Mayo Irish,
in its speakers' own voices.
Abairt is a growing collection of recordings of native speakers from Mayo, transcribed and translated line by line. Listen, read along, and search for any word or phrase.
The Irish of Mayo
Most courses and dictionaries follow Connemara Irish or the standard. The speakers here come from Erris, Achill, Tourmakeady and east Mayo, and from the neighbouring districts where Irish was once spoken.
Irish is still a community language in three Mayo Gaeltacht areas: Erris, Achill and Tourmakeady. In the 2022 census about 10,500 people lived in the Mayo Gaeltacht, 5,956 of them said they could speak Irish, and 555 spoke it every day outside school (CSO).
A century ago far more of the county spoke it. Find your own parish on the 1926 Gaeltacht map to see how it was classed then.
Click on the map to listen to speakers from all over Mayo and follow the links to their recordings, words and phrases.
How the dialects divide
Tuaisceart Mhaigh Eo
Erris and the north-west of the county. Still a Gaeltacht.
Acaill
Achill and the coast around it. Still a Gaeltacht. Like Erris, it shares a good deal of vocabulary and pronunciation with Ulster Irish.
Lár Chonnachta
South Mayo, including Tourmakeady, with most of Roscommon and north and east Galway. Tourmakeady is still a Gaeltacht.
Connachta ó Thuaidh
North-east Mayo, Sligo and the north of Roscommon and Leitrim. Irish has died out here as a community language, but recordings of its last speakers survive.
The divisions follow Tomás Ó Máille's account of Connacht Irish as it stood in 1927.
206 recordings
Interviews, stories, songs, transcribed line by line.
53 native speakers
From across the Mayo dialects.
52,722 words and phrases
Folca, seanráite, seanchas, abairtí.
51,744 with audio
Words and phrases you can hear as well as read.
Listen, read, search
Recordings come with a transcript that follows along as they play, the Irish with the English beneath it.
- Play any line on its own, or shift-click to loop it
- Slow down to half speed
- Search recordings, and filter by dialect and topic
- Browse recordings on a map
Where the recordings come from
Community contributions and automated processing, checked by native speakers.
Collect
Native speakers and community members upload recordings, and a nightly import brings in Irish-language media, mostly from Turas Siar.
Process
Each recording is split by speaker, transcribed with ABAIR's speech recognition and given a draft English translation.
Check
Native speakers correct the transcripts and translations, and add speakers and places. Only checked entries are confirmed.
Are you a native speaker or a fluent Irish speaker? Sign up to help check recordings. Building something? There is an open API.
"An chéad chainteoir eile, 'the next speaker'. The goal of this site is to increase the number of adult speakers in the community."
Frequently asked questions
Yes. The aim is a high-quality collection of native Irish speech that anyone can use, and we don't want money to stand in the way.
Abairt is not run for commercial gain and has no analytics or tracking. If you sign up, your email is used for login and notifications, nothing else.
We make no claim on the material. It is shared freely, and the copyright and licensing belong to the owners of the original recordings.
You are welcome to fork the code and build a community of your own.
No. Everything you can listen to, read and search is open. Sign up if you want to help check and improve recordings.
- Start with the map to hear speakers from different areas and notice how the Irish changes.
- Search for a word or phrase in Irish or English to hear it in context.
- Slow it down and loop it until you can copy the sounds and the rhythm.
- Read along with the transcript, the English beneath the Irish, to follow the meaning.
Not always. Transcripts and translations start as machine drafts and are corrected by native speakers; entries marked as confirmed have been checked.
The speech services come from ABAIR and are not always available. Check their status if something isn't working.
Please report it on GitHub. Abairt runs on modest infrastructure, so it may occasionally be slow or briefly down.