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The current state of Irish | ||
Tags: Gaelic (Irish) | Endangered Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5536 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 17 03 February 2014 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The Andrew Carnie article linked by akkadboy is excellent. It dates from 1995, so it's probably out of date, but here are a few quotes:
Two factors come up repeatedly in this paper: popular attitudes towards the language, and whether the language is actually necessary for success in day-to-day life. Now, here's what a successful language revival looks like, taken from an online forum discussion titled Work for non French speaking in Montreal:
Of course, this is just one anglophone's view, being explained to anglophone immigrants. But you can see how economic and social forces are reversing the historic language shift towards English: Being a monolingual English-speaker means fierce competition for a limited number of jobs, and besides, all your friends regularly joke around in two languages. All of a sudden, being a monolingual English speaker starts to feel, well, backwards and unambitious.
Yes, this is a very real thing in Canada, too. Because there are situations where French speakers have a right to French services, and where English speakers have a right to English services, it creates lots of jobs where speaking both languages is a major advantage. So anglophone parents quickly snatch up all the spaces available in French immersion schools, even outside of Quebec. Language revival seems to work best when people see bilingualism as a practical economic and social asset. That might be something as simple as, "Hey, at least you can always get a government job speaking Saami and Finnish." As everybody at HTLAL knows, getting good at a language is a lot of work. The average person isn't going to maintain fluency in two languages without some kind of practical payoff, even if it's merely getting access to cool comic books. Edited by emk on 03 February 2014 at 7:18pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7160 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 10 of 17 03 February 2014 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The only wrinkle with trying to strengthen a minority language's position in education by providing government services in that language is the minority language's status itself. Swedish is co-official in Finland and anyone who plans to work in the Finnish government must clear an exam at the end of high school in what is called "the second national language" (in practice it's a Finnish exam for Finns who're native speakers of Swedish, but a Swedish one for Finns who're native speakers of Finnish - the exam however in a Finn's native language can be in Finnish, Swedish or Northern Saami). The difference though is that Swedish is a thriving language, and for those students who would rather focus on other subjects (and forgo the chance at working in the Finnish government), mandatory classes in Swedish become a chore much like how mandatory French instruction is for many students in Canada. Finnish students (and their parents) sometimes question the purpose of adhering to Swedish nowadays despite the historical and political reasons. As mentioned previously Northern Saami is not mandatory in Finland although it can be of administrative/professional use in far northern Finland because of the right of a citizen there to get government services in Northern Saami.
On top of this situation in Finland is the truth that English is widely spoken throughout Fennoscandinavia and at sufficient levels to enable basic communication (and even in business transactions) within the community when shared knowledge of the majority language (i.e. Finnish) or the minority ones (i.e. Swedish, Saamic languages) fails to do the job. Finns who are willing to take a chance on working abroad would rather focus on improving their English, French, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin or whatever other foreign language they think that they'll need in their future. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gunshy Diglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4121 days ago 28 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French | Message 11 of 17 04 February 2014 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've been tempted to learn Irish (or any other Celtic language as a matter of fact), but one thing that puts me off is the nationalism involved. Do you think a language at threat from another could survive without a common "enemy" (e.g. the Irish trying to pull away from the British)? I've even been run out of an Irish pub for speaking English, and that just reinforces my (however untrue) stereotype of Irish speakers; they dislike the English!
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| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5266 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 12 of 17 05 February 2014 at 1:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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There seems to be a consensus developing, I got this tweet today which further elaborates on what we non-linguists have been discussing:
In Alor, the death of a language
This is the current state of Ladino today. Since the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the subsequent development of the language known as Judeo-Spanish/Ladino, the language hasn't had it's own country. The Ottomans allowed the Sephardic community to retain their language, educate their children in Ladino and print newspapers and books in it. Before WW II Salonika, Greece had a majority Ladino-speaking population. Now, what's left of the community after the Holocaust practically eliminated the Sephardic Jews of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, after immigration has left only about 20,000 speakers in Turkey, has spread to many countries besides Israel. In Israel, Hebrew is the dominant language. The remaining Ladino-speakers are elderly. The language is dying while it still lives. I will be able to read and understand a large part of this language but I'm not really going to speak it well because I won't have the same opportunity to interact with it as I do with my other languages. I am afraid that we "neo-speakers" won't be able to master the idioms with the play on words that exist between the foreign borrowings and Spanish vocabulary. Haitian Creole has a paucity of literature in comparison to Ladino but there are 10 million HC speakers with their own country. HC is not dying. So is my learning Ladino helping to preserve the language or is it merely an homage? I mean, I'm not even Jewish. I'm beginning to think it is probably more of the latter than the former. It's the children and grandchildren of the Sephardim who are best able to preserve their ancestral tongue and with it, their cultural heritage. Maybe, my "homage" to Ladino may help to show some of them that their language and culture has value and is worthy of being preserved. Edited by iguanamon on 05 February 2014 at 1:55am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Indíritheach Senior Member United States Joined 4049 days ago 108 posts - 146 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Irish, French | Message 13 of 17 05 February 2014 at 1:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As I've only been learning Irish for about 4 months now (but have had a fascination with the language for far longer than that) I can't really offer any expertise on the state of the language...I have never been to Ireland, and probably won't be able to go for some time. But I must say, it seems like I've heard this before. I remember an Irish friend of the family years ago tellng me that "Gaelic is dead" (it seems that Irish people who don't want anything to do with the Irish language call it 'Gaelic'). In fact, in my copy of Ó Siadhail's Learning Irish (published in 1980), it specifically states that the "fate of the language will be decided by the end of this century". Well, here we are, 14 years into the new century and well, I don't know...On the one hand, I'm sure Irish is in dire straits, as are (lamentably) the rest of the Celtic languages. Will it really vanish within a generation or two? I don't know. Certainly, I have no intention of giving it up, but since I'm not Irish it isn't really my fight, is it? All I know is that Irish is a beautiful language that I enjoy studying and I will keep on studying it. By 2050, I'll be 65 and will probably have enough time on my hands to devote to speaking a "useless", "dead" language.
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| lecavaleur Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4781 days ago 146 posts - 295 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish | Message 14 of 17 11 February 2014 at 11:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I realize a lot of the literature on the net reinforces the image you are reporting here, but I call it into question and have been doing so for a number of years. Having lived as a French-speaker in Canada outside Québec, and as an English-speaker in Québec, and with an obvious penchant for matters of language, my observations have led me to quite a different conclusion. 1. On the quality of the French instruction at so-called immersion schools. a. Outside Québec: It is true that spots in French-immersion programs outside Québec are coveted. Parents are eager to procure their children any possible advantage. They imagine that their kids will be perfectly bilingual when they come out. The children in such programs do acquire a limited ability in French, but it is important that people realize that these children do not come out of these programs perfectly bilingual, switching effortlessly from one language to the other. Their French is heavily anglicized and very heavily accented. They do not have the fluidity and natural spontaneity that bilingualism presupposes because they do not really live in a French-speaking environment. Their grammar is most often quite poor. Very often, the teachers in these programs are not Francophones themselves. The children speak to each other in English almost always. What's worse is that their mistakes have been tolerated for so long and reinforced so much by their peers that they are hard to get rid of if and when they ever integrate a real Francophone society. b. On French-Immersion schools inside Québec: The imperative of acquiring excellent French that many Anglophone parents in Québec now feel does effectively have them enrolling their kids in the limited number of spots in French-immersion schools in the province, schools where no Francophone children attend. Those who don't get a spot fall back on the English public school system. The great irony in this is that any Anglophone parent in Québec can, at any time, place his or her child in the public French system which is the common, universal system in Québec available to everyone without restriction. This is something the vast majority of them refuse to even consider, not because they are afraid of losing English the way Francophones outside of Québec are scared of losing French. English is in an extremely comfortable position. The so-called English minority of Québec is the only provincial linguistic minority in Canada that actually succeeds in assimilating newcomers. The immense attractive force of English as well as it's stature as the first language of the North American continent and lingua franca of the world have guaranteed Anglophones in Québec a linguistic comfort unrivalled among linguistic "minorities" (though I obviously object to that terminology). The reason they refuse to have their children integrate the French system, even if it would guarantee their bilingualism, is because of a long-standing grudge, the fear that their kids might come to actually think of themselves as Québécois instead of Canadian, and that they might come to see the Anglo-Quebecker victimhood narrative for what it really is: bullshit. 2. Availability of services and linguistic rights as a guarantee of language viability. In my three years living and working in Southern Ontario, I will admit that my bilingualism procured me just about every job I ever had there. There are a certain number of positions in both the private and public sectors requiring or preferring French-English bilingual candidates, and the very limited pool of acceptable candidates tips the balance in the favor of real bilinguals (and even a few fake ones). The downside of the situation is that these positions are low-level. They are usually in customer service. Even the government positions (which are much rarer) are low-level outside of Ottawa. The common language of work remains English. The language of the social ladder remains English. French occupies a marginal position as the language one uses to communicate with Québec clients, basically. In the Federal bureaucracy in Ottawa, and everywhere except Québec (and sometimes even in Québec), English is the common language of communication and work, as most Anglophone employees are incapable of working in French, the Francophone employees are expected to conform to that working culture. As for the availability of French services outside Québec (and perhaps the most heavily Francophone areas of New Brunswick), these have in no way halted the disintegration of French communities and the dilapidation of the language's viability. I have accessed such services (and still must, from time to time) and I am inevitably confronted with someone whose French is quite poor (and yet whose English is flawless). The statistics have shown steady assimilation rates year after year (linguistic transfers from French to English). Those stats can be accessed by anyone and speak for themselves. The further one moves away from the Québec border, the worse the situation for French becomes. It has, in such communities, been demoted to a heritage language with limited usefulness. English has replaced it as the language of reference for the youth, and their respective abilities in these to languages shows it (flawless English, ravaged and incomplete French). The future of French in Canada, outside Québec has not been secured or even stabilized by these otherwise laudable (I guess?) efforts. That is clear and that's all I'm saying. The better strategy would have been to not embark on the French eradication campaign in the first place, then the "revival" would be unnecessary. But alas... To bring the conclusion back to Irish. I think incentivizing its mastery is a good thing, but it's an ancillary measure at best. It won't halt the disappearance of the language if there aren't real measures taken... the kind of measures that are difficult for people, and hence the kind of measures that probably won't take place. Edited by lecavaleur on 11 February 2014 at 11:38pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4832 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 15 of 17 16 February 2014 at 4:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It is rather interesting to contrast one aspect of Irish versus Welsh:
Ireland was, and Wales still is a part of the United Kingdom, which is unarguably dominated by England/London. Clearly it didn't help the cause of either language that the countries in which they were spoken were ruled by the English, who, at least to some extent, actively suppressed those languages for many years. However, Ireland (leaving aside Northern Ireland) has been self-governing for many years, and completely independent for a bit less. But the fortunes of Irish didn't miraculously recover after self-rule/independence, even if the language was "officially" supported. The fortunes of Welsh did recover/have recovered, partly through nationalistic-style politics, and perhaps a certain amount of pragmatic self-interest on the part of "London", who perhaps feared that if they didn't support the language (or allow support for it) tnen they'd have a more serious rebellion on their hands. (The story of S4C - the Welsh language TV channel is a case in point). Wales has had some measure of devolution for quite a few years now, which stops quite a bit short of independence, and is probably never likely to achieve independence in the foreseeable future. I'm not sure if the Welsh Government/Assembly has had a positive influence, on the whole, on the language. One might have expected it to, hoped that it would, but I think actually more progress was made before the Assembly came into being. And if census results are to be believed, Welsh is actually falling back now. There is certainly no room for complacency. Scotland, on the other hand, may well achieve independence, but the state of Scottish Gaelic is far worse (I believe) even than Irish, and I doubt if independence would help. The English can be blamed for a lot (I speak as primarily an Englishman), but in the present day at least, I don't think it's the English who are primarily responsible for the problems in the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Thor1987 Groupie Canada Joined 4738 days ago 65 posts - 84 votes Studies: German | Message 16 of 17 18 February 2014 at 1:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's really interesting considering the amount of people in irish diaspora. Between the
two gaelics there's easily 50 million people that can consider the languages as a heritage language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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