Fascinating new book on the lost Yola dialect

A FASCINATING book on the lost Yola dialect written by Wexfordman Aidan Sullivan, has just been published by Amazon UK.

‘Yola and the Yoles’ contains lists of Yola words and phrases spoken mainly in the Rosslare and Lady’s Island areas and also different words and phrases spoken in Bannow.

Aidan said he decided to write the book as many people had asked him about Yola down through the years and initially he had to reply that he knew nothing about it and had never heard it spoken or seen it written.

But all that changed last April, when the Galway poet Liam O’Neill won a Hennessy Award for a poem written in a mix of Yola and English which was published in The Ticket magazine in the Irish Times.

‘ This blew me out of the water and indicated that Yola is not dead, as we had been told too often,’ said Aidan, a native of Wexford town who grew up in Ibar’s Villas and has worked as a freelance journalist all his life, including a couple of years with the Irish Times.

His parents and his late brother Sean ran a drapery shop in North Main Street (opposite the AIB bank) where Evolution men’s shop is situated now.

Aidan said he was curious about the legendary south Wexford dialect for a long time and in the 1970s in London, he knew an elderly couple from somewhere in south east Wexford who used to mutter among themselves in a language that neither he or others could understand.

‘ They used to turn to me and say ‘we are speaking your language’ but I did not get the message,’ he said.

It took him a year to research and write the book after his enthusiasm was sparked by the Yola poem winning the Hennessy Award.

‘Very small amounts of these dialects seem to be spoken today by people who learned the language from their grandparents in the 1970s,’ said Aidan.

The book contains a mini dictionary of Yola along with Yola songs and customs peculiar to Yola people such as the funeral cross tradition in Kilmore which continues today.

‘ Yola and the Yoles’ is on sale from Amazon UK, Wexford Book Centre and Byrne’s Bookshop.

The Yoles harvested weed from the sea, lakes and ponds, using it as fertiliser. This painting by Joseph Malachy Kavanagh (from the National Gallery of Ireland) records the practise. Confusingly, the Yoles used several words to describe sea and lake weed.

Author Aidan Sullivan.