Alt Suimiúil

Gael

Ón Indo:

http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=45&si=1333333&issue_id=12041&printer=1

simu

Nach deas an sceal é sin!

Gael

Seo ceann eile ó Mheiricéa faoin nGaeilge:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0411290150nov29,1,212670.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

PurpleFistMixer

D'fhéachamar ar 'Yu Ming is Ainm Dom' sa rang Gaeilge, lá amhain. Cheapaim go bhfuil sé ar fheabhas, cé go bhfuil an fear sa teach tabhairne beagáinín... heh, stereotypical. (I'm not even going to try saying that in Irish I've done enough damage as it is.)

Agus, tá cuma ar an scéal, dá shábhálfaí an teanga, dhéanfadh na ... foreigners é. Sort of sad it's that way, but it's good to see people have interest in it, even if they're not Irish.

Gael

An dtaispeánann do mhúinteoir scánnáin Ghaeilge mar sin daoibh go minic?

PurpleFistMixer

Just an am amháin, bhí DVD le cúpla scannáin gearr aici.

An Fear Aniar

Gael wrote:

Seo ceann eile ó Mheiricéa faoin nGaeilge:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0411290150nov29,1,212670.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

Caithfear bheith cláraithe.

An bhféadfá é a chóipéail anseo?

simu

PurpleFistMixer wrote:

Just an am amháin, bhí DVD le cúpla scannáin gearr aici.

An féidir Yu Ming a cheannach mar sin?

Gael

An Fear Aniar wrote:

Caithfear bheith cláraithe.

An bhféadfá é a chóipéail anseo?

Warming up to language Irish once found uncool

By Tom Hundley
Tribune foreign correspondent
Published November 29, 2004


DUBLIN -- From George Bernard Shaw to Samuel Beckett, from William Butler Yeats to 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 Gaeilge, 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 Gaeilge's Celtic language cousins in Scotland, 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, 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 drudgery--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.

A language rediscovered

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 a sense of its own individuality in the age of globalization, the Irish rediscovered their language.

Over the past 20 years, the number of schools in which Irish is the language of instruction has increased 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 it's 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 immigrated 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 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. They underestimated the power of the English juggernaut.

Bilingualism

Irish language remains a prerequisite for university matriculation. 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.

The language also lost some of its luster when, in the 1970s, it became associated with the violent nationalism of the Irish Republican Army. Many IRA members learned the language in British prisons.

These days, no one expects Irish to supplant English, but Irish has found its niche in a country that seems increasingly comfortable with its bilingualism.

"Irish has been stabilized," Mac Donnacha said. "The education system has shown it can produce competent bilingual speakers generation after generation. I think it's safe to say the Irish language will be with us for many years to come."

TG4, the Irish-language TV station that broadcasts from Connemara, has seen its market share quadruple in the past five years. In Northern Ireland, the Belfast-based Irish-language weekly La moved to a daily format last year and now circulates throughout the island.

"The tradition of reading the Irish language is only beginning to develop," said La editor Ciaran O Pronntaigh, noting that most of the paper's sales are in Dublin and Belfast, and that Irish is the second language for most of its readers.

Last week the Dublin government asked the European Union to add Irish to its list of 20 official working languages.

The action is more than symbolic. As English expands into all corners of the globe, Mac Donnacha predicted that other small countries may want to take a lesson from the Irish.

"I believe that if 150 years from now you go to Holland or Denmark or Finland, you'll find that they will be facing the same difficulties with their language that we are having now," he said.

Or as a popular Gaeilge saying puts it, roughly: "If you're not big, you'd better be clever."