Is It Possible to Revitalize a Dying Language? An Examination of Attempts to Halt the Decline of Irish
This paper evaluates the attempts to revitalize the indigenous language of Ireland. It examines how the number of native Irish speakers declined under British rule, and how this trend continued even after independence, when Irish was declared the country’s official language. Successive Irish governments have used two main strategies to reverse language shift. The first was to protect the small Irish speaking areas in the west of the country, the Gaeltacht. The second was to rely on schools elsewhere to produce new generations of fluent Irish speakers. By the 1970s it was apparent that neither policy was working. However since then, somewhat improbably, an increasing number of people have begun to use Irish, both inside and outside the Gaeltacht. This paper examines whether this revival constitutes reverse language shift. In particular, it asks to what extent Irish is now being passed on as a mother tongue to a new generation of children.
All-Irish Primary Schools in the Dublin Area. Report of a Sociological and Spatial Study of All-Irish-Medium Schools in the Greater Dublin Area, with Special Reference to Their Impact on Home and Social Network Use of Irish.
0 Riagain, Padraig; 0 Gliasain, Micheal All-Irish Primary Schools in the Dublin Area. Report of a Sociological and Spatial Study of All-Irish-Medium Schools in the Greater Dublin Area, with Special Reference to Their Impact on Home and Social Network Use of Irish. Linguistics Inst. of Ireland, Dublin. 79 201p. Instituid Teangeolaiochta Eireann, 31 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2, Ireland, United Kingdom. Reports Research/Technical (143) Tests /Evaluation Instruments (160)
American Indian Bilingual Education
American ambivalence towards its aboriginal population is clearly reflected in attitudes to native American languages and to language maintenance efforts. While linguists found the American Indian languages a rich mine for study, they generally felt little responsibility to preserve them except in grammar books and archives. In similar vein, they generally chose to study the languages rather than how they were used. The paucity of studies of sociolinguistic questions — of languages in contact or being destroyed — is most regrettable. With a few distinguished exceptions, the student of an Amerindian language has made no mention of these matters, except to complain how few speakers are left, or how poorly they recall the language (cf. Spolsky and Kari 1974). Official policy towards American Indians and their languages has swung from virtual genocide to moderate acceptance, from the encouragement of assimilation or relocation to the support of some degree of maintenance of ethnic and linguistic identity. This paper concentrates on a current trend in the direction of maintenance: it cannot predict future directions or efforts. It records in the main recent federally supported initiatives to encourage One form or another of bilingual education. This will be shown to be interpretable in various cases as language maintenance, language revival, or more efficient language loss, depending on the sociolinguistic situation in which it