What's there to fear? It's fucked, basically.

There was an Irish guy who is involved in the language academically at the conference I was at recently and he says stuff like what Lughaidh says



I guess they don't need Irish all that much and 'táim ag enjoyáil mo cider' does the job easy enough

I recently bought A History of the Irish Language: From the Norman Invasion to Independence http://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Irish-L ... 0198724764 and it details how people wouldn't know there were two different languages, being active in one and fluent in the other, so it just slipped away with no real sense of loss

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His criticisms are very vague. What's his proposal?

If he's saying that preserving use of Irish within the existing Irish-speaking communities in the gaeltacht areas is one part of the solution, then I agree, but if he thinks it's the way to return Irish to being a non-endangered language, then I think he's wrong:

Given the population size of fluent natives of gaeltacht Irish that we have today (some say it's 60,000) and given a goal of getting to a stable and self-sufficient population -- let's say a million -- in fifty years time, what's his proposal for how the Irish-speaking population of the gaeltacht areas can produce 940,000 people? That's a 1:16 ratio of older generation to younger generation. This will never happen naturally, and even if something similar did happen, how would each member of the younger generation get enough time with people of the older generation in order to be raised a real native? The younger gaeltacht generation would outnumber the older generation so much that they would spend most of their time interacting with each other (and with English speakers) instead of the older generation, that they'd develop the kind of Irish Dinneen's trying to avoid.

I think the only way to get to a big population of native Irish speakers is to target the non-gaeltacht areas and do our best. Using recordings by Gaeltacht speakers in the class is great, and so is Irish-language TV and radio. But this will have to be coupled with greatly increased hours of Irish in schools (make all schools bilingual), and it's not possible to find gaeltacht natives to do all those hours of teaching, so that's one example of somewhere a compromise has to be made.

With a purist approach, the growth that's possible is very small, probably too small to be useful if the goal is to get to a stable native population. We need growth of 1000% or 2000%, and that means accepting that the Irish spoken will be a mix of old and new.

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Pages I made:
(These are unfortunately offline for the near future, but they'll be back!)

• Teaching Young Kids Irish (It's just my notes, a work in progress.)
• CD transcript and translations for the book Learning Irish

You make a good point about the ratios, but such targets are pie in the sky anyway.

I would say that targeting both native speakers and non-speakers are both doomed to failure as they are lacking in key ingredients -social networks who control their own linguistic domain economically and socially and with whom membership of network groups is dependant on having mastery of the language and which also produce new speakers (children). The Gaeltacht doesn't meet the requirements as it is poor and isn't passing on the language; the Galltacht doesn't speak Irish.

Unless you want only auxiliary status, and a creolised 'code', you need either native speakers or an ultra dedicated club that imitates dead dialects each generation...

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Why does Irish need a population of 1 million to be considered stable? There are a lot of stable smaller languages than that.

Irish needs to be spoken by more than 67% of the population on a daily basis in any given community to be considered stable. I think this ratio is similar for most minority languages. That is languages which the users are under pressure to shift to a larger more dominant language.

If 67,000 people in the Gaeltacht spoke Irish daily it would be stable.
But one million people speaking in a population of 4.6 million would mean that the language is so far below the level required to be used as a community language it probably wouldn't be considered stable.

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I think it would make more sense to concentrate on trying to use what resources are available to reinvigorate Irish in the Gaeltacht, and area of 100,000 people, rather than scattering it around an area of 4.6 million people.

There is more chance of seeing which things work to reinvigorate a language and then a case can be made to extend it to a wider community.

Sure if a particular course of action doesn't produce more speakers in a community where 40-70% already speak the language, what hope has it of creating an Irish speaking community in a community where only 1-2% speak it ?

Even a larger area of targeting the 300,000 or so people in the actual Gaeltacht, the "Gaeltacht service towns" and their hinterland would be better as it could allow the language to grow more organically.

Of course none of that will happen when our strategy to save Irish is a vague and ineffective 20 year plan with no funding.

To put it in perspective, the 20 year plan has earmarked €1.5 million in funding. Not sure if that's for all 20 years. But its 0.002% of our annual government budget. (€70 billion per annum)

Even though we are the second lowest spender on Defence in the EU, our budget of €800 million a year is many times greater than the resources we are willing to put in to protect our own language.

Even a tenth of that would probably help reverse the language shift in the Gaeltacht.
It could provide free childcare and play groups through Irish, for all age groups.
Children's activity's through Irish and social clubs through Irish. etc, etc.

It could even cover the cost of running full time intensive Irish courses, where parents and adults in the Gaeltacht. Where the participants are paid so as to be able to dedicate the time to it like a full time job. A one year course would give you 1,800 class hours, enough to build a strong conversational ability for someone with no Irish or vastly improve the Irish of someone who went through the school system, particularly anyone native to the Gaeltacht. Its a system that has been used in a limited way but with great success elsewhere.

Or we could buy one fighter jet for the same amount of money and add our name to the list of countrys bombing Syria.

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75,00 a year...WOW

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probably just enough to publish press releases

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Because the amount of TV programs, translated books, newspapers, government services etc. available in Irish is atrocious, and that won't change until there's a sizeable demand and sufficient people to make these things.

I couldn't blame any young person in the Gaeltacht for living most of their life, besides interaction with neighbours, through English. There's almost no other option - and then we think we can leave them with responsibility for the survival of the language? That's not stable at all.


€12.5m funding for two Irish dictionaries was announced on Tuesday, so obviously the project getting €1.5m is just some small part of various things the government is funding. (I'm not defending current government policy, but let's get our facts right.)


I read an article recently complaining about how scandalous is was to be funding TG4 when there's an acute shortage of hospital beds in the country. Everyone can play the "my issue is more important than your issue" game :-)

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Pages I made:
(These are unfortunately offline for the near future, but they'll be back!)

• Teaching Young Kids Irish (It's just my notes, a work in progress.)
• CD transcript and translations for the book Learning Irish

A language doesn't need a million speakers to be stable. There are languages with only a few hundred speakers that are considered stable; however, that's because they remain the primary languages of those communities in which they are spoken and children are being raised as monoglots in those languages. Maybe if that kind of community could be created somehow for Irish, it would be good.

I think media, books, news etc. need to be an important part, like our man in Brussels said. I guess young people need to feel like they won't be missing anything by living their lives primarily through Irish. And that's not at all easy, especially with the internet and other media showing us all not only the mass Western/American culture but all the cool other ones from around the whole world too. It makes it very easy to ignore local traditions, ways and concerns.

Take me, even. I'm an American and I'm learning Irish mainly to read books in Irish, even though there are probably hundreds of great books in English by American authors that I've never read, and there are people in my own country, state, even my hometown, with whom I can't communicate due to a language barrier. I'm deliberately ignoring my own land and culture and delving into something foreign and exotic to which I have a tenuous connection.

Of course I'm sure young people in the Gaeltacht have a strong sense of tradition and would love to carry things on, but in order to actually do it, the way things seem to be now, they would have to cloister themselves.





What kind of dictionaries?

I suppose the point I was trying to make (badly) , is that there is no real plan or visible attempt to create an achievable measurable result.

I know the 1.5 million is not the only funding available. More is available in an ad-hoc manner, nothing is really laid out in the so called plan.

Even the figures of a 29% increase of speakers in the Gaeltacht and 69% in the Galltacht seem to be pulled out of thin air. There doesnt seem to be a plan.

I know there is always the "my issue is more important than...", but I think these things need to be viewed in context.
Certain people will have an issue with any money being spent on Irish, be it 5 quid or 500 million.

But a lot of other people dont have a real grasp of the figures. So when you compare what is spent on Irish to other government spending's , you can see it in the context of how much of our total resources are being used for a particular issue.

I used to work in a large financial institution, and even there a lot of people had a very poor grasp of public spending figures. In one particular conversation a number of colleagues flat refused to believe that the Irish state budget was as much as one billion, not to mind many times that.

And these were people who worked with vast sums of money every day.

So for example when people in the UK give out about the 50 million spent on Scots Gaelic every year, the amount seems like a lot on an individual level.
They rarely put it in to context, for example, 1,000 times more is spent on killing people, or that it wouldnt cover the cost of one jet to bomb some poor conflict ridden country.
Not considering

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