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| | Encyclopedia :: encyclopedia : English-speaking Europe (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-13) |
 | | As the centuries passed and the social conditions in Ireland deteriorated, culminating in the Great Irish Famine, many parents refused to speak Irish to their children as they knew that the children would probably have to emigrate and Irish would be of no use outside the home country, in Britain, the US, Australia or Canada. |
 | | For this reason the native (Gaelic) language of Ireland is spoken as a mother tongue by only a very small number of people in the Republic of Ireland, where most of the speakers have learned it at school; and – as a second language – by about 170,000 people in Northern Ireland. |
 | | With the rise of Fascism in Italy, and with the outbreak of the War, the Maltese lost their sense of fraternity with the Italian world, and hence there was a decline in Italian spoken in Malta. |
| www.hallencyclopedia.com /English-speaking_Europe (2115 words) |
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