During the last few weeks, the world has commiserated with the Irish in their struggle to save their economy. On December 21, the very day prime minister Brian Cowen conferred with the Council of State to discuss the emergency, which has only met a dozen times since 1937, he also unveiled a plan to triple the number of people who can speak Irish in twenty years, the result of a ten-year study on how to strengthen the language.
Although Irish is the first official language according to the Irish Constitution, less than half, 42%, of the 4.2 million living in Ireland can speak some Irish, and only 3% use Irish as their household language. Until recently, UNESCO’s “Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger” classified Irish as “definitely endangered.” This status has since been improved to “vulnerable,” though fears persist that the language could die without help, even in the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking regions.
Now, for the first time, Ireland has a “comprehensive long-term plan for the Irish language,” said Mr. Cowen. As well as tripling the number of people who can speak Irish, the plan hopes to increase the number of people with some knowledge of Irish from 1.66 million to 2 million over 20 years.
Let us hope that Mr. Cowen will discover that Ireland can meet the two challenges in one fell swoop. The financial dependence on the outside world required to save the economy may have the effect of encouraging cultural nationalism as an antidote.
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It brings to mind Arnold Toynbee. In his “A Study of History”, he described the attempt of some nations “to bring a dead language back to life by putting it back into circulation as a living vernacular” as “The impulse towards this perverse undertaking …” Among a few others he referred to Ireland and Israel. As to Ireland, he said, “The Irish devotees of linguistic archaism are engaged, not in civilizing a living patois, but in re-creating an almost extinct language, and the results of their efforts are said to be incomprehensible to the scattered groups of peasantry in the west of Eire who still speak Gaelic as learnt at their mother’s knee.”
He described the process in Israel as “the most remarkable of all”; “… in the course of a single generation, this ‘dead’ language has been brought out of the synagogue and converted into a vehicle for conveting modern Western culture …”