16.3392, Review: Socioling/Celti c Lang: Mac Giolla Chr íost (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3392. Mon Nov 28 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3392, Review: Socioling/Celtic Lang: Mac Giolla Chríost (2005)

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1)
Date: 22-Nov-2005
From: John Murphy < jmurphy at socal.devry.edu >
Subject: The Irish Language in Ireland: From Giodel to Globalisation 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:08:35
From: John Murphy < jmurphy at socal.devry.edu >
Subject: The Irish Language in Ireland: From Giodel to Globalisation 
 

AUTHOR: Mac Giolla Chríost, Diarmait
TITLE: The Irish Language in Ireland
SUBTITLE: From Goidel to globalisation
PUBLISHER: Routledge
SERIES: Routledge Studies in Linguistics
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1427.html 

John L. Murphy, Humanities, DeVry University, Long Beach, California

SUMMARY

This volume overlaps three areas: sociological theory on ethnicity and 
identity formation within a globalized context; a historical synopsis of 
the Irish language; analyses of surveys and public policy addressing 
its use in both the Republic and the North of Ireland. Aimed at an 
academic rather than a general audience, this study would be 
appropriate for research-level university libraries. Its hefty price of 
GBP 80 should not impede the wider impact upon which the author, a 
lecturer in the School of Welsh at Cardiff University, intends this book 
to have to foment practical policies that encourage the future survival 
and growth of Irish-speaking communities. 

In about 250 pages, Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost contributes enough 
material to keep not so much scholars as workers in the area of 
linguistic promotion inspired for years. He manages to avoid polemic, 
ignores romanticization, and provides sophisticated models upon 
which informed initiatives to nourish Irish-language use can be 
constructed. Although the density of considerable amounts of data 
may overwhelm any casual reader seeking a concise introduction to 
the fortunes of the past and present conditions within which Irish has 
emerged and endured, for those already familiar with sociological and 
public policy analyses, this study condenses immense efforts to direct 
discourse about the state and fate of Irish into a previously neglected 
intersection between academic and community-based efforts. The 
author applies research too often languishing upon government and 
academic shelves into a theory-laden but careful examination for a 
public forum.

This appeal heightens the relevance of Mac Giolla Chríost's thesis. 
But, his presumed audience may remain narrower than his message 
deserves. With such impacted concentration of so much research, the 
book remains curiously uneven. Its three stubbornly discrete levels, 
even partially synthesized, lack crossover appeal for the majority of an 
already specialized readership to whom this book -- and I would 
emphasize its implicitly stated need to put its many theories vigorously 
to work within everyday Irish life -- would be received and understood, 
let alone shifted into action that would strengthen the tenuous grip of 
the Irish language upon a rapidly globalizing and quickly shrinking 
native core for whom the language represents a necessary, daily 
commitment. 

EVALUATION

With its first sixty pages, the crushingly erudite foundation for this 
densely related investigation that attempts to stimulate tangible 
progress into furthering Irish-language community-based efforts nearly 
stifles in the cradle the book's well-intentioned, engaged ambitions. 
Only one paragraph in this vast chapter addresses the Irish language 
within half-digested, half-quoted segments of sociological contexts. 
Pierre Bourdieu's concept of ''capital value'' deserves the depth 
excavated here, but how this ''capital'' is invested within Irish begins to 
appear only in the next chapters, surveying linguistic history. Such a 
delay frustrates a reader anticipating when progressing through this 
dauntingly erudite terrain as to how Bourdieu's theory applies to Irish.

In the historical chapters, Mac Giolla Chríost's pace quickens. Perhaps 
too rapidly for any newcomer, yet the amount of material remarked 
remains impressive, given the evident editorial constraints upon how 
much coverage appears to have been allotted to a topic that in itself 
could have consumed easily twice the length of this study. For 
instance, the emergence of Hisperic Latin deserves more than a 
sentence, given that such accomplished fluidity between the two 
languages demonstrates how, as the author here can only hint, early 
medieval Irish with Latin flourished within permeable conditions akin to 
those encountered by present-day speakers. In his summation of the 
1366 Statute of Kilkenny which has been regarded by some historians 
as more hyperbole than feasible, Mac Giolla Chríost reminds us that 
the English overlords would not have fulminated for the first time 
formally against the use of Irish and imposed harsh penalties upon its 
use unless their law kept its clout. Although Tony Crowley's 
sourcebook on the ''politics of language'' (2000) is not cited, this and 
his companion study (2005) provide novices with easily accessible 
contexts for the impacts of anti-Irish language policy up to 
independence from Britain. 

By the nineteenth century, the contraction of Irish--after centuries of 
its relegation by both Irish and English speakers to a traditional rather 
than modern attitude inculcated by clerical, political, and eventually 
educational authority--ensured that only ''symbolic capital'' remained. 
Its daily users, antiquarians and scholars who already regarded it as a 
dead language, and administrators who condemned it as preventing 
economic progress and practical literacy among the natives all 
hastened its neglect as an oral rather than written vernacular. This 
worsened the fragmentation of the language among the active 
remnant, now divided by geography as depopulation, the Famine, and 
anglicization combined against its territorial and demographic claims. 
Mac Giolla Chríost's division of Irish into the ''popular vernacular'' 
opposed by the ''bureaucratic mediation of the English map'' (97) sums 
up the invasion of the indigenous Irish mentality and polity as the land 
and its people were renamed. Irrelevant to many native as well as 
nearly all English politicians within the nationalists emerging before the 
Famine, Irish next suffered a nearly fatal loss of many of its speakers 
from its remaining home bases in western and southwestern regions. 
The author comments upon the anglicizing medium of ''American 
letters'' sent home -- nearly always in English despite the Irish spoken 
by many of the emigrant writers -- but cites neither Kerby Miller's use 
of them to  immigration (1986) nor his co-edited collection of such 
letters (2003). Further analysis of such documents would strengthen 
Mac Giolla Chríost's employment of this factor as accelerating the 
erosion of Irish among many speakers later in the nineteenth century.

English became the chosen vehicle of emancipation for native Irish, 
emigrants or not. Irish, increasingly denigrated as antonymous 
with ''modernity,'' relegated to a few rural redoubts by the twentieth 
century, could not then, phoenix-like, spread its reborn wings to stoke 
for long the revolutionary fervor that fired up many of the middle 
classes and urbanizing Irish into leading their war for independence. 
The idealism shared by Gaelic Revivalists and republican activists was 
illuminated by the ''symbolic capital'' invested in the Irish language, but 
the practical failure of the Free State post-1922 in sustaining the 
energy of the previous decades meant again that Irish dwindled. 
Between the partial freedom of Ireland and 1939, native speakers 
declined by a hundred thousand. The nation's recognition of the 
linguistic heartlands as Gaeltachtaí neither protected the language nor 
inspired its replacement among the rest of an English-speaking island 
in which its official language was not its everyday language. 
Regrettably, essential recent work is not cited that analyzes the 1911 
census basis for this collapse (FitzGerald 2003) and that maps (Walsh 
2002) this well-intentioned attempt to define linguistic reservations 
from which, it was proposed, Irish could then reverse its retreat and 
regain its lost lands. The comparative isolation and economic poverty 
of these Gaeltachtaí, however, doomed any but a posthumous reward 
for attenuated Irish. Compulsory Irish in the schools, its often 
unprepared teachers, and its requirement as entry into civil service, 
the police, or university earned ''school'' Irish not the affection but the 
enmity of millions. (Not cited by Mac Giolla Chríost, see Kelly 2002; cf. 
Hamilton 2003, Ó Treasaigh 2002) This mentality eliminated any pride 
or comprehension among many Irish that their ''official language'' was 
other than symbolic capital invested in and pocketed largely for only 
ceremonial display, most often indulged in by the most greedy and the 
grasping. 

Such convolutions, rhetorically and practically, meant that for 
twentieth-century Ireland, the Free State's thwarted ambition to revive 
the language became the Republic's lip service, the ''cupla focal'' 
ritually commencing a political speech or an Aer Lingus announcement 
for flight departure. Mac Giolla Chríost reminds readers that while 
prominent revivalists as Douglas Hyde blamed earlier loss of Irish 
upon imperial compulsion, for most of this last century, an arguably 
independent Irish polity had only itself to blame. While this judgement 
sounds overly harsh considering overwhelming handicaps with which 
a nascent State had to contend under a British-dominated economic 
hegemony and postwar internecine conflict, the Free State gave ''an 
aspirational rather than actual'' constitutional status to the Irish 
language. (121) Any ideological well-spring imagined by 
revolutionaries and revivalists purified by Irish neither invigorated 
English-speaking millions nor sustained thousands who remained at 
its mytholgized cisterns. By the 1940s, maintenance of rural 
Gaeltachtaí became unofficially status quo for language policy. No 
wider recovery of the ancestral language would occur throughout the 
rest of the island.

The second half of the twentieth century found the Republic presiding 
over what appeared to be the deathbed of Irish. That it survived the 
past century as a living community language, as  Mac Giolla Chríost 
admits, is miraculous. The European Union refused to grant official 
status to Irish, the only ''official language'' of a member state so 
denied. (This was overturned only in 2005.)  Standardization of its 
spelling--overcoming what had been its territorial fragmentation into 
dialects with cumbersome orthography dissonant with its voiced 
varieties as taught in schools-- and dictionaries codifying Irish 
appeared around mid-century, solidifying scholarly advances. Even as 
the language stagnated in its ''official'' capacity, research expanded 
into its relevance. Government boards then floundered -- in bringing 
industrialization into the Conamara Gaeltacht, for example, native 
workers often returned from outside the ''reservation'' with non-Irish 
speaking spouses and children; managers were likewise recruited 
many times only among non-Irish speakers or even non-Irish, 
exacerbating the symptoms that the Gaeltacht sought to remedy.

Recent reforms in the Republic and across the border show renewed 
commitment to addressing job, schooling, and community-based 
problems. While the author states that the role of Raidio na 
Gaeltachta (RnG) has not yet been ''rigorously examined'' (131), 
Watson (2003) applies Jürgen Habermas' (1992) nation-praxis to RnG 
contexts. The TnG television channel, newspapers, and the Internet 
do not gain deep coverage here, but these media demand further 
analysis within their Irish-language presentation and reception. 1960s 
activism from the West of Ireland's Cearta Sibhialta and Language 
Rights Movements (see Fennell 1985, 1993; Quinn 2001), noted in 
passing here, struggled decades to bring broadcasting to fruition after 
long government neglect, but such triumphs witness to the 
combination of symbolic with financial capital that Bourdieu situates 
and for which not only grassroots agitators but lecturers (if in rarified 
prose) such as Mac Giolla Chríost advocate. If the passivity too long 
associated with Irish is to be overcome, and its  ''symbolic capital'' 
exchanged and traded as a global commodity, Mac Giolla Chríost 
urges that the shopworn display demands investment and remodeling 
for a multiethnic, ideologically complex, non-sectarian and trans-
political identity. The chapter on its status in the North further 
delineates the current state of Irish and how it may be expanded in a 
post-Agreement, peacetime society. Any ideal Irish-speaking Ireland 
has expired but idealism inspires a minority increasingly urbanized, 
determined by consumer choice rather than by legislative fiat to 
broaden its market.

In the 2002 census, twice the number speak Irish in its cities as in its 
Gaeltachtaí. Surveys filling many of the book's remaining pages 
quantify the current health of the language as a daily medium. Space 
prevents incorporation of even a broad summary, but Northern Irish 
fieldwork done by Mac Giolla Chríost deserves attention. He 
demonstrates rejuvenation; 48% of those questioned under twenty-
four years of age affirmed some use of Irish. Cohorts within the best-
educated, the professional classes, females employed, and males 
unemployed ranked highest. He counters charges of sectarian or 
political bias by comparing uneven patterns across predominantly 
Catholic and Nationalist areas. Linguistic resurgence is not confined to 
stereotypical demographics. As post-Agreement cultural efforts 
continue, Mac Giolla Chríost  locates also a decline from earlier 1980s 
surveys in political or sectarian motivations for studying, or neglecting, 
the Irish language among largely urbanized Northern Irish populations. 
As in the rest of Ireland, the role of all-Irish schools and the cultural 
support given speakers foster a small but growing, voluntary cadre of 
those investing in their chosen reclamation of Irish.

The closing chapter spirals back to widen sociological issues with 
which the study opened. Mac Giolla Chríost calls for a redefined 
ethnic and civic discourse that does not separate into citizen and 
consumer an Irish-language speaker. That is, he criticizes the 
Republic for treating users as if relegated to the former identity, 
concerned with ''rights, equality, and rigidity,'' or the latter, 
favoring ''choice, empowerment, and flexibility.'' (197) Legal 
challenges to moribund government delivery of services to its Irish-
speaking constituencies have, in 2003, resulted in special provisions. 
Yet, the Republic's policies remain often meshed in only a binary 
response, ignoring individual Irish speakers while nodding to those 
geographically favored (and as speakers, then state-subsidized -- a 
topic needing more investigation than given) by Gaeltacht residency. 
Breaking this dichotomy, Mac Giolla Chríost contends, becomes an 
essential priority.

His conclusions recapitulate three concerns. First, given diffusion 
among Gaeltachtai, he rallies for community-based ''moral ownership, 
agenda-setting and action.'' (198) Next, he demands recognition of the 
multi-ethnic, multiple identities chosen by contemporary Irish people 
away from the petrified ''passive totem'' of Irishness towards a 
dynamically fluent, evolving identity. (see Mac Murchaidh 2004; Nic 
Eoin 2005) Finally, he strives to bring the urban environment into 
language and policy engagement. His final words on this 
vexed ''language question'' and intricately compiled report remind 
readers of the shift away from a fatalistic pronouncement for Irish. In 
its ''modern past,'' it was devastated by ''a fateful encounter with 
empire.'' (236) Now, an honest confrontation forces us to view its post-
modern future. Unlike so many venerably ''dead'' languages, its 
survival still depends upon our own power to kill off Irish or sustain its 
long life.

Given the diligence with which Mac Giolla Chríost has carried out his 
investigation, the neglect of more accessible, recently published works 
such as those I have mentioned in favor of often more obscure 
sources puzzled me. The uneven integration of the opening section 
and closing section both dependent upon theory weigh down these 
chapters, and leave the central portions stranded. The historical 
chapters condense millennia into a few relatively straightforward 
pages. The survey material, however, appears to have been imported 
from another project, and again is not sufficiently blended into the 
previous historical coverage. It is left to the patient reader to balance 
the sociological theory, the rise and fall of the Irish language, its 
current prospects in both the Republic and the North, and ethnic, 
political, and policy considerations. The application that Mac Giolla 
Chríost intends for this considerably diverse material and for which 
this volume documents as urgent remains for an audience capable of 
comprehending a vast amount of data, and to bring what is proposed 
through this English-language medium into the realm of Irish. The 
expense of this book may imply that it will find only a small readership 
to subsidize the labor of its author. The relevance of its message 
should remind a larger readership of the necessity to intervene and 
direct the survival of the Irish language towards the broader, global as 
well as territorially contiguous market that has been the traditional 
consumers of Irish. Certainly, as the Linguist List itself shows, the links 
between the past strongholds and the present dispersion of Irish point 
also to its spread among the electronic as well as its internal and 
external diasporas.

REFERENCES

Crowley, Tony (2000) The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366-1922: 
A Sourcebook. London: Routledge.

Crowley, Tony (2005) Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in 
Ireland 1537-2004. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP.

Fennell, Desmond (1985) Beyond Nationalism. Dublin: Ward River.  

Fennell, Desmond (1993) Heresy: The Battle of Ideas in Modern 
Ireland. Belfast: Blackstaff. 

FitzGerald, Garret (2003) Irish-Speaking in the pre-Famine period: a 
study based on the 1911 census data for people born before 1851 
and still alive in 1911. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 103-C, 
191-283.

Habermas, Jürgen (1992) Citizenship and national identity: some 
reflections on the future of Europe. Praxis International 12.1, 1-19.

Hamilton, Hugo (2003) The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish 
Childhood. New York: Fourth Estate-HarperCollins. 

Kelly, Adrian (2002) Compulsory Irish: The language and the 
education system 1870s-1970s. Dublin: Irish Academic. 

Mac Murchaidh, Ciarán, ed. ''Who Needs Irish?'' Reflections on the 
Importance of the Irish Language Today. Dublin: Veritas. 

Miller, Kerby (1988) Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish 
Diaspora to North America. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. 

Miller, Kerby, et al., eds. (2003) Irish Immigrants in the Land of 
Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary 
America 1675-1815. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. 

Nic Eoin, Máirín (2005) 'Trén bhFearann Breac': An Díláithriú Cultúir 
agus Nualitríocht na Gaeilge. Dublin: Cois Life.

Ó Treasaigh, Lorcán (2002) Céard é English? Dublin: Cois Life.

Quinn, Toner, ed (2001) Desmond Fennell: his life and work. Dublin: 
Veritas.

Walsh, John (2002) Díchoimisiúnú Teanga: Coimisiún na Gaeltachta 
1926. Dublin: Cois Life.

Watson, Iarfhlaith (2003) Broadcasting in Irish. Minority language, 
radio, television and identity. Dublin: Four Courts. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

John L. Murphy, a lifelong learner of Irish, teaches in the Humanities 
course sequence at DeVry University at its campus in Long Beach, 
California. His research interests include the representation of the 
Irish language within English-language literature and culture, 
macaronic and multilingual uses of Irish within English, and rhetorical 
applications of Irish republicanism. Since its founding, he has served 
as contributing editor to the on-line Belfast-based journal The Blanket.





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