Lá Fhéile Phádraig: Is Gaelic dead?
posted at 8:47 am on March 17, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
Send to a Friend |
Share on Facebook | printer-friendly
A happy St. Patrick’s Day to Hot Air readers, or Lá Fhéile Phádraig, as the Irish call it — or would, if they spoke Irish. Being a poor student of the ancient tongue myself, I read Manchán Magan’s essay in the LA Times today about his travails in attempting to use Irish in Ireland with some sadness and understanding. Despite generations of compulsory education in the nation’s first official language, or perhaps because of it, the Irish seem unwilling to make this part of their heritage a part of their current lives:
Gaelic — or irish, as we call it here — is the first official language of Ireland. (English is second.) And 41% of the population claim to speak it. But could that be true? To put it to the test, I set off across Ireland for three weeks in the summer of 2006 with one self-imposed handicap — to never utter a word of English.
I chose Dublin as a starting point. The sales assistant in the first shop I went to said, “Would you speak English maybe?” I tried repeating my request using the simplest schoolroom Irish that he must have learned during the 10 years of compulsory Irish that every schoolchild undergoes. “Do you speak English?” he asked again in a cold, threatening tone. Sea (pronounced “sha”), I affirmed, and nodded meekly. “I’m not talking to you any more,” he said, covering his ears. “Go away!”
I knew the journey was going to be difficult, just not this difficult. Language experts claim that the figure of fluent Irish speakers is closer to 3% than the aspirational 41% who tick the language box on the census, and most of them are concentrated on the western seaboard, in remote, inaccessible areas. What I had not factored for was the animosity. Part of it, I felt, stemmed from guilt. We feel inadequate that we cannot speak our own language.
I decided to visit Dublin’s tourist office, which, presumably, was accustomed to dealing with different languages. The man at the counter looked at me quizzically when I inquired about a city tour. “Huh?” he said, his eyes widening. I repeated myself.
“You don’t speak English, do you?” he asked coldly. I was already beginning to hate this moment — the point at which the fear and frustration spread across a person’s face. I asked if there was any other language I could use, and they pointed to a list of seven flags on the wall representing the languages they dealt in. To be honest, I could speak four of them, but I had promised myself not to, not unless it was absolutely necessary.
As Magan discovers, the language itself has its burden of politics and culture. For generations, it served as a badge of shame — identifying its speakers as backwards, unsophisticated, and hopeless, or at least it did among those who thought themselves superior for having left it behind. That kind of baggage doesn’t disappear overnight. The compulsory education didn’t do anything to address that, nor did it give the language any kind of relevancy in a nation that already spoke one language from border to border: English.
I had just begun to study the language when I traveled to Ireland for the first (and so far only) time in 2001. Having just begun instruction with Gaeltacht Minnesota, a lovely local group of volunteer instructors, I wanted to find some Gaeilge resources. I found a newspaper as Gaeilge in a convenience story in Kilkenny and bought it while chatting with the young clerk. When she saw the paper, she asked me if I spoke Irish (being quite obviously American), and I told her I had just begun learning it. Her reply? “Ah, why bother?”
And it seemed many shared that sentiment across Ireland. All of the signs in the country are in both languages, but apart from the tourist trinkets one could buy, hardly a word of Irish could be heard in Dublin or any of the cities. On the western seaboard, as Magan notes, the language felt a little closer to life, but still only made an occasional appearance. We missed the gaeltachts of Connemara during our vacation, where the people use it as a community language, but that use hasn’t spread outside of the enclaves.
Oddly, this should be an era where the language thrives. Ireland pressed for and received official EU recognition for Irish as an official language of the union. Web sites teaching the language flourish, and global interest in it continues to grow. More and more musicians use the language not just to sing traditional Irish songs, but to write contemporary music with contemporary lyrics. Its beauty remains undimmed, even if still mostly unrecognized.
Hopefully, Magan’s journey will inspire more to actually use the language, in Ireland and abroad. Despite the open hostility he found in Dublin, the rest of the country appeared more open to his use of Irish, if no less dumbfounded. Language speaks more than just conversation; it carries the history of a culture in its structure and syntax. Its loss would mean so much more than just the disappearance of a few quaint road signs along the countryside.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Blowback
Note from Hot Air management: This section is for comments from Hot Air's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that Hot Air management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment just because we let it stand. A reminder: Anyone who fails to comply with our terms of use may lose their posting privilege.
Trackbacks/Pings
Trackback URL
Comments
English is a more powereful language. Better for reaching a larger group of people internationally for business or whatever. It also the easiest to understand when confronted against it’s dialects. On top of that it’s able to assimilate other languages terms and phrases readily.
Just look at the contries that speak it vs those that don’t.
I’m not knocking Gaelic by any means, but I’m with the girl. If you’re a historian fine, but for everyone else it’s like studying Vandalic, Latin, or Old Frankish.
- The Cat
MirCat on March 17, 2008 at 9:02 AM
Welsh lives!
passingtramp on March 17, 2008 at 9:05 AM
“Gimme a pint or I’ll mop the floor with ya.” Is there a pretty Gaelic phrase for that?
Coronagold on March 17, 2008 at 9:07 AM
Well in Torchwood, not a one of em speak it :P
- The Cat
MirCat on March 17, 2008 at 9:14 AM
I was worried when I first glanced at this posting.. “what would I cook with?”
Then I realized that it Gaelic, not Garlic.
DaveC on March 17, 2008 at 9:16 AM
As a person who has studied various languages her entire life, this saddens me greatly. I know English is the language to know, but there is something to be said about remembering the language of ones ancestors. I grew up learning Polish and English concurrently, but as I went through school my second language knowledge was discouraged by my teachers. They must have thought I wouldn’t learn English properly or something.
I’m not Irish, though I’ve been accused of it (red hair, green eyes, fair skin & freckles), and I would love to learn Gaelic. There’s a beauty to much older languages. And if I were dictator for a day, every schoolchild would learn basic Greek and Latin. A year of Latin set the foundation for learning Russian, and both Greek and Latin for the base of several languages. The grammatical structure, being more complex due to age, also serves as a good starting point for learning any language.
I can dream. Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
the goddess anna on March 17, 2008 at 9:17 AM
Well happy freakin’ St. Patrick’s Day. heh. Languages come and go, and Gaelic is just the latest. If the latest generation of Americans is any indication, English might be next.
RightOFLeft on March 17, 2008 at 9:18 AM
Nightmare!
passingtramp on March 17, 2008 at 9:21 AM
I speak jive.
balderdash on March 17, 2008 at 9:24 AM
English was forced upon the Irish and the Scots, their languages outlawed. It’s good that you’re keepin it alive Ed!
dogsoldier on March 17, 2008 at 9:26 AM
Good article, Ed; thanks for sharing. While I understand that many people in Eire having given up learning the mother tongue in favor of English, I don’t believe Magan when she says only 3% speak Irish. If she really wanted a feel for the real Irish speaking people she would avoid tourist destinations and urban settings. The fact is Irish is still a living language, not on the brink of extinction.
Oh, and
There is a significant Scottish contingency in Poland. Perhaps you’re not Irish, but the Scottish angle is worth pursuing.
fourstringfuror on March 17, 2008 at 9:41 AM
Ed, I love these posts of yours about the Irish. My family visited Scotland for two weeks last fall, and we couldn’t leave the region without first stopping in Ireland. We spent a couple of days criss-crossing the Isle - our driver was incredibly well-informed on the history and he explained so much of the Troubles and language issues. It was endlessly fascinating.
Ireland was soft and green and beautiful, but I’m sorry, nothing can match the brutal grandeur of the Scottish Highlands. Nothing. After having visited it only once in my life, I miss it and feel, oddly enough, “homesick” for it. I understand now some of the deep-rooted love of the land (and this goes for Ireland too) - once it grips you, it never lets go.
Redhead Infidel on March 17, 2008 at 9:42 AM
PS: My husband makes the most delicious Guinness soaked Irish stew I’ve ever had in my life. Try finding a hearty Irish stew in any of the pubs in Ireland - it can hardly be done! And the reactions we got from wait staff when we requested their Irish stew - kind of like the language thing. When we finally found a pub that would serve up some stew, it was a half-hearted, watery affair with chunks of potatoes. Our driver was embarrassed, but he said that the Irish don’t really like Irish stew. (!) It’s a “poor man’s dish” and a lot of places don’t sell it because the Irish won’t buy it. They’ll make it for themselves, he said, but they won’t choose it as a meal in a restaurant.
Redhead Infidel on March 17, 2008 at 9:53 AM
Cap’n Ed,
Study (poorly) Scots Gaelic m’self. While English is certainly more ‘flexible’, Gaelic is far richer in speaking or song.
Togi s’cum ogi!
Oh, for those that may not know, St. Patrick was a Welshman!
SeniorD on March 17, 2008 at 9:55 AM
English is a very difficult language for just about everyone except our close Germanic cousins (such as the Scandinavians and Dutch). I don’t know what you mean by “powerful”, but it does indeed have an enormous vocabulary, and not only because of technical terms. (This is because we often have an Anglo-Saxon or Norse word for something and also a French or Latin word for the same thing.)
Also, our verbs are not as easy as at first they seem: think of “do, am doing, did, was doing, used to do, will do, shall do, would do, going to do”, etc. Very hard for foreigners to get a feel for them.
And dialects? Have you ever been to England? There are dialects other Englishmen can hardly make out. But just ask foreigners learning English what they do when confronted with a Scouser or a Geordie or a Brummie.
English as an international language makes no sense except for historical reasons. German would be far more logical: once you learn the basic vocabulary, the compounds make a lot of sense and are built upon that same vocabulary (whereas in English we borrow the from Latin, French and Greek and so their meaning is not obvious).
Which in fact brings us to one of the advantages for teaching Latin to the general public: to help them understand their own tongue (as well as to train the mind and to give them access to two millennia of western culture).
Tzetzes on March 17, 2008 at 9:56 AM
I don’t understand this affection for little-used languages and dialects. Why should people in Ireland go through all the time and effort to learn a language, when they can already communicate perfectly well in a language that they share with billions of people?
Clark1 on March 17, 2008 at 10:04 AM
I think congress should commision a study of endangered languages with an eye toward requiring impact studies for the effects of infrastructure development on in- and exodenginous languages. Just sayin’.
davidk on March 17, 2008 at 10:09 AM
French as been manditory in most Canadian schools since the 70’s when official bilingualism was introduced; try finding someone from outside of Quebec, Acadia (in New Brunswick) or one of the tiny French enclaves scattered around the country. The only people who speak French as a second language are those with government ambitions, federal law enforcement, or military officers. Making the learning of a language mandatory does not guarantee that language will be used any more than is absolutely necessary.
Frozen Tex on March 17, 2008 at 10:14 AM
Right on. It’s sad to see how little Latin is offered both in public schools and in colleges these days (no Latin classes at all at my college! And 15,000 people come here…).
Hey Ed, are you willing to have a weekly ‘Learn Gaelic’ installment? I would be down for it.
Pent. on March 17, 2008 at 10:18 AM
I’ve taught myself some Polish, and wish my family had done more to preserve Polish and Slovak, which were last spoken fluently by my grandparents (although my dad retains a bit of Polish learned from his mother).
The Slavic languages diverged relatively recently, giving them a pretty large common “core” vocabulary. While in Krka National Park in Croatia, I heard a woman shout what sounded like “czekaj” to the kids she was attending, which I understood to mean “wait”.
I’ve been to those places, too. Except for the Connemara and the Burren, Ireland is amazingly green. But if I want to hike or view scenery, I’ll take the Highlands.
I had a great bowl of Irish stew in Brugge, Belgium. And lamb with mint sauce at Durty Nellie’s, next to Bunratty Castle.
Bigfoot on March 17, 2008 at 10:22 AM
I rather press two for Gaelic, than Spanish. My Irish and Scottish ancestors (Ciamar a tha thu!?) learned English when they came here, legally.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day……
Hening on March 17, 2008 at 10:24 AM
In a few generations people will be mourning how their parents didn’t teach them Spanish in the home, and how their grandma was the last to speak it fluently.
tlynch001 on March 17, 2008 at 10:27 AM
For the Catholics on the island, St Pats has already happened this year.
Once again, from an American perspective the non-Catholic Irish are written out of the story - assuming that Irish=Gaelic ignores that other Irish language, Ulster-Scots, which is now quite rightly an official language in the North.
Leaving aside the Irish, it is nonsense to say that English was forced upon the Scots - long before the 1707 Union, Scots (which grew out of middle english) had supplanted Gaelic in most of the nation, and had become the language of the original Scottish parliament. I can understand sometimes why British people are irritated when Americans foist their misunderstandings of British history upon them.
Forcing people to learn a language of limited use is almost always counter-productive. Yes, 42% in the Republic claim to use the Gaelic language once a week or so, perhaps meaning a few stock phrases, but only 3% speak it fluently. It is a good thing to protect a language in communities where it already spoken, but to impose it on those whose families may have stopped speaking the language generations ago, or who never spoke it in the first place, is the behaviour of authoritarian government. If it were not compuslory there would be far more enthusiasm amongst young people for the language.
I wonder how much time we would give to attempts in the US to force indigenous language learning down the throats of communities here. Not much, I hope.
Pax americana on March 17, 2008 at 10:31 AM
Definitely a dream ;-) The teachers union would never allow that!
rightside on March 17, 2008 at 10:33 AM
The Irish (half of my family tree came from Cork)) should realize that:
it’s always good to have a language that the tourists don’t understand.
A Happy St. Patty’s!
And read “How the Irish Saved Civilization” for an intriguing little history of this unique folk.
profitsbeard on March 17, 2008 at 10:44 AM
The trends for the Irish language are much better in the North than in the rest of the country. In the North there is a much greater desire by people to learn the language and it is widely promoted. It was first promoted by Sinn Fein and others during the Troubles and IRA prisoners learned the language in jail. Schools were also established that taught only in Irish which are now funded by the British government and they are flurishing- in part because the students at these schools score much better on tests than their english only counterparts. There are now so many speakers that West Belfast is now a Gaeltacht.
http://u.tv/newsroom/indepth.asp?id=76553&pt=n
irish_infidel on March 17, 2008 at 11:04 AM
So is there a Gaelic keyboard now?
landlines on March 17, 2008 at 11:05 AM
Swift, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Behan, etc. etc., don’t help the argument for Gaelic.
snaggletoothie on March 17, 2008 at 11:19 AM
Redhead Infidel on March 17, 2008 at 9:53 AM
I’d love to have the recipe! I was just looking up how to make colcannon! I’m a McDonough descendant, from Sligo and possibly Roscommon. They settled in Richmond, VA around the time of the Civil War, and some moved to New York just after. I’ve always wondered if they spoke Irish.
BNCurtis on March 17, 2008 at 11:22 AM
Blithering dunderhead.
As a full-blooded Scot and proud second-generation American, I can tell you with all authority that the purpose is not to replace english and communicate solely in gaelic, but to try and reconnect, if only a wee bit, with the dying language of one’s ancestors and history. We do it because we wish to, and it’s fun.
As has already been well explained, there are a wide number of gaelic dialects among the celtic kith and kin that are NOT mutually-comprehensible. One of my grandmothers was raised in a tiny village named Dalchork, while the other grew up in far north Dounreay. Both women insisted it was impossible to understand the other unless she was well into her cups. ;-) It’s kinda like growing up in Lacombe and trying to talk to a fellow Louisianian in Dulac.
I admittedly know very little about Ireland, but in Scotland, get out of the modern cities and into the Highlands or the westernmost Isles (Skye, Benbecula, Harris, etc.) and you will find that Gaels are prevalent. For we transplants, learning the language is a hobby. For them, though, it is their spoken language and an intrinsic part of life.
While honoring the family tradition today of wearing an dath ruadh and pinching anyone in green, I do wish the good Cap’n and fellow Irishmen a Beannachtai Fhéile Phádraig (in the Irish form) today.
EHeavenlyGads on March 17, 2008 at 11:47 AM
Redhead Infidel on March 17, 2008 at 9:42 AM
Sorry Ed, I must agree with the Redhead. I do love Ireland but the Scotland tugs on me. I must return to both countries.
BTW, Tommy Smythe is the St. Patrick’s Day Parade Grand Marshall. The first native born Irish to do so and not a bad futbol commentator.
d1carter on March 17, 2008 at 11:52 AM
When I was in Ireland a few years ago, I asked a bartender in a hotel how to pronounce some Irish words I’d read in books over the years. He was very helpful and seemed a little surprised I even knew how to spell the words from memory. (I’m American born with Chinese ancestry.) I attempted, very briefly, to learn both Scots and Irish Gaelic (which are different in the way that Mandarin and Cantonese are, I believe), but alas, it’s way too difficult for my poor brain. I’ll stick to the Romance languages.
Anyway, have a Guinness today for the Irish. Slainte!
wherestherum on March 17, 2008 at 12:05 PM
Pointless.
Everyone now speaks ‘Merican … even the english.
Kristopher on March 17, 2008 at 12:35 PM
BNCurtis, I will try and pry the recipe out of him. I do know it’s not written down anywhere.
We can’t wait to return to Scotland - and we most certainly will. I may be a well-mixed Nordic-American mutt: Scottish, Norwegian, German, a wee bit Oglala Lakota and of all things - Laplander! - but the Scot is what I feel most. I never understood that feeling until I wandered around the Highlands and Orkney (fierce!!) for two weeks. It’s the only time a hard-nosed gal like myself waxes remotely poetic - when I consider Scotland. It’s probably the only place on earth that could lure me away from the good ole US of A.
Redhead Infidel on March 17, 2008 at 1:31 PM
Quite possibly; and born to a Roman decurion. My Welsh-Italian wife reminds me of this from time to time.
DrSteve on March 17, 2008 at 1:46 PM
Well if the Irish, Welsh and Scots “de ney” bother to keep the language alive it will be left to their Canadian decendents to carry on.
Like it says on the signs as you cross over to the island, “Caid Mille Failte”
http://www.gaeliccollege.edu
Jim708 on March 17, 2008 at 2:58 PM
Gaelic still lives where I live, just on bumper stickers and T-shirts - not the best phrases in the world either.
I alos love making Guinness Stew, but also Guinness pot pie, and Guinness French Onion Soup.
What doesn’t taste better with Guinness?
reaganaut on March 17, 2008 at 3:28 PM
Surely a Gaelic linguist would have known better than to start in Dubh lin (black lake or pool).
Starting near Galway or the Aarons would have been a bit brighter, Dublin was a Viking city a thousand years ago and has been something a bit separate since.
Speakup on March 17, 2008 at 4:23 PM
I second this!! Would love to learn some Gaelic. Going to the Isles in June!
tickleddragon on March 17, 2008 at 5:38 PM
Oh. Profound truth.
That sounds like pure fun!
Redhead Infidel on March 17, 2008 at 6:00 PM
Redhead Infidel on March 17, 2008 at 1:31 PM
My family and I visited Scotland this past spring for the second time and for a couple of weeks. We fell in love with Scotland and the Scottish people. My wife and I will return for an extended visit someday to the Isle of Skye. It is one of the most beautiful places on earth. I have experienced that “homesick” feeling about no other place that we have visited.
d1carter on March 17, 2008 at 6:19 PM