The current state of Irish (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

The current state of Irish
Tags: Gaelic (Irish) \| Endangered Language
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

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iguanamon
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Message 1 of 17

01 February 2014 at 8:56pm | IP Logged

My twitter feed had an interesting link today forwarded by @IndigenousTweet- We’ll soon find out whether we lose our native language forever. Having just recently begun to study a dying language- Ladino, I am interested in minority languages and how they can thrive and how they can wither away and die. Here's an excerpt from the article:

Seán Mag Leannáin wrote:

...According to our Constitution, Irish is our national language. Yet for, most people, Irish has little or no impact on their lives and they will never bother too much about it. Why then did it turn out to be different in my own case, and that I went on to develop a lasting interest in the language? Brought up in rural west Wicklow (far from any Gaeltacht or urban Gaeilgeoir background) I was definitely an unlikely recruit.

Looking back on it now I think it was a combination of two lucky factors that opened up Irish to me. While my parents had practically no Irish themselves they were favourably disposed – this was factor number one. The second lucky factor only kicked in during my final years in secondary school when for the first time in my life I had a teacher who was able to teach Irish as a living language.

As if by magic, what had previously seemed as dead as Latin suddenly began to come alive for me. The characters in Dónall Mac Amhlaigh’s book Dialann Deoraí about Irish navvies in England could have been neighbours of ours from west Wicklow, and in the expressions they used in Irish more and more I could hear echoes with the Hiberno-English all around me.

That good experience enabled me to surmount the barrier which faces every learner of a second language, and especially those trying to grasp a minority language that is spoken by very few people. That barrier is, of course, is the reward worth the effort? – or, as we say in Irish, an fiú an tairbhe an trioblóid?

Irish opened up a whole new world for me

Irish will always remain my second language but I have to say it has opened up a whole new world for me, and has deepened my understanding of what it means to live in this country and to be able to partake in its multiple cultures. I recognise, of course, that I have been exceptionally lucky, and only regret that far more people did not have the same opportunities.

There is no doubt that Irish is now at a crossroads, and the next 10 years will determine if she lives or dies. I know from my own periodic visits to the Gaeltachts over the last 40 years that the language is now on its last legs in its traditional heartland. ... ....How did the situation in the Gaeltacht get so bad, especially over the last 30 years? One undoubted factor has been the abject failure of the State to provide services through Irish even in the strongest Gaeltacht areas. In effect, a regime of compulsory English was imposed on native speakers.

Irish speakers have been active in developing "virtual communities", but is it enough to save the language if it is fading away in it's heartland? If you speak Irish, live in the Gaeltacht and can't deal with your own government services in your own national language, what's the point? Ultimately, "Is the reward worth the effort?" The message seems clear- English is a necessary language to living in Ireland. I see many parallels with Ladino's situation, and why I haven't taken Haitian Creole farther.

The article is a good read.

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akkadboy
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Message 2 of 17

03 February 2014 at 9:25am | IP Logged

Thanks for posting that.

I've read a bit about the current situation of Irish and this article seems to be a good summary : gaeltachts are shrinking, people are not really intersted in the language, it is taught as a literary/dead language.

Feargal Ó Béarra's article (Late modern Irish and the dynamics of language change and language death) is more detailed and somewhat more pessimistic. His main idea (hope I'm not betraying his thought) is that even if Irish survives it won't be Irish but some new language heavily influenced by English. He goes as far as using the term "linguistic dichotomy" when speaking about the Irish spoken in the Gaeltacht and the Irish of learners/journalists/translators.

This article about the cause of the failed revival is also interesting.

Breton is also an interesting case-study as the kind of Breton taught and spoken by neo-speakers is not easily understood by native speakers. So here too, it seems that the dialects are doomed while the only hope for the language is the language as spoken by the learners (see Gary German's article on Breton in West Brittany in the volume above).

There isn't as much to read about the situation of Welsh. I guess this has to do with the fact that Welsh is not as endangered as Irish is (the closer the death of a language, the easier it becomes to find people writing about it, recording native speakers, counting them until none is left). But it might be that in a few decades Welsh will have the same problem, in the sense that the Welsh-speaking communities are shrinking (albeit slowly) while the number of people who know it as a second language rises. On the bright side, from what I've read the number of native speakers is still high enough to ensure that learners do not create their own version of the language and the language is taught well enough.
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tarvos
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Message 3 of 17

03 February 2014 at 2:35pm | IP Logged

Quote:

Breton is also an interesting case-study as the kind of Breton taught and spoken
by neo-speakers is not easily understood by native speakers. So here too, it seems that
the dialects are doomed while the only hope for the language is the language as spoken by
the learners (see Gary German's article on Breton in West Brittany in the volume above).

Confirmed.
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Indíritheach
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Message 4 of 17

03 February 2014 at 3:56pm | IP Logged

Well that's depressing...
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emk
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Message 5 of 17

03 February 2014 at 5:16pm | IP Logged

iguanamon wrote:

If you speak Irish, live in the Gaeltacht and can't deal with your own government services in your own national language, what's the point? Ultimately, "Is the reward worth the effort?" The message seems clear- English is a necessary language to living in Ireland.

For me, this is the sad part. Ireland requires students to sit through a great many years of Irish, which is apparently taught poorly. But the government isn't willing to provide Irish-language services in the Gaeltacht. So it's OK for the government to burden the students, but they won't spend money to hire bilingual employees and translators.

The contrast with Quebec is interesting: Sixty years ago, Quebec French was a low-status dialect. French speakers were sometimes told to "Speak white!", which inspired a famous poem during the Révolution tranquille. (The English Wikipedia page insinuates that the whole "speak white" thing is a myth; the French Wikipedia page provides a list of historical references.) But in the 60s and 70s, this changed. Even if we leave aside Loi 101, the Quebec government obviously provides services in French, and you can absolutely get by as a monolingual French speaker. This means that there's an incentive for people to learn French, because you need it to work with the public.

But even if we take a thriving language, one with 6 million speakers, government support and international prestige, there can be a lot of pressure on monolingual speakers to become bilingual. For example, about 25% of medical care in Montreal is provided by "bilingual hospitals" who seem to fail at bilingualism:

Quote:

When my mother’s name was moved from the interesting cases list to the basket cases list, Dr. Olivier passed her file on to a Czech doctor who didn’t speak a word of French. He greeted every patient in the clinic hallway with a single question:

Do you speak English?

Only about 40% of patients in Montreal’s bilingual hospitals are English-speaking so the doctor spent the first ten minutes of every second consultation sighing loudly as he fished around for an idle nurse, orderly or first year student who could translate his patients for him. I got on his good side by setting aside my modest expectation that in 2009 my mother was entitled to receive health care in French in Québec.

…

The day shift doctor who showed up in the morning didn’t speak French either. I don’t speak French I’m from Brazil, he told me, almost proud of himself.

I made him speak to me in Spanish. He got the point and dropped the grin.

…

That night was a hard one, but it wasn’t the toughest yet. I spent many other long nights at the Royal Vic and the Montreal General Hospital with my mother. Tired, scared and confused by the quick succession of unfamiliar faces coming and going around her, my mother started to speak to me in English in those last few weeks of her life.

My father had started to do the same thing in the last days of his life. So did my grand-mother. So did my grand-father.

Anyone still wondering why I’m angry?

And this happens to a language which definitely isn't in any danger of dying out. Imagine what it must be like to be a monolingual Irish speaker.

What kills minority languages? The first step is to make it clear that the minority language isn't ever going to be sufficient, not by itself. Then you make it clear that anybody who speaks the minority language is some kind of second-class citizen. Telling somebody to "Speak white!" in 1950 in North America is a particularly blatant example, but it can be a lot more subtle—just make it clear that, say, Irish is insufficient in the Gaeltacht, and useless outside, and everybody will get the message.

If the Irish voters want to save Irish, there are a bunch of things they could try. Immersion education is obviously one possibility. So I'm sad to read that Feargal Ó Béarra is pessimistic about the Gaelscoileanna. They seem to be fairly popular, judging by the numbers I've found on the web, and they're definitely better than the current system.

I understand that languages die, often because native speakers decide that other languages open up far more opportunities. I just wish that the outside world didn't make things quite so hard for them.
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tarvos
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Message 6 of 17

03 February 2014 at 5:28pm | IP Logged

The natural change of languages is hard enough to combat without repressive politics...
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Ogrim
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Message 7 of 17

03 February 2014 at 5:58pm | IP Logged

Interesting article, and sad, and all the more remarkable that Irish seems to be neglected by the authorities. This in a country where the Constitution explicitly says that Irish is the first national language while English is recognised as a second national language. I do not know too much about language policy in Ireland since the country gained independence, but one would have thought that the state would put much more effort into reviving the national language at all levels.

However, for a language to live, it not only needs support from the authorities, although that is of course very important, but also a critical mass of native speakers who identify with the language, and who see the language as a part of their own identity. This is what has saved Basque and Catalan in Spain, for instance, and what keeps a small language like Romansh alive in Switzerland, in spite of having very few native speakers. I therefore wonder whether Irish identity is less defined by language and much more by other cultural and historical factors.

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Chung
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Message 8 of 17

03 February 2014 at 6:23pm | IP Logged

One thing that makes me wonder is why some central governments and pedagogical authorities take a figurative sledgehammer to deal with problems requiring more considered approaches. Blanket mandatory instruction in a minority language (or anything in which there's little currency for the students) cannot be compared to mandatory instruction in mathematics, natural sciences, social studies or the native/official language. The subjects just aren't comparable regardless of their intrinisic worth in intellectual development.

In reference to my experience with Saamic languages (especially Northern Saami) one difference that I can see off the top of my head is that Northern Saami being an official language in some municipalities/counties in Fennoscandinavia means that citizens have the right to government services there only in Northern Saami (or in Finland's case even in Inari Saami or Skolt Saami). It sets up a limited but measurable need for people to be fluent in a Saamic language if the goal is to work in administration in the far north. It seems that Irish is not in the same position despite being in a nominally stronger position by virtue of the Irish constitution and mandated use in public education (and not just for a few municipalities). Another item is that none of the Saamic languages are imposed in public education on all children like Irish is. At least in Finland, the principle considers individual choice and government support. There are a few "language-nests" on the model of language nests for Maori where parents may send their children for instruction only in a Saamic language while it's also possible to study a Saamic language (usually Northern Saami) at university if not at special high schools (I suspect that these latter exist in Ireland too).

However I don't want to leave the impression that the Nordics are always going out of their way to preserve the Saamic languages as minority ones. See this article for more information but this excerpt shows what I mean on the checkered position of the Saamic languages today.

Magga Ole, Henrik; Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove “The Saami Languages: the present and the future”, 2001 wrote:

[...]
The "dark century," 1870 to 1970, had detrimental effects which can still be felt on both the languages themselves and on their status and speakers. In the coastal areas of Norway (and elsewhere), negative attitudes were transmitted by the Saami themselves, and intergenerational transfer of the language ceased in one generation.

It seems that the new language efforts (from the 1970s) have been successful in many ways: in achieving recognition for the Saami languages, in developing the languages themselves, and in maintaining the total numbers of Saami speakers. On a national level, these efforts have been successful when it comes to legislation and formal recognition. Obviously, the identification of language rights as part of general human rights has had positive effects. Governments with aspirations in human rights have listened to arguments about language rights. Sadly, the clear tendency of Nordic governments today is to be less sensitive toward these kinds of arguments. As long as states could enhance their international profiles as defenders of human and indigenous rights without having to grant large concessions, they were willing to support cultural and other rights for indigenous peoples. But there seems to be a limit when real self-determination, including questions of land rights, are brought into the agenda. This general tendency is echoed internationally.

Recent language efforts have also faced difficulties. Majority attitudes were easier to influence in favor of minority languages when the whole debate was at the level of principle. To influence everyday practice has proved much more difficult. Likewise, implementation of language legislation has been difficult at both central and local levels. One of the most striking failures of the Saami strategies is that the smaller Saami languages (in numbers of speakers) have not seen success in improving their situation or even in defending their previous position. This failure is partly due to the fact that most speakers live apart from the larger Saami groups. Dispersed among Norwegians, Swedes, Finns, and Russians, they do not have the demographic concentration that would enable them to use their language in the workplace and in official situations, including schools. Saami initiatives have also faced problems in getting language legislation implemented. In Norway, many municipalities with a Saami population had developed procedures to give the Saami some local linguistic rights. Yet, when the Saami language law (in force since 1992) designated certain areas as belonging to the Saami administrative districts, many of the municipalities left outside these official districts -- often municipalities where the speakers of the smaller Saami languages lived -- withdrew services in Saami, claiming that the law did not require them. The situation has thus deteriorated in non-Saami-designated areas. (This decline is clearly evident in the largest study ever conducted on the use of Saami languages in Norway; the study contains interviews with almost 1000 Saami speakers and over 1000 Norwegian speakers in the Saami areas and can be read in Saami and Norwegian at www.samediggi.no
[...]

See the following for related discussion of this problem worldwide.

The role and usefulness of Irish
Being forced to learn a minority language
China’s endangered languages
Endangered national languages
Resurrected languages
Is Catalan under thread
Languages with no monoglots

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