Irish language makes a comeback

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the Philadelphia Enquirer, Posted on Sun, Dec. 26, 2004

In Ireland, an Irish language comeback

Once seen as a drudge, study of Gaelic is now the cool trend on the
Emerald Isle.

By Tom Hundley

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

DUBLIN - Exemplified by George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, William
Butler Yeats and James Joyce, the Irish have long been masters of the
English language. It's the Irish language that has them stammering.
English has been on a 700-year march across Ireland, relentlessly pushing
the Irish language, or Gaelic, toward oblivion. These days, Irish survives
as an everyday language mainly in a half-dozen scattered regions on
Ireland's sparsely populated western edge.

Yet, statistically speaking, the Irish language is in good shape. It may
even be undergoing a renaissance of sorts. According to the Irish
government's 2002 census, 1.57 million of the island's 4 million
inhabitants say they can speak Irish - up from 1.43 million in 1996. But
experts say the number of people who are truly fluent in the language and
use it on a daily basis is much smaller: 150,000 to 300,000.

Still, this is better than Gaelic's Celtic-language cousins in Scotland
and Cornwall and on the Isle of Man. The number of Scottish Gaelic
speakers has dipped below 60,000 and continues to decline, while the last
native speaker of Cornish died in 1891 and the last native speaker of Manx
died in 1937. Welsh is the only Celtic language besides Irish that appears
to be thriving in the British Isles, with 582,400 Welsh claiming to have
some knowledge of their ancestral tongue, according to the 2001 census.
Despite having to share its small island with the most rapacious of modern
languages, Irish has withstood the English onslaught mainly because Irish
language study is a mandatory part of the national school curriculum
through 12th grade.

For generations of Irish students, language study was a drudge - no more
exciting than the Roman Catholic catechism, another mandatory school
subject. But in the last decade or so, Irish has become more popular.
"What has happened is that Irish has become cool and trendy. You could
call it the 'yuppification' of the language," said Padhraic O Ciardha, an
executive at TG4, a state-sponsored Irish-language TV station that began
broadcasting eight years ago.

O Ciardha, who is from the Irish-speaking area of Connemara, on Galway
Bay, learned English as a second language. "When I was a kid in the '60s
and '70s, Irish was very uncool. When we'd go into Galway, we'd speak in a
whisper. Irish was the badge of the rural, the backward, the culturally
repressed part of Ireland," he said. But as Ireland transformed itself
from one of Europe's poorest countries into one of its most prosperous, as
it reversed a century-long trend of population decline, and as it sought
out a sense of its individuality in the age of globalization, the Irish
rediscovered their language.

Over the last 20 years, the number of schools in which Irish is the
language of instruction has multiplied tenfold, and some of the schools
are far beyond the Irish-speaking enclaves on the country's periphery. "In
Dublin, it's become a kind of yuppie totem to send your kid to one," O
Ciardha said. In a global economy where English is king, why bother with
an obscure language spoken by no one beyond the country's borders?

"Because its part of our human heritage," said Jeosamh Mac Donnacha, an
Irish language scholar at the National University of Ireland's Galway
campus. "We should be just as concerned about preserving a language as we
are about preserving historic buildings." The Irish language reached its
peak in the 14th century, when it was spoken throughout Ireland, in most
of Scotland, and in parts of western England.

"That lasted until the Irish aristocracy lost power and English became the
language of politics, the court and, eventually, the marketplace," Mac
Donnacha said. "The final big blow was the famine of 1845," he said. "Most
of the people who died or who emigrated were the poorest, and they were
the Irish speakers."

Eamon de Valera, the father of modern Ireland, dreamed of an independent
island united by a revived language. But even de Valera, who was born in
New York, first had to learn the language. When the Irish Free State came
into existence in 1922, the new constitution defined Irish as the
"national language," with English "equally recognized as an official
language."

The new government confidently adopted an education policy designed to
replace English with Irish. It underestimated the power of the English
juggernaut.

Irish language remains a prerequisite for university matriculation.
Lawyers and judges are required to have a working knowledge of the
language, and up until last month, so too were the police. The words of
the national anthem are in Irish, but for most citizens, Irish was
something that was beaten into them in school - and promptly forgotten
after graduation.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/10497866.htm