Irish is Dead?

Finally reality and honesty are replacing delusion and denial in the debate about the Irish language. The most noticeable and welcome change is that the theories of linguistics, particularly those relating to endangered languages, or indeed the death of languages, are being used to give the debate a more scientific and realistic grounding. It was maddening the way census stats on Irish were pressed into service to show that the language was holding its own. The status of the language in the Gaeltacht is now as clear as it is stark. According to the recent “Linguistic Study of the Gaeltacht” :

“The bare conclusion of the survey of young [speakers of Irish in the Gaeltacht] is that Irish will remain a community language in the strongest parts of the Gaeltacht for no more than 15 or 20 years”.

Recent commentators on the language have begun to refer to the “linguistic crisis” in the Gaeltacht. Well, from the first time I realised that Irish was endangered I have often wondered about what shape the death of the Gaeltacht would eventually take. How would we sense it has happened (since a few remaining native speakers would still remain in some communities)? From the vapour of what constitutes debate about Irish, a solid picture is beginning to emerge, and to me at least, it depicts  the end of Irish as a community language in the Gaeltacht.

For the first time, the native speaker is sliding out of view in government policy on the language. Commenting on the government ’20 Year Strategy for Irish’, Seán Tadhg Ó Gairbhe in a recent Irish Times article asks “what happened to the native speaker who was once at the centre of such policies?” While it is true that native speakers still exist, the Gaeltacht is losing its key place at the centre of language policy.

From the beginning of the revival movement there was always a tension and misunderstanding between the Gaeltacht community and city Gaeilgeoirí. If the city pioneers of the language were loyal and committed, they were also idealistic and had romantic view of the language. They had a poor understanding of the hardships faced by those with ‘saibhreas teanga’ (linguistic richness)  who eked out a living among the bare hills in remote parts of the west coast. There was a cultural gap as well. Traditional life was hanging on in the Gaeltacht while modernity swept the cities.

The hope was, of course, that these gaps could eventually be bridged. The finest seeds of tradition could be saved in the Gaeltacht and planted in the Galltacht (Think of DeValera’s policy – where actual families were transplanted from west to east!). And the most effective and wonderful aspects of modernity could be brought to the Gaeltacht (factories, TV, communications). No one knew at the time, however, how these complex changes would play out linguistically. With a better grasp of the dynamics of socio-linguistics now, we know that it can be devastating for a minority language when old networks are broken and replaced with new ones.

It’s now clear we failed to stem the decline of the Gaeltacht. And clear too that we failed to close the gap between Gaeltacht communities and learners in the cities. In a fascinating article in the Irish Times, Dr. Brian O’Broin examined the differences between Gaeltacht Irish and the Irish of the learner urban community. He also looked into how these communities viewed one another.

In general native speakers reach for the remote when a program comes on that is mainly ‘Urban Irish’. And remarkably fluent urban speakers seem to tune out from native speakers too, claiming their dialect is too difficult to grasp. More interesting is the linguistic comparison that Dr O’Broin made between the two forms of Irish. According to him there are large differences in syntax, grammar, morphology, and phonetics between the two ‘languages’. Basically, the fluent urban speakers were, in the main, not making the correct inflections, used a different pronunciation, and used a simpler phrase structure. O’Broin went as far as suggesting the urban lingo was a pidgin (simple language derived from two others and coined quickly for pure communication) but that it might eventually evolve into a creol (the more developed and sophisticated language that comes about when a pidgin stabilizes and becomes a full language in its own right).

Promoters of Irish had a vision that the Gaeltacht would serve as the well from which learners would draw to enrich and perfect their command of the language. Alas, this aim has not proven possible.

This begs the question: if learners cannot acquire the richness, integrity and beauty of the Gaeltacht tongue, then is it worth while preserving the Gaeltacht at all? Or is it merely the case that the urban language would be poorer still were it not for the Gaeltacht language which they can draw upon? Or does the Gaeltacht operate at a different level entirely in the mind of the learner, serving as an embodiment of linguistic possibility, that is to say, that the Gaeltacht in the learner’s imagination is more important than the real Gaeltacht?

Without doubt a version of Irish will survive as a langauge spoken by individuals right across the country, but in my view the language cannot now survive as a community language in the Gaeltacht. As a speaker and lover of the language it doesn’t please me to admit that. I often thought about how Irish would eventually die. Looking at the maps that show the extent of Irish speaking areas since the nineteenth century I always imagined a great ice sheet melting away. Only a few fragments of the sheet remain and the heat of English, now as a global language, is increasing still. Very soon nothing will remain but a pool of water.