The creeping prominence of the Irish language

It's interesting and pretty unique how quickly the Irish diaspora dropped the language wherever they went in the new world. And not just in the english speaking parts either. There's a pocket of Welsh speakers in Argentina, yet of Irish speakers, nada and there are a lot more of Irish ancestry in Argentina. In the US German immigrants kept their language going to the degree that there were areas of the US where much of daily life was conducted in German(until the first world war put an end to that). Chinese, Jewish, Dutch, Italian, Spanish Americans kept much more contact with their home languages than the Irish did. There were some attempts in the 19th century to keep things going like newspapers in Irish, but they pretty much died a death. What's even more surprising is that a large proportion, if not most of the migration in the 19th century was from rural Irish speaking areas. I can understand the social and economic advantages of being fluent in English, but it was an advantage to all disapora, most of whom kept more of their native languages in play even as local slang(a fair bit of it ending up in US English loan words, Yiddish an obvious one). In America I can see an extra pressure on the language as it's a WASP culture and alone among the other demographics more Irish could "pass" as being from that culture, so dropping Irish made sense to some degree I suppose. Still, we have an odd and often partisan relationship with the language.

I've an uncle who is fluent in Irish. My family on both sides are many generations of Dubliners so he's about the only one and he learned it because he married an Irish speaker. He was also a civil servant and from a time when it was the language of the service. He noted this strange attitude to the language when they removed the stipulation that it was to be used as the first language internally. The week after the majority continued as Bearla, with only a few holdouts, and as he pointed out these were people who were already fluent in the language. He was surprised at the speed of the shift.

Newfoundland is a good example of the speed of change i mentioned. A fluent and isolated Irish stronghold in the 19th century and with the 20th barely a babe in the crib it was gone near overnight. It also largely mirrors the decline of the language at home and among the diaspora. In rude health at the start of the 19th century, staying pretty strong in the middle and even at the end of the same century, dying a death around the start of the 20th.

Even in Ireland as we kicked out London there were far more fully fluent Irish speakers around than today. It should have been a renaissance in the language like other nations that threw of the colonial linguistic yokes. In Spain when Franco died Basque saw a rebirth after being systematically held down under his rule(where it was illegal at one time to even christen a child with a Basque name). The ex Soviet Blocs were also quick enough to dig Russian out when that empire fell. Even Welsh has seen a greater rebirth than Irish. Those examples also happened more quickly. Even though at the foundation of this state we ploughed a lot of time, effort and hard cash into the language.

I remember reading that there are more fluent Dutch speakers than fluent Irish speakers in the US and Dutch Americans make up around three milllion Americans whereas Irish Americans are in the tens of millions, second only to Germans. Hell nearly two million Americans speak German and it's the second, albeit minority language in a few states. Usually after Spanish, another language that held on in that diaspora.

It does seem that the Irish in general like the "romance" of the language and like that it's around, but clearly at some remove and mostly as Bearla when discussing it. There will always be a solid minority who speak the language, which is a good thing and that wasn't so certain even thirty years ago, but beyond that I can't see it ever growing much in actual daily use outside of very narrow areas of Irish life.

Oh certainly, that's a huge influence alright. It just it does seem that Irish is one of those minority languages that should have many more speakers for all sorts of reasons and advantages over other minority languages, but in practice it doesn't.

I agree with CGI as far as this "usefulness" reductionism going on with some in regard to the language. A language is far more than just base usefulness, though obviously the more of that going on the less under threat a language is.

That said Irish is a bit of an outlier compared to other minority languages. Not least with the resources thrown at it over the last century. Ackwel does have a point as far as other such languages go. It exists in an odd halfway house. On the one hand we say it's important and can even be quite defensive about it, yet few of us speak it and even fewer speak it fluently. There is a lot of cupla focal "fluency" out there. This halfway house extends to the authorities tasked with preservation and promotion. As he pointed out Breton is not on the public radar or Parisians, just like Basque isn't on the radar of Madrilenos and so forth.

The problem is - and this was the problem with my schooling in it and something that is not acknowledged for the optics - Irish is a foreign language for the majority of Irish people. Yet we teach it, or at least taught it, as if we should automatically latch onto it like "natives". I retained more French, even Latin compared to Irish from my schooldays even though I grew up surrounded by the language in media and the like mostly because they were accepted and taught as foreign languages out of the gate. It also didn't help that it was much more a rural language and that didn't really take in the Dublin I grew up in where there was quite the urban/rural divide. Though there had been a large move from rural to urban areas, particularly Dublin from the 40's onwards. Vanishingly few of my friends went back more than one or two generations in the place. Even so it seemed that at least for that first generation they wanted to leave the "rural" behind, which included the language for many if not most*

*and accents for many too. Ireland had one of the highest number of elocution teachers in the west. To smooth off the rural. Not too unlike the diaspora dropping the language to fit in and move up.

To be fair a goodly number of my peers at school baulked at having to learn Shakespeare's stuff too. And even a few lines of Liam's ouevre makes Peig look like the dour stone soaked misery peddler she was. In any language. "I lost 18 childer to the great bog fart of 88 and that was the year my hair burnt down and a halibut ate my toe". Whoever thought that guff was of any relevance or would strike any sympathetic chord in kids must have been smoking peat moss of the funny sort. Then again we were in the grip of "Catholic Ireland" and our Catholicism was very much of the slow walking in purgatory through the vale of misty tears sort compared to the Latin versions. so there's that. Misery porn was in, as Flann O'Brien noted and extracted the urine from to great effect. I gather those that came after me have not had to suffer the witterings of that oul crone. This is a good thing.