Previously, I shared the various difficulties I faced when learning the orthography of Irish consonants, and how they are pronounced. But this time, I am faced with a bigger challenge — figuring out how the vowels are pronounced. After all, the Irish language is no stranger to vowel sequences like “aoi” and “uai”, building up to the interactions with consonants in blocks like “oighea” and “eomhai”, and it took me quite some time to work out how these are pronounced. Once again, I am focusing on Ulster Irish for this bit.

It would be a great recap to mention the golden rule of Irish orthography, that is, “caol le caol agus leathan le leathan“, or “slender with slender and broad with broad”. This alludes to the use of vowels indicating whether a consonant is broad or slender.

Remember when I mentioned that broad consonants are marked by “a, á, o, ó, u, ú”, and slender consonants are marked by “e, é, i, í”? It turns out, I have missed on an important exception. The vowel combination “ae” is followed by a broad consonant despite the “e” in there.

Written vowels also differ in their quality depending on whether or not they are part of a stressed syllable. To my knowledge, stress usually falls on the first syllable, and in compound words, the first syllable of the first constituent, and secondarily, the first syllable of the second constituent. But stress is not indicated in Irish orthography.

I observed several patterns in Irish vowels after comparing what was said with what the Irish subtitles or transcriptions show. The first one, and probably one of the most identifiable patterns, is that unstressed short vowels (a, e, i, o, u) are usually reduced to a schwa.

Additionally, accented vowels are always pronounced, and they represent long vowels. If there are unaccented vowels adjacent to these accented vowels, they would generally be silent. Interestingly, although unmarked, the “i” and “u” are lengthened before “á” and “ó”. Some unaccented vowels would also be lengthened before certain consonants as well.

But first, let us start from the basics. The unaccented vowels “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, and “u”. These are the main ones that would have different pronunciations in unstressed syllables.

Vowel	Unstressed	Stressed
a	/ə/ /a/ before ‘ch’	/a/ /aː/ before ‘rd’, ‘rl’, ‘rn’, ‘rr’
e	/ə/	/ɛ/ /eː/ before ‘rd’, ‘rl’, ‘rn’, ‘rr’ /ɪ/ before ‘m’, ‘mh’, ‘n’, ‘nn’
i	/ə/	/ɪ/
o	/ə/	/ɔ/ /oː/ before ‘rd’, ‘rl’, ‘rn’
u	/ə/	/ʊ/ /uː/ before ‘rd’, ‘rl’, ‘rn’ /ɔ/, /ʊ/ in English-based loanwords

Next, we have the accented vowels “á”, “é”, “í”, “ó”, and “ú”. As we noted, these are always long vowels, and adjacent unaccented vowels are not pronounced. To organise this better, here is a table of the vowel sequences containing the accented vowels, and their corresponding values.

Vowel sequence	Phoneme (Ulster Irish)
á, ái eá, eái	/aː/
é, éa, éi	/eː/
í, ío aí, aío oí, oío uí, uío	/iː/
ó, ói	/oː/ /oːxə/ in verb endings
ú, úi iú, iúi	/uː/
iá, iái	/iːaː/
uá, uái	/uːaː/
ió, iói	/iːoː/
uó, uói	/uːoː/

And now, we come to the vowel sequences with only unaccented vowels. This is the category of vowel sequences that I have the most trouble grasping, as it does not make intuitive sense that the sequence ‘aoi’ makes a /iː/ sound, for example. This sentiment does seem to resonate with many other people as well, after watching videos of people struggling to pronounce Irish names like Saoirse, sometimes with a rather comedic effect.

But as vowel sequences like these show up in commonly found words like “feirmeoir” (farmer) and “buaileann sé” (he meets), I will need to familiarise myself with them, regardless of how unintuitive their pronunciations may be. I thought I would organise these ones together in another neat table or two. The second table takes into account digraphs like “ai”, “ei”, and “oi”, which have different pronunciations based on stress and presence of other consonants.

Vowel sequence	Phoneme (Ulster Irish)
ae, aei	/eː/
ao, aoi	/iː/
eo, eoi	/oː/ /ɔ/ in anseo (here), deoch (drink), eochair (key), seo (this)
ia, iai	/iə/
io	/ɪ/
iu	/ʊ/
ua, uai	/uə/

Vowel sequence	Unstressed	Stressed
ai	/ə/	/a/ /aː/ before ‘rd’, ‘rl’, ‘rn’, ‘rr’
ei	/ə/	/ɛ/ /eː/ before ‘rd’, ‘rl’, ‘rn’, ‘rr’ /ɪ/ before ‘m’, ‘mh’, ‘n’, ‘nn’
ea, eai	/ə/ /a/ before ‘ch’	/a/ /aː/ before ‘rd’, ‘rl’, ‘rn’, ‘rr’
oi	/ə/	/ɛ/ /ɔ/ before ‘cht’, ‘rs’, ‘rt’, ‘rth’, ‘s’ /oː/ before ‘rd’, ‘rl’, ‘rn’ /ɪ/ next to ‘n’, ‘m’, ‘mh’, before ‘nn’, ‘ll’
ui	/ə/	/ɪ/

Something that puzzles me is, I cannot find a reason why vowel sequences like ‘aoi’ makes a long ‘i’ sound, and how ‘ao’ also makes a similar sound while marking the adjacent consonants as broad consonants. I would want to touch on that subject at some point later, but that will have to wait as I do my reading on this.

Annoyingly, exceptions do still apply, especially when these vowels are part of certain grammatical functions like verb conjugation. To my knowledge, the main ones that are affected are the sequences ‘ea’, ‘eo’, ‘eoi”, ‘ó’, and ‘ói’. Unlike the ‘dh’ conundrum we encountered previously, these exceptions are a bit more simple.

Firstly, ‘ea’ is pronounced /ɛ/ when it is in the various conjugations of the verb ‘to be’, ‘bí‘. And lastly, in various verb endings, ‘eo’, ‘eoi”, ‘ó’, and ‘ói’ would be pronounced with a /oːxə/ sound. While these are simpler rules than the ‘dh’ exception, I would perhaps have to bear this in mind together with the grammatical aspects of Irish. Familiarisation will come best with practise for me, though I would also want to pay more attention to these details when listening to Irish-language videos or audio clips.

I hope this short series has helped in understanding how written Irish is pronounced, as I learned to find patterns in these vowels, and familiarise myself with unintuitive vowel sequences. But we are not done here. In the last part of this short series, we will look at the instances where vowels, normally unaccented vowels, interact with certain consonants, producing some more unintuitive pronunciations. Join me, as I learn how words like “caighean” (cage), “Samhain” (November), and “domhain” (deep) are pronounced.