Criminal
11-30-2004, 04:47 PM
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/yahoo/chi-0411290150nov29,1,5900294.story
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.
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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.
See link for rest of story