How we write pronunciation

Every record on this site carries a pronunciation guide like SLAWN-cheh or guh rev MAH AH-gut. This page is the system behind those guides: what the letters mean, which Irish sounds they stand for, and what a respelling honestly can and cannot do.

The honesty clause first

Our respellings are editorial approximations for English speakers. They are the one part of a record page no source stands behind, and each page says so. They aim at a neutral, roughly Connacht-leaning pronunciation, will get you close enough to be understood, and are not a substitute for a native speaker. Human-recorded audio, credited by name, is the planned replacement. Never a synthetic voice.

Reading the guides

Stress is in CAPS, one stressed syllable per word; syllables join with hyphens. The vowel anchors: ah as in father, aw as in law (that is á), ay as in day (é), ee as in see (í), oh as in boat (ó), oo as in too (ú), uh for the unstressed schwa. The fada is what makes a vowel long, which is why it can never be dropped.

The sounds English ears miss

Irish consonants come in broad and slender pairs, and the slender ones are the famous difficulty. A slender d sounds close to English j, which is why Dia begins like “jee”. And a slender t drifts toward “ch”, which is why sláinte ends in -cheh. A slender s is “sh”. The lenited letters do the rest of the surprising work: bh and mh sound as w or v, th as a plain h, fh as nothing at all, and broad ch is the throat sound of Scottish “loch”, the one in chéile.

Eclipsis, the strangest-looking rule

Where Irish grammar puts one consonant in front of another. Gcuire, mbeadh, dtránn, bhfuil: you pronounce only the front one. It looks unpronounceable and is actually a simplification: GIR-eh, MEH-ukh, drawn, will.

Fixed spellings

The little words are always respelled the same way across the site. Guh (go), un (an), jay (Dé), iss (is), nee (ní), err (ar), leh (le), fayn (féin), mah (maith). And an internal check flags any record that drifts. Consistency is most of what a respelling system is for.

Want to hear the system at work? Any record page pairs its guide with the Irish it describes: start with Sláinte or the shelter proverb.