The creeping prominence of the Irish language

No one is forcing anyone or looking to and well you know it. Languages are simply hard work, that's the long and short of it.

Asking Ireland.Inc to successfully kick start anything in the first 70 years of existence without a bean in the coffers would be like asking the patient to heal themselves with no help.

Now that we're starting to get somewhere with Irish outside of the gaeltacht the toys are coming out of the pram though....

I brought that point up and I'm not sure how we could check out a closed group but from what I can see 15,000 members and fewer than 500 posts a month isn't exactly stellar.

New posts, not comments so the equivalent of a new thread. I have no idea what Boards.ie's metrics are.

I feel you may have misunderstood him/her.

This does not refer to every English speaker who does not speak Irish, but a subset of them - just the "intellectually lazy and culturally narrow-minded monolingual" ones.

There are plenty of English speakers, even monolingual ones, who are neither intellectually lazy nor culturally narrow-minded; and indeed a lot of them sent their kids to Gaelscoileanna, and a lot more again would do so if they had such a school in the vicinity.

The 13 years forced studying of the language is what if not an imposition?

I think you need to look again at the comment you are replying to.

He didn't say it wasn't an imposition - the fact is that the whole education system is an imposition, every moment of school life is an imposition.

The point is though that it is the State that is imposing it, not the lowly Irish speaker.

English is a life-skill, Irish is not

This is among the most completely dismissive comments regarding the Irish language I have every seen anywhere. Hate-speech really.

It certainly destroys any of the credibility you have tried (but not really succeeded) to build up with the occasional mealy-mouthed crumbs of "support" you come out with for some minor measures.

Yeah, there's plenty of good content anyway (it's a general interest page; not a page filled with learners questions)

You might like this website http://indigenoustweets.com/

It tracks activity on twitter on minority languages. Over 14,000 users have sent Irish language tweets, over 4 million of them.

I forgot about the discord servers as well.

It's obvious to me that reports of the death of the Irish language have been exaggerated but it is a minority and it is endangered.

I'd just point out as well that one of the reasons I'm passionate about the Irish language is that there is interesting content that I enjoy and I simply don't get it anywhere else. We're at a high point for content I think, I hope it keeps getting bigger and better.

"Hate speech"...?! Seriously - how can that be hate speech?

Irish is not a nessecary skill to have in function in life. Case in point - millions of people don;t have it and lead successful happy lives.

Because it was contemptuous and because you wouldn't say it about any other minority language in Ireland.

I think people know when they're not respected, it's possible to keep the respect there even when they don't agree.

Edit: I'll add, because languages are so personal as well. It clearly is a life-skill to the native person who speaks it.

As a schoolboy(1960's), it seemed to me that most of our Irish teachers were maniacs. Now, having said that, i liked Irish enough to graduate to the 'A' stream where all subjects were taught through Irish. What was funny, was that when I did the entrance exam for secondary, I had to translate the questions in my head to Irish....

I left school at 16, but retained my fluency -which was as good as any news reader's - well into my twenties. In my fifties, I attended Comhrá sessions locally, just to mix with some local Irish enthusiasts, out of curiosity. Most of them were like me, reliving schooldays without the screaming and the hidings. Unfortunately, a very small number were out and out Irish language fascists, and managed to drive everyone else away. So, 40+ years later, I STILL associated Irish with headcase ultra nationalists, the type that believe that only true Irish people use the language. So, whenever I hear of a new initiative to 'promote' the Irish language, in my minds eye its this kind of person I see. And so to the topic of the thread. The latest initiative I have become aware of, is Irish language programmes on RTE one. There's one at the moment about pets "Peataí". If I wanted to watch tv in Irish, I'd switch to TG4. However, I have dozens of channels to choose from, so a quick zap and I'm away. I suppose eventually the Gaelgeoiri will succeed in making Irish the predominant language on RTE etc, and fool themselves that they've achieved Gaelgeoir utopia, while the rest of us are gone to Satellite and Internet TV.

The sociolinguistic nuances are numerous and would require a much deeper exposition than can be managed here.

Indeed they are.

I quote from the book Crannóga by Liam Ó Sé. Chapter 5 begins:

The Ghetto

On my way back to medical school in the autumn of 1945 the first leg of my journey to Dublin brought me as far as Limerick with just enough time for a hasty lunch. ... The diningroom of the nearest hotel seemed full but the waiter managed to find space for me at a table already occupied by five soldiers in the uniform of the United States ... Some way into my meal I became aware that something odd was afoot - they were all conversing in fluent Irish.

There was one GI whose Irish, while fluent, was clearly school Irish; he, in fact, had emigrated from his native Dublin just before the war. The others, whom I had taken to be from Connemara, were with one exception second or third generation Irish-Americans from Boston. The fifth, who was a fourth-generation Irish-American, hailed not from Boston as one might have expected, but from somewhere not too far from Chicago. All the Irish-Americans had learned Irish in the homes of their parents. (pp 99-100)

Thanks to Deirdre, I reread your post with the eye of a native Irish speaker (I'm not btw) - and imagine reading that your own language isn't a life-skill in your own country. It's your life-skill if it's the language your mother taught you.

I mean if we were debating about the HSE sending out leaflets in Polish, African languages etc... to encourage minorities to take up the Covid-19 vaccine, something I heard on the radio during the week, I bet you would not say, that's a waste, Polish isn't a life-skill in Ireland, sure most if not all Poles here can speak English.

What stings most about the comment is that we all know that comment wouldn't be made about any language other than Irish.