A considered look at the current
state of the Irish language. Our understanding of the particular
situation of Irish is greatly enhanced by the world, linguistic
and ecological perspectives which the author brings to the
subject.
James McCloskey is Professor
of Linguistics at University of California, Santa Cruz.
This book is the first
fully bilingual publication from Cois Life Teoranta.
McCloskey likens the early
Irish state's efforts to beat the language into children to
the earlier practice of beating English into them. He welcomes
the creative diversity brought by speakers in Dublin and Belfast,
and the children in gaelscoileanna. Irish is just one of many
languages worthy of support, he says. The effort to support
it is "fundamentally anti-nationalist", and is "one
strand... in an international effort to open cracks in the
dreary homogeneity of culture and ideology created by global
capitalism." Liz Curtis, Irish Post, 15/12/01
McCloskey writes with concern
about the ongoing destruction of languages
throughout the world. Of the estimated 6,800 languages spoken
at present ... it is thought that 90% will be dead within
100 years. Given the strength of English as a global force,
shouldn't Irish speakers face the inevitable? "Well no,
I don't think they should" he replies "The situation
is like that of a farmer who is set to make a killing selling
off his land to some giant property developer but who then
discovers that the land is home to some rare and endangered
species of bird or animal. There are moral issues here. Just
think of all the stories, all the poems, all the jokes, all
the histories, all the philosophies that simply become inaccessible
if the languages go."
The Irish Times, 13/04/01
An extract from Chapter
6: IRELAND, IRISH AND ENGLISH
If we take up again in this new context the debates about
language-policy which have been such a staple of political
life in Ireland since the beginning of the century, it seems
to me that things begin to look very different.
Consider, for instance, the
debate about whether or not the Irish state should pursue
policies designed to promote use of the Irish language. Critics
and supporters alike of such policies have framed the debate
in essentially nationalist terms. Supporters have argued that
the language is the central element of a distinctive and authentic
Irish identity. Critics have seen such rationales as sentimental
and backward-looking at best, as punitively narrow and exclusionist
at worst.
In a broader, global perspective,
there are excellent reasons for trying to maintain Irish,
but those reasons have nothing to do with nationalist sentiment,
nor with any search for an authentic, distinctive, or exclusive
Irish-ness (whatever that might mean). Far from being driven
by an insular or inward-turning impulse, the effort is worth
making because it is our contribution to a much larger effort,
a global struggle to preserve a kind of diversity which human
society has enjoyed for millennia, but which is being lost
in our time. Like the Maori and the Inuit, we have the good
or the bad fortune to be sole custodians of one threatened
strand of that diversity. Between us and the other communities
around the world forced to engage in the same kind of struggle,
there is only one principal difference ‹ we are immensely
richer than most of them.
Viewed in this perspective,
the effort to support Irish is actually a fundamentally anti-nationalist
effort. It involves in the first place recognising that the
nationalist impulse has been the enemy of Œsmall¹
languages everywhere. It involves in the second place recognizing
that there is nothing special about Irish. It is a language
like any other, neither more nor less worthy of support than
Yupik, Inuit, Chamorro or Maori. The fact that it is an Irish
language (whatever exactly that means ‹ not obvious
once one probes even a little below the surface) is completely
irrelevant.
The effort to support Irish
should ideally involve trans-national alliances with the marginalised
and often impoverished groups who are trying to organise across
the globe to resist the coercion of powerful national and
international élites. The effort to support Irish is
in fact one strand, or ought to be one strand, in an international
effort to open cracks, however small, in the dreary homogeneity
of culture and ideology created by global capitalism.
This is, I think, a rational
way to think about why the effort to preserve Irish might
be worth making. It is not, of course, how that effort has
most usually been presented, especially by its self-appointed
leaders. Those leaders have more often than not sounded the
kind of nationalistic, conservative, and insular themes that
have so poisoned the atmosphere and earned for the language
and all connected with it the enmity of some of the most thoughtful,
energetic, and outward-looking elements in Irish society.
My own sense is that the sentiments of the official or semi-official
leaders of the various language-related movements were more
often than not deeply at odds with, and deeply offensive to,
the feelings and opinions of many of those who were actually
most active in language activism at the grassroots level.
Many, I think, have found this intellectual dissonance to
be frustrating and dis-illusioning. That, at any rate, has
been my own (limited) experience.
A second theme, beyond nationalism,
which regul-arly emerges in discussion of language issues
in Ireland is the theme of the inevitability of failure. The
idea as it is usually developed is that revivalist aims are
hopelessly unrealistic. Such efforts cannot succeed (have
by some accounts already failed); only hypocrisy on a grand
scale prevents recognition of this fact, and the entire effort
to preserve Irish therefore represents a waste of valuable
state resources.
This theme formed a large part
of the critical commentary that surrounded the setting up
of the Irish-language television channel Teilifís na
Gaeilge (now called TG4) some years ago. Once again, a certain
consensus unites proponents and opponents in this debate,
for the smell of failure has hung round the Œrevival¹
movement like a corrosive fog for decades. Once again, viewing
the issues from a less insular perspective is revealing.
Say we ask a seemingly simple
question: Has the preservationist effort been a failure or
a success? Is Irish in fact dead, moribund or alive?
Such questions are normally
answered with reference to the hopes and expectations of those
who initiated the movement to preserve and restore the language.
Assessing the preservationist effort by those standards leads
to the sense of failure and the kind of self-flagellation
that has marked much discussion of these issues.
But the hopes that first energised
the revival movement were impossibly naive. That they were
so is not surprising, since until that time there had been
no organised attempt to revive a language as close to extinction
as Irish had come by the 1890s. There was therefore no body
of experience or expertise against which one could assess
the realism of aims and aspirations. That has changed. Communities
all over the world have embarked on language revival efforts
in the past fifty years or so, and there is now available
a substantial bmeasure of what has been achieved in Ireland.
Say we take that body of newly
accumulated know-ledge and ask again the same two questions.
Is Irish in fact dead or moribund?
As we have seen earlier, the astonishing conclusion is that
by the criteria of recent studies Irish is among the safe
10 percent of languages. The co-authors of the article which
has most clearly defined the language-endangerment debate
in recent years used two criteria to classify a language as
being in the circle of the saved:
(i) that it have a community
of speakers of 100,000 or more; or
(ii) that it have the official
support of a nation-state.
Irish currently has perhaps
20,000 or 30,000 native speakers among whom are reasonably
large numbers of young people. In addition, it has perhaps
100,000 people who use the language regularly in their daily
routines. It has the official support of a modern nation-state
(however half-hearted and reluctant that support seems to
be at certain times), a radio network, a TV station, and a
lively presence on the internet. By all measures, then, Irish
is very clearly in the circle of the saved. There is little
chance that Irish will become moribund (at least in the technical
sense) in the next 100 years. Claims occasionally and casually
made that Irish is already dead border on the irrational.
One can look at these facts
in different ways ‹ on the one hand, the idea that the
future of Irish is more assured than that of 90 percent of
the world¹s languages is, in a certain narrow sense,
comforting. In larger perspective, of course, this understanding
provides a vivid sense of just how desperate the global situation
is. Have preservationist efforts failed or succeeded? The
conventional wisdom on all sides of the debate is that they
have failed. Many Irish people in fact seem to derive enormous
pleasure from deriding these perceived failures (this is surely
one of the strangest features of the Irish cultural scene).
Once again, when one lifts
one¹s gaze a little, and when one looks for comparison
to similar efforts being made around the world, the answer
to these questions is far less clear and the business of answering
them becomes a lot more interesting.
It is extraordinarily difficult,
we now know, to turn the tide for a language that comes close
to extinction. Preservationist efforts typically begin when
it is far too late. It is almost as if such efforts are postponed
until failure is assured and the longing for what an earlier
generation threw off can be safely indulged. A similar phenomenon
can be seen in the current growth of Œheritage¹
language classes in US universities. Students of Vietnamese,
Chinese, Japanese, Italian or Spanish background crowd into
classes, eager to learn the languages that have been hidden
from them by their parents or grandparents.
