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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 869

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

From Revivalist to Undertaker: New developments in official policies and attitudes to Ireland’s ‘First Language.’

Authors: Ó Giollagáin, Conchúr
Submitted by: Ó Giollagáin, Conchúr (National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland)

The debate in Ireland concerning issues of language policy and ethnolinguistic diversity has been transformed in recent years. To a large extent, this change is as a result of government-commissioned research reports (Ó Giollagáin and Mac Donnacha et al. 2007, and Fiontar 2009) which have sought to engender debate and inform policy initiatives. This paper offers an analysis of the official culmination of this process: the 20 Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010-2030 (Government of Ireland 2010). Ó Giollagáin and Mac Donnacha et al. (2007) indicates that the combination of demographic pressures on the Gaeltacht, the internal social dynamics operating within the Gaeltacht communities and the dominant influence of a majority-language youth culture is undermining the ability of Irish-speaking parents to foster the emergence of a sufficiently large proportion of Irish speakers in the various Gaeltacht communities for the intergenerational acquisition process to be completed. The analysis in this paper will primarily address the Irish Government’s response to this crisis, but also seeks to question whether national and international discourse on the bilingual condition (and its trope of consensual cultural hybridity) is adequately addressing the ethnolinguistic crisis in minority language groups, i.e. the contraction in linguistic functionality of young minority language speakers in the bilingual context. The discursive tension between multilingual cosmopolitan aspirations and unaddressed minority-language realities of peripheral disadvantage will also be discussed.

The creative tension between the consideration afforded to performative aspects (art, aesthetics and media) of minority cultures in contact with minority and majority audiences, on the one hand, and the implications of the power relations which determine the social functionality of minority linguistic cultures, on the other hand, will also be addressed. This paper asserts that the new (albeit undisclosed) official policy in Ireland is not to intervene in the social collapse of Irish as the native language of Gaeltacht people, but to pursue an actual language policy which will merely facilitate and support the use of Irish in second language educational and aesthetic endeavours. The paper concludes that the investment in what is effectively a policy façade – a fatalistic, sociolinguistic neo-liberalism – rather than ethnolinguistic substance, has the potential to generate a cottage industry of language ideology with only a weak potential to engage systematically with existing trends which are undermining the language’s vitality.

Fiontar, Dublin City University (2009). Report for the 20 Year Strategy for the Irish Language. Dublin: DCU.

Government of Ireland (2010). 20 Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010-2030 Dublin: The Stationery Office.

Ó Giollagáin C., S. Mac Donnacha et al. (2007). Comprehensive Linguistic Study of the Use of Irish in the Gaeltacht: Final Report. Dublin: The Stationery Office.