Irish language article

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From National Geographic News at
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0225_030225_irishlanguage.html

Youngest Generation Will Determine Fate of Irish Language

Rural Irish Speakers Fight Influx of English

Sean Markey in Ballyferriter, Ireland
National Geographic News
February 26, 2003

Villages don't get much smaller than Ballyferriter, a hamlet of 40 souls
here on the windswept Dingle Peninsulaan Irish-speaking enclave in
western-most Ireland. Set amid sheep pastures and rugged hills hard by the
Atlantic Ocean, the village center boasts little more than a modest
collection of homes, four pubs, a church, a post office, and a police
station.

By most accounts, the Irish language is in decline in communities like
Ballyferriter that lie in Ireland's Gaeltacht, a term used to describe the
country's seven, historically Irish-speaking regions scattered about its
western seaboard.

Irish faces no risk of dying out in the near- or medium-term. Language
experts say Gaeltacht communities and 80 years of government-mandated
Irish instruction in primary and high schools throughout the country have
managed to stabilize the language and ensure its passage from one
generation to the next. But language advocates say the degree to which
Irish is freely spoken is now at stake. More than anything, the attitudes
of Ireland's youngest generation towards the Irish language will determine
its fate, they say.

"What's killing Irish, or any language today, is three words: That old
Irish," said Father Mchel Dochartaigh, a Gaelic advocate and parish priest
in Beaufort, a small village in County Kerry.  Sean McConn, a student at
Galway Mayo Technical Institute, was born in Athleague, a small village in
County Galway outside the Gaeltacht. Taking a break from his job at an
Internet caf in Galway, he shared his views of the Irish language with a
visitor. "You only hear old people speaking it, unless you're way out in
the Connemara," he said, referring to a rural Gaeltacht region in County
Galway. "Rarely would you see a young person speaking Irish today."

Irish was not spoken in McConn's community nor at home. As a result,
McConn said, he struggled to learn the language at school. "I would like
to be a native speaker, [but] if you don't enjoy it, you don't want to
learn," he said. "I'm 24 now. Learning it would be pointless."

Unlike McConn, Pl  Loidein, 21, was born into an Irish-speaking family in
Carraroe, a strong Irish-speaking community about 20 miles (32 kilometers)
from Galway.  Loidein says that while his parents spoke Irish exclusively
during their upbringing, he speaks both Irish and English. "Even though I
speak Irish with a lot of my friends, it is a dying trend,"  Loidein said.

"I can see it with the younger ones coming up, it's become less and less
often that they'd be speaking Irish to one another,"  Loidein said.
"Around the Connemara itself, you can see the perimeters are closing in
the whole time," he said. "The Gaeltacht is getting smaller."

Louis de Paor, an Irish-language poet and director of the Center for Irish
Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway, said he thinks the
Irish-language community does itself a disservice when it compares the
present state of the language to its historical heyday or idealistic
visions of the future. "I think we're unduly harsh on ourselves," he said.

But de Paor adds, "I don't think the Irish language is entirely a personal
choice yet. If you choose to [speak] it, it is a political choice as much
as anything else," he said. "You find yourself becoming an activist
despite yourself because of the lack of equality between [Irish and
English]."