So I’m sure everyone has seen Van Damme’s epic split by now:

Mainly, I walked away from this thinking, “Ya know, I actually really like that Enya song.”

It turns out Enya’s first language is Irish:

I spent quite some time trying to find and example of her speaking Irish that was at least of a slightly better quality than the video above but it doesn’t seem to exist. What’s more, her music is only occasionally sung in Irish. This is strange to me as New Age music places a premium on exotic otherworldly aesthetics which the use of a little known language would support. In fact, Enya once had an entirely new language created just for three songs off her album Amarantine.

So why not employ a language that she knows so well? Maybe she doesn’t like writing her own lyrics (as all of her songs in Irish seem to be written by her)? Maybe she doesn’t want the language to associate her too closely with Ireland? It’s hard to imagine that she’s not proud of her heritage, though, and if she cares at all about the survival of Irish she could help it out a ton by being known as a world-famous singer who uses Irish exclusively.