have contributed to the mistrust shown towards him by Irish-speaking Newfoundlanders. Beginning in the 1870s, the more politicized Irish-Americans began taking interest in their ancestral language. Gaelic revival organizations like the Philo-Celtic Society began springing up throughout the United States. Irish-American newspapers and magazines also began adding columns in the Irish language. These same publications also circulated widely among Irish-Canadians. Furthermore, the sixth President of St. Bonaventure's College in St. John's, Newfoundland was not only a member of the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language, but also taught Irish-language classes there during the 1870s. Although the subject still remains to be explored, Kenneth E. Nilsen, an American linguist specializing in the Celtic languages in North America, argued in a posthumously published essay that "closer inspection would likely reveal a Canadian counterpart to the American language revival movement." Revival The identities of the last speakers of Newfoundland Irish are unknown. There is a lack of information of the sort available from the adjacent Province of New Brunswick (where, in the 1901 Census, several individuals and families listed Irish as their mother tongue and as a language still spoken by them). The question of how far Newfoundland Irish evolved as a separate dialect remains open. Newfoundland Irish has left traces in Newfoundland English, such as the following: scrob 'scratch' (), sleveen 'rascal' () and streel 'slovenly person' (), along with grammatical features like the "after" perfect as in "she's already after leavin (). The most notable scholar of the Irish language in Newfoundland was St. John's native Aloysius (Aly) O'Brien (16 June 19158 August 2008). O'Brien's paternal grandmother, Bridget Conway, had spoken Irish (which she had learned growing up in Ireland) but his father did not speak it. O'Brien taught himself Irish by means of language records, cassette tapes, and the booklets of Eugene O'Growney, a notable figure in Ireland's Gaelic revival. O’Brien was thus enabled to become an authority on the many Irish words used in Newfoundland English and became a teacher of the language at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. He claimed, despite this, that he was not fluent in Irish, lacking opportunities for immersion. There is interest in the Irish language, as indicated by the fact that Memorial University in St. John's, employs one of the Irish language instructors appointed every year by the Ireland Canada University Foundation to work in Canadian universities and support the Irish