Irish is an ancient language, with a limited number of speakers nowadays, but it still attracts many people interested in Irish and Celtic culture.
– www.irishlanguage.net
Sadly, this statement accurately sums up what Irish has become today. It has been classed as a dead language, a language of the past rather than a language of the future. It is sought out only by those with a strong interest in the Irish culture, or by a few irish natives trying to find their identity. Many Irish children go through their school years learning irish, yet leave with a strong distaste for the language, and for me personally a decade or so later, I have forgotten much of what I learnt in school.
One has to ask, why is this so? Could it be that the methods used to teach this wonderful language are at fault? Those charged with teaching the language need to ask themselves why so many children leave school with either a hatred or an indifference towards their native tongue. For each one is as bad as the other.
A recent census in Ireland stated 41.9% could speak Irish. Many have ridiculed this figure, but I would defend that figure. I answered this question in the affirmative. For the question was not – Can you speak Irish fluently, but rather can you speak it? And while my Irish may be broken, and I am able to understand more than I can speak, I can still speak the language, and there are many others in Ireland like me. The census also asked how often you spoke Irish outside of the education system. It shows sadly how little we speak Irish, with many being able to speak it never do. (Source: http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/breaking/2007/0329/breaking35.htm)
Our government struggled through wide criticism to make Irish an official language of the European Union. To insult us further there has even been discussions surrounding the idea of making Polish a national language. And by a few it has even been suggested that children learn polish in our classrooms rather than learning Irish. These people are naïve, thinking that there is no use in learning an archaic language. Yet our language is part of who and what we are. Slowly and surely with world globalisation we are stripped away of all that makes us unique and different from other cultures.
There are many individuals who fought and still fight hard to retain our language. I commend the practice of always showing the Irish names along with the English versions of our cities, towns and villages. Though I would prefer to return to the irish placenames and drop their English counterparts. I would like to see it compulsory that all new placenames (i.e. vast housing estates that seem to spout up around the countryside) should be given Irish names. It is deplorable that they are given an english placename; this to my mind is an enormous step backwards.
Because Irish is an official language of Ireland, all Government or EU funding projects within Ireland should produce documentation in Irish as well as English. Eventually this should apply also to businesses that operate in Ireland. Often I find myself reading over the Irish text, and then reading the english text to see if I understood it. There is something comforting about reading Irish even though I do not fully understand it, but the words and sounds seem to make sense.
There are many resources available for people to improve their native tongue. These need to be more visible. It is a shame to see TG4 (once an all Irish language channel) show sub-standard programs, when it could have been used to promote the language. And often when switching onto this channel, I find that they show a large number of programs from the archives of RTE. These programs might be entertaining, and a small minority of them cultural, but they are often english speaking programs.
So where do we fail in imparting a love of irish to her people? I have nephews who attend an irish speaking school and they have a great love of the language. They speak and read it with ease, viewing it as not much different to English. This is in stark contrast with another nephew who attends an English speaking school. He has developed a hatred of the language, mainly brought about due to the difficulty he has experienced in learning it.
My most memorable year of learning Irish at school was my first year in secondary school. Our teacher refused to teach Irish through English. No spoken word of english was allowed in the classroom. All new words where taught through words of Irish we already knew. It was amazing as you began to realise how much Irish you actually knew, and you began during that 40 minutes to think in Irish. Unfortunately the rest of my learning of Irish in secondary school consisted of translating Irish into english or vice versa. Many hours spent translating newspaper articles into english in order to build my vocabulary. Yes, it built up a vocabulary for me, but a vocabulary of single words rather than phrases. And constantly I found myself writing in English what I wanted to say, and then translating it into Irish.
It is with great embarrassment, that I admit I cannot speak irish fluently. Though the reason for this is not through lack of knowledge, but rather through forgetfulness. If we don’t use what we know we quickly forget it. It is the same with others languages I have tried to mastered, as long as I find a way to keep using them, I retain much of the knowledge I have spent years developing.
And so I find myself asking how can Irish fit in to Ireland today? To assume, or even to suggest that Irish replace english seems at first native and counter-constructive. For it will surely be met with criticism and complaint. But I strongly think that we can easily integrate it into normal living. Already we speak a bastardize form of English – ‘Hibernian English’ as it is referred to. A form of english we have made our own, by including into every day speech the way we would have spoken in our native tongue. It is effective to continue to bastardize this form, in order to slowly but effectively move closer to irish every day. Phrases such as "Sín é", "Tá go mhaith", "Slán abhaile", (all common Irish phrases), can be used in everyday speech, and indeed many people commonly do this, by habit rather than a conscious decision to speak Irish.
Slowly, but surely we can move from speaking very little irish to it becoming our dominant tongue. Those we communicate with on a daily basis may even pick up our phrases, and start to integrate it into their own tongue. Parents communicating with their children in their native tongue. Friends communicating with each other, helping each other to improve on the language. More and more we need to demand that irish remain dominant and always to the fore.
And again I return to my own personal experience in trying to master another language. When I submerge myself in this language, I find myself suddenly thinking in this language. And when I must communicate again through english my mind becomes fuzzy as I must force my mind to think in english once more. This is what irish must become once more. It should be our first language of thinking and this can be achieved my submerging ourself in the language. Listening to old songs sung in the language, reading articles or stories written in the mother tongue without trying to translate them to english in our mind. Over time and through patience this will become second nature to us. And once more our mother tongue may become dominate in our land.
Corrupt Eire
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