Nicholas Wolf's An Irish-Speaking Island contributes significantly to scholarship on the British Isles, and potentially to that of related fields, during the transformative hundred years from 1770 to 1870. That is so even if one must comment on certain parameters Wolf sets for the book, on aspects of his approach to primary sources, or on the inclusiveness of his secondary readings. Wolf's introduction not only highlights the existence of substantial cohorts of Gaelic speakers throughout almost all regions of Ireland during this period but, equally, how limited scholarly analysis of that community and its vernacular has been. Wolf argues that linguistic diversity throughout British-influenced areas in Africa, the Americas, and Asia has historically received much greater attention than has investigation of Celtic populations' monolingualism or multilingualism in the home countries.

In the study's first major part, “Identities” (23–108), Wolf affirms the pervasive presence of the Irish-speaking world as an ancient but lasting inheritance, emphasizing its functioning in spheres such as commerce, toponomy, and displays of verbal dexterity. In a second large-scale division, “Encounters” (109–274), he examines at greater length other domains where Irish operated, including religion and education (treated effectively as a subset of the devotional), such as the promotion of Protestantism or Roman Catholicism via pious vernacular tracts. Also discussed are the employment of Irish in the courts, during evidence taking and evaluation, and in electioneering. He closes by restating his central premise that Gaelic was no fossil but rather a vibrant voice in its location and time—a premise obliging one to rethink later retrospective portrayals of Ireland that largely remove language from coverage of the era.

Wolf's work commends itself with ease to interested readers. The book is well-structured, cogently argued, and clear in its writing style. Translations of Gaelic texts and terminology, or paraphrasing, help those unfamiliar either with Irish or its context. Linguistic lapses seem minor (sometimes typographical, such as the hyphenation of labhóraidh, “would speak” [61]). Conclusions are grounded on a bedrock of reference to catalogs of original handwritten documentation, as well as to printed contemporary and later publications. The author furnishes a painstaking overview of relevant historical and linguistic research output, in various languages, laying content and inference before us to a high standard.

My further observations about An Irish-Speaking Island center on issues of wider moment, particularly the intractable historiographical dilemma of periodization. Wolf concentrates on 1770–1870, perhaps in response to investigations by former Irish prime minister Dr. Garret FitzGerald (1926–2011), who suggested Gaelic underwent a steady decline from the last quarter of the eighteenth century onwards (see 277, note 1). One difficulty in opting for the 1770 Wendepunkt is that language shift toward English had progressed significantly even before that stage. Commentators offer various dates for when English intervention in Irish affairs led to a marked transformation of Ireland's linguistic and cultural character. Historians like Nicholas Canny situate the decisive change during the late 1500s, Louis Cullen and Jane Ohlmeyer in the 1600s, while the Royal Irish Academy's A New History of Ireland (vol. 4, 1986) takes 1691 as point of departure for Britain's definitive sway. Accordingly, a book like Wolf's, which does not address the greater part of the eighteenth century, tends to omit a critical phase that prefigured and shaped later conditions. The other temporal boundary, 1870 throws up different challenges, cutting off from consideration positive contributions to Irish-language welfare made by various branches of Britain's administration as the 1800s came to a close. For example, creation, during the 1890s, of the Congested Districts Board beneficially affected economic and infrastructural improvement along the Irish-speaking western seaboard. This effort strengthened local government as the late 1800s yielded, in the county councils, an influential platform on which to secure, over time, space for different facets of Gaelic civilization within services like universities and libraries, or, later, through folklore collecting schemes (see Traolach Ó Ríordáin's 2000, Conradh na Gaeilge i gCorcaigh, 1894–1910, 165–74). In short, the full sweep of the 1700s and 1800s forms a compelling natural continuum with respect to one of Wolf's self-selected vantage points—state agency and how it influenced linguistic reality.

One finds limited treatment here of certain crucial issues. Education, for instance, is addressed mainly as an adjunct to religion, but other aspects of this domain remain unconsidered: access to instruction, curriculum development, subject availability, linguistic media used in classwork and teacher formation—all factors at play from the early 1700s onwards. Economic history, too, deserves more attention. Actions by the British authorities ensured the majority of Ireland's Irish speakers remained lower class, engaging in occupations common to their station, as craftsmen or laborers (agricultural and the like). Linguistic trends among the professions are largely absent from Wolf's account, despite an abundance of original documentation for them.

The work's bibliography is impressive in its comprehensiveness, but admission of further titles might have been beneficial. Among those is Barra Ua Cearnaigh's groundbreaking Amhail fuaim chogair bhig: Teangeolas Shéamais Uí Scoireadh (2011), a study that highlights a Kilkenny native, James Scurry (d. 1828), who searched out models for dictionary making and language standardization in Gaelic some one hundred years before the southern Irish state undertook the same tasks. Scurry drew on the writings of linguists such as William Ward (1709–90) and John Walker (1732–1807), who were exercised by similar challenges confronting English itself at the time. By showing a proactive approach to language planning, Scurry's case bolsters Wolf's arguments about the vitality of contemporary Irish. Wolf states from the start that Ireland's situation has scarcely attracted notice commensurate with that of other British possessions; one wishes that he might incorporate scholarship that points out key parallels and discontinuities. This is a matter of some import, because the story of modernity is one of precipitous reduction in language attestation internationally, a process in which European intrusiveness played a preponderant role. It might have been appropriate to have searched within the Old World as well for pertinent comparanda. Gaelic Ireland throughout this age holds much in common with Jewish Mitteleuropa in its distinctiveness and vigor, but Ireland also shared manifestations of existential anxiousness or marginalization together with impending doom. Allowing for such caveats, An Irish-Speaking Island succeeds in its overarching aim of asserting that the people of Ireland had different media at their disposal when communicating with each other throughout the century at issue. Further attempts to clarify what, exactly, they conveyed in those conversations, to map the spoken and written terrain Wolf delineates, will find this careful coordinate and compass of relevance to their concerns at multiple levels.