The death has been announced of the Irish language scholar Professor Máirtín Ó Murchú.
He was Senior Professor at the School of Celtic Studies, in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), between 1987 and 2006, serving as director of the school for ten of those years.
Prior to that, he was Professor of Irish at Trinity College Dublin between 1971 and 1986.
A dialectologist and sociolinguist, Prof Ó Murchú produced many significant works in both fields, including: The Irish Language (1985); East Perthshire Gaelic: Social History, Phonology, Texts and Lexicon (1989); Cumann Buan-Choimeádta na Gaeilge: tús an athréimnithe (2001); and West Perthshire Gaelic (2021).
His book on the Gaelic of East Perthshire in central Scotland was his magnum opus and the fruit of many years of fieldwork among the last speakers of that dialect.
Without that work, much detail and specialist knowledge would have been lost.
Prof Ó Murchú also conducted linguistic fieldwork on the island of South Uist in the 1960s for the Gaelic Section of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland.
He was an advocate for greater standardisation of Irish spelling and pronunciation, with the aim of further promoting the language.
Prof Ó Murchú was married to the well-known Irish language educator Helen Ó Murchú.
He is survived by his wife and their three children.
