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Endangered Languages Case Study: Irish

Preliminaries

• Irish is a member of the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Other Celtic languages include Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Breton.

• The Irish prefer to call the language ‘Irish’ and not ‘Gaelic’ or ‘Irish Gaelic’.

Preliminaries

• Irish is spoken natively by people who largely live in rural areas known as Gaeltachts. There are three major Gaeltachts, corresponding to three major dialects of the language: Donegal, Connacht, Munster.

Preliminaries

• A story about Buddy Holly • Aifric • A monolingual speaker

Status of the language

• Has had a good deal of state, and less ofcial, support for the last ~100 years – “…we have in the case of Irish what is surely the

oldest and most sustained attempt so far to organize consciously and systematically against the threatened extinction of a language.” (McCloskey 2006)

• But Irish is arguably endangered

“Can speak” Irish

“Daily outside the education system”

• “Can speak”: 44% of Republic (~1.77 million people)

• “Daily outside the education system”: 1.8% (~77,000 people)

• (2011 census)

Status of the language

• Virtually no monolingual speakers anymore

Status of the language

• From a recent study of Irish-English language dominance of 7-12 year-old school children in Connemara: – “…the pupils exhibit a general lower level of ability in

Irish than in English.” – “…every child is dominant in English…”

• English dominant in – vocabulary – accuracy in phonetics, morphology and syntax – semantic and pragmatic usage – …

Status of the language

• Connemara is “…the strongest Irish-speaking area left.”

• “[Language extinction] is one of the very few social processes in which signifcant power is ceded to fairly young children…” (McCloskey)

Status of the language

• Number of people who “speak Irish” increased by 7.1% between 2006 and 2011

• Number who “speak daily…” increased by 7.0%.

On a more positive note

On a more positive note • “[The fostering of Irish among the primarily English-

speaking] represents…the single most successful instance of language revival, or of language maintenance, known to me [Hebrew aside]”

• What is unparalleled in the Irish situation is not what has happened in Gaeltacht communities, but rather what has happened…outside the Gaeltacht – in the creation of a large and energetic second language community, a community now many times larger than the traditional Gaeltacht, and one which calls into question…notions of what a Gaeltacht is.”

• (McCloskey 2006)

History • Irish was the language of the entire island

until several hundred years ago. English in Ireland is relatively recent.

• Irish has the longest literary tradition in Western Europe, with written works dating back to the 5th century AD, after St. Patrick converted the Irish to Christianity.

History

• English involvement in Ireland began in 1167, when Normans invaded. (They conquered England in 1066, coming from France.) The English went on to conquer all of Ireland eventually, though this took a while. English rule began with the ‘English Pale’ around Dublin in the 15th century.

History

• Statutes of Kilkenny of 1366 forbade the English in Ireland to use the Irish language, or to marry the Irish.

• Early-mid 16th century: Henry VIII broke with Rome, and later declared himself King of Ireland as well as England and Scotland.

History

• Early 17th century: the 6 counties of Ulster were taken by the English. They were settled by Scots. (These are the ‘Scots Irish’, many of whom eventually came to the US.)

• In 1641, Catholics (largely Irish-speaking) held 59% of Irish land.

History

• Oliver Cromwell, English soldier and statesman, took Ireland. His troops killed about 2,000 people. More land was confscated around Ireland. Irish landowners were exiled to Connacht (Western Ireland). 50,000 Irish were sent as slaves to Barbados.

History

• In Cromwell’s lifetime the population of Ireland dropped from 1.5 million to 500,000.

• Roughly 6,000 boys and women were sold as slaves and sent to Jamaica.

• In 1688, Catholics held 22% of Irish land.

History • In 1695, Catholics held 14% of Irish land. In

1714, 7%. • Various ‘Penal Laws’ were enacted

between 1692 and 1829. Catholics were barred from Parliament and from many professions; they couldn’t own guns or a horse worth more than 5 pounds; they couldn’t be educated, unless in Protestant schools.

History

• 1845: beginning of the Irish ‘potato famine’. Eventually 1 million die. Roughly another 1 million leave Ireland for good.

History

• English colonialism obviously afected the state of Irish. The famine was another blow to the language, however. It afected Irish speakers disproportionately, because they were poorer and more rural.