baby name threads go, this on has been interesting!

To answer your question about "Ais" always sounding like "Ash" - in Irish I think it does. I've been sitting here going through Irish words (I'm a bit rusty) and any I came up with had the ash sound.

I took my NN from Saoirse Ronan, who explains her name in USA interviews as "Saoirse like inertia"... which I thought was a pretty clever way to get people to remember it. I've heard a few grumbles that she is saying her own name wrong - so what hope does anyone else have?

There are different pronunciations throughout Ireland, never mind trying to say them in Irish/Gaelic isn't a language you are used to. Niamh can be Neeev or Ne-uv, or Caoimhe can be Ceeva or Queeva for example.
"Mh" in Irish is a V sound in the middle or end of a name, like Niamh, but I think (I am open to correction!) that it's a W sound at the start on a name.

Wow, Irish names are fairly popular in protestant circles down south. Not that there even are rigid protestant circles anymore. It's all so fluid now.

It's like my generation and maybe the generation a decade beneath me finally has the confidence to fully claim their right to be as Irish as their catholic compatriots! of course, that's if you dig deep and try to analyse other people's subconscious. It could just be a case of I love that name and nobody is going to bat an eyelid if I use them!

Your question about an M being a V sound in Gaelic. Not 100% about Scots Gaelic (is that the term?) but in Irish it's Mh together that becomes a v sound. For example the mh at the end of the name Niamh.

Jazz yes, I think so. Not everyone sees it that way, of course, loads of people don't. But if you look up NISRA (NI Statistics and Research Agency) baby name statistics you can see baby names by council area. If you know the areas, you can see the trends very clearly in that the most popular names in the towns that are traditionally 'Nationalist' areas are often Irish names. Then if you look at the towns that are traditionally 'Unionist' the most popular names are the English ones. There are obviously exceptions but I think it is a general trend.

Horatio I was so interested to read your post sounds like a fascinating topic, but it made me wonder about something. In Ireland in the past, particularily in my parents generation, there was a huge trend of naming your child in English on their birth cert for formal usage and maybe because it was seen as the right thing to do but the child would then be called the Irish version of the name in common usage. In my father's very large family half of the children would have had this scenario. My FIL the same, my mother's family the same for example and they were all spread across the country. I would imagine though cannot say for certain that a similar practice may have existed in Scotland. Did you come across this?

I think the Irish/English names issue in N Ireland is probably a little bit more complex than the equivalent in Scotland and Wales because here even something as simple as what you decide to name your child is so loaded. I know a little girl from a Protestant family who has a beautiful Irish name, because her very middle class parents live in the sort of circles where these things don't matter. But her very working class grandparents won't use her name in public because they are scared of what people will think. I think it will take several generations for that mindset to die out.

Wow I've just read this whole thread.

I don't understand the OPs question?
Can't believe she couldn't have googled about Northern Ireland though?

Wait - not all Commonwealth countries recognize the Queen as their Head of State, but they were all once part of the Empire. Some do still recognize the Queen as their Queen, others just recognize her as the Head of the Commonwealth. Membership is voluntary.

My understanding of how the islands are named.

England is in the main bulk of land but doesn't include Scotland or Wales. They are geographically attached to England and that whole lump of land is called Britain. Even if another country invaded and re-named the country, the lump of land is called Britain.

The British Isles includes Britain and the 'bits' around it, e.g. Portsmouth, The Isles of Scilly, Mann, Hebrides etc.

The United Kingdom includes Northern Island.

Ireland is the name for both the piece of land, and the nation which is Ireland. Some people refer to Ireland as the Republic of Ireland as a way to differentiate it from the whole piece of land, or to describe its constitution, or out of error.

There are other islands which come under the protection of the United Kingdom, but they are not part of the UK. They recognise Elizabeth II as their monarch. These include places such as the Channel Islands and Tristan D'Cunha.

Then there is the Commonwealth. Basically, these are places we appropriated and managed to populate to such an extent that white people became dominant and we destroyed the people already living there. Eventually, rather than face the embarrassment of losing another country, like we did the US, we allowed them to have their own parliament and autonomy, stopped making them pay taxes, and have given them rights to migrate to the UK in a slighter easier way than non-Commonwealth countries. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand are the best known Commonwealth countries, but I've just checked and there's 53 countries in the Commonwealth.

I know chuff-all about the traditions for names, though.