AHC: How can Ireland revive the Irish language?

cen fath ba mahaith on duine eireanach ag caint as gaelige.

Why would the people of Ireland want to speak Irish.

To be honest you need an 1800s POD to make Irish common here.
 
Step 1: Ireland looks at Quebec's language laws

Step 2: Ireland copies Quebec's language laws

Step 3: Ireland copies Quebec's "language police"

Result: the majority of the Republic of Ireland will by law have to speak Irish for almost all situations (eg. business, signage, school). Those that don't will be quickly marginalized and driven to either learn or leave Ireland.

Downside: Ireland becomes a bit of a laughingstock as the Irish Language Police sometimes get caught by the press doing really stupid things, such as trying to ban the word "pasta" from menus because it is Italian

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/01/quebec-language-police-ban-pasta
 
Step 1: Ireland looks at Quebec's language laws

Step 2: Ireland copies Quebec's language laws

Step 3: Ireland copies Quebec's "language police"

Result: the majority of the Republic of Ireland will by law have to speak Irish for almost all situations (eg. business, signage, school). Those that don't will be quickly marginalized and driven to either learn or leave Ireland.

Downside: Ireland becomes a bit of a laughingstock as the Irish Language Police sometimes get caught by the press doing really stupid things, such as trying to ban the word "pasta" from menus because it is Italian

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/01/quebec-language-police-ban-pasta

I think you are overestimating French in Quebec and the extent to which they speak it. Sure in Montreal and Quebec French is very strong, but English is very much spoken everywhere. If you go in to a sub shop they will greet you in English and speak it very well. Plus French laws in Quebec don't apply to places like the Postal offices and other federally protected language places. Northern Quebec barely speaks French at all. About 65% of all complaints to the Office Quebecois de la langue Francaise come from the southern three regions around Montreal and the Ontario/NY border; single largest complaint- language on product labels.

The UN Human Rights Committee has ruled that Quebec has no right to limit people's freedom of expression to choose a language. And the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Ford v Quebec in 1988 that Quebec should only make French more prominent in advertising, not the sole language, a recommendation that Quebec did end up doing.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
Donor
Well, given that English is a mandatory second language taught in schools and universities and that good use of the English language is considered a hallmark of an educated person (Israeli politicians have been made fun of by young Israelis for bad English and it has hurt their careers), I would say Israel has actually proven my point of how important it is to have your people speak English.

Frankly, I don't think English was ever a threat to the Czech language, though German would have been. I've never been a supporter of the idea of a Czechoslovakia or its two daughter nation-states. Autonomous regions of larger Austria (Czechs) and Hungary and Poland (Slovaks) would have been more logical. Especially in the case of the Slovaks there's no historical reason for a nation-state. Might as well given independence to Cornwall, Breton, Lappland, or Friesland.

The Czech language was under heavy pressure from German, and if the Czechoslovak state had not happened it might not exist today.
 
The Czech language was under heavy pressure from German, and if the Czechoslovak state had not happened it might not exist today.

Czech language has been under heavy pressure from German for over 1,000 years. If Sorbian/Wendish can still exist under even more pressure and with no independent nation then so would Czech.
 
I think you are overestimating French in Quebec and the extent to which they speak it. Sure in Montreal and Quebec French is very strong, but English is very much spoken everywhere. If you go in to a sub shop they will greet you in English and speak it very well. Plus French laws in Quebec don't apply to places like the Postal offices and other federally protected language places. Northern Quebec barely speaks French at all. About 65% of all complaints to the Office Quebecois de la langue Francaise come from the southern three regions around Montreal and the Ontario/NY border; single largest complaint- language on product labels.

The UN Human Rights Committee has ruled that Quebec has no right to limit people's freedom of expression to choose a language. And the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Ford v Quebec in 1988 that Quebec should only make French more prominent in advertising, not the sole language, a recommendation that Quebec did end up doing.


Well I live in Montreal and yes, English is spoken fairly commonly downtown, because there are lost of anglo businessmen, tourists and students. However pretty much everyone in Quebec, even in Montreal has to know French to be able to work and live in the province, because you have to do business in the French language (although being bilingual is often desired by employer because of doing business with the US). Thus most of the people in Quebec who only speak English are only there temporarily (eg. students and foreign or out of province businessmen). For the record Montreal is about as bilingual a city as you can get (at least as far as English vs French), as pretty much no major cities in Canada outside of Quebec use French for anything except for official government stuff where bilingualism is required, although outside of Montreal and Old Quebec City, it really is mainly French monolingual in Quebec. The language laws have been toned down a bit in the last couple of decades, but remember that the language laws themselves were ruled as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada but were upheld and implemented by the Quebec government via employing the "notwithstanding clause". So pretty much everyone outside of Quebec believes that the language laws are still pretty draconian, but they are still there, and regardless of their ethicacy they have been effective at preserving the French language and diminishing other languages, primarily English (See the Anglo flight from the late 1970s to the late 1990s). To be blunt, outside of the touristy/international business areas Quebec is French, not English or bilingual. Most of Quebec is as French as the rest of Canada is English.
 
Well I live in Montreal and yes, English is spoken fairly commonly downtown, because there are lost of anglo businessmen, tourists and students. However pretty much everyone in Quebec, even in Montreal has to know French to be able to work and live in the province, because you have to do business in the French language (although being bilingual is often desired by employer because of doing business with the US). Thus most of the people in Quebec who only speak English are only there temporarily (eg. students and foreign or out of province businessmen). For the record Montreal is about as bilingual a city as you can get (at least as far as English vs French), as pretty much no major cities in Canada outside of Quebec use French for anything except for official government stuff where bilingualism is required, although outside of Montreal and Old Quebec City, it really is mainly French monolingual in Quebec. The language laws have been toned down a bit in the last couple of decades, but remember that the language laws themselves were ruled as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada but were upheld and implemented by the Quebec government via employing the "notwithstanding clause". So pretty much everyone outside of Quebec believes that the language laws are still pretty draconian, but they are still there, and regardless of their ethicacy they have been effective at preserving the French language and diminishing other languages, primarily English (See the Anglo flight from the late 1970s to the late 1990s). To be blunt, outside of the touristy/international business areas Quebec is French, not English or bilingual. Most of Quebec is as French as the rest of Canada is English.

Have you ever been to the northern parts of Quebec? Such as the Ungava Peninsula? The Inuit (90% of the population up there) would disagree with your assumption of French throughout most of Quebec's land. Outside the St Lawrence basin it's English or First Nation languages. If Quebec ever secedes you'll see everything not along the St Lawrence leaving Quebec to rejoin Canada.
 
This seems vaguely relevant.

http://faultylogic.comicgenesis.com/d/20070922.html

It seems to express a (typical? No promises...) view in Ontario of the language laws.
Note the stuff below the comic, it's probably more germane than the comic.


um...ok. British death robots and surrendering French soldiers are not really how Ontarians think of the French language, or Quebec.

Growing up in Toronto, French was just another mandatory school course, something, that like quadratics or Shakespearean theater that you learned for a few hours every week and never really used outside of school.

The language laws are pretty much universally disliked in Canada outside of Quebec, but I would say that Rest of Canada-Quebec relations are at a high point right now, particularly after the people of Quebec voted to scrap that awful Quebec Charter of Values, which was pretty much seen as thinly veiled racism. Besides you always see tons of Ontarians visiting Montreal and Old Quebec (and masses of Americans invade Old Quebec city in the summer), so they cant rally hate it ;)
 

Saphroneth

Banned
um...ok. British death robots and surrendering French soldiers are not really how Ontarians think of the French language, or Quebec
Well, yeah, which is why I mentioned the stuff below the comic.

Here it is extracted:


I don't hate the language, I'm just annoyed with the laws surrounding it. And for the sake of our non-Canadian readers, I'll give a little bit of background on this... For starters, Faulty Logic is made in Canada, specifically... Ontario, Canada.

Canada is legally a bi-lingual nation. That means that we have two official languages and ideally, people who speak either language should have completely equal rights and priveleges in any area of the country. (France originally settled the area known today as Canada, but English nearby came into conflict with them and eventually sent squirrels in giant mechs to force the French colonies into defeat, as detailed in the comic. Rather than force the French civilians to assimilate to British culture, they were allowed to keep their language and heritage and eventually created the bilingual country of Canada when the colonies reached confederation.)

This all sounds great on paper but it does not add up well in the modern world. French speakers in Canada represent a minority of the country, and because Canada primarily deals in trade with the United States (who have absolutely no desire to speak in french or produce french products), there is a constant pressure on French Canadians to assimilate into an English culture to make their lives easier which French Canadians fight against.

To delay this assimilation (I say delay because I don't believe it can go on forever), the government has passed many laws about Canadian products and businesses that force the french language to be printed on just about everything, whether or not these products or businesses are in a province that actually contains a french speaking population.

In Ontario, for instance, there is no french speaking population. You cannot enter a store and expect to converse with a cashier in french. There are no road signs in french, and there is basically no way to go about your day to day life speaking french because english Canadians have no pressure to learn the language.

The end result of this is a large rift between english and french culture. French Canadians are annoyed with English apathy and fight tooth and nail against the domestic and international pressures of assimilation, while English Canadians find french annoying because it tends to clog up their lives being on everything they touch, and are annoyed with the hostility that can occur while French Canadians fight against English assimilation.

I really wish there was something funny I could say here, but there's not. This rift isn't going to fix itself any time soon. French has become a second-class language in Canada, and all the laws in the world are not going to fix it at this point. It's certainly not fair to French Canadians, but I cannot fathom a solution that doesn't involve angering the majority of Canada.
 
National languages change because individuals find it more useful to use some other language. French failed in England as only a small proportion of the people needed to speak it but still needed to speak to the majority whilst social changes divorced the upper classes from France (whose own received French was changing) and the rising middle classes came from the English speaking majority. Hebrew succeeded in Israel because the people wanted it to succeed as a display of Israeli nationhood. It could as easily been English or German or even Spanish or Arabic. Welsh remained in rural Wales where there was little need to engage in contact with English speakers in commerce and agriculture but (despite the modern myth of schools imposing English against local feeling) the opening up of travel and industrialisation etc. drove parents to demand that their children be taught English so that they could take part in the new opportunities. Imposing a language has been a policy in China since the first Emperor but, even with drives to move Han speakers into all of China, you will still find rural areas speaking the local language amongst themselves.

So, in answer to the question, Irish has to find a need amongst the Irish. Patriotic or economic. Imposing it against the will of the Irish would be a long and uphill task especially as English will still be needed as a language of business in the modern world. The Dutch use Dutch as the everyday language but English is a necessary second language to the extent that the Dutch abroad are assumed to speak English (and do so far better than the English).

The economic route will not work for Ireland unless it is part of an imposed language necessary to do anything official or in written commerce. Quebec started from a largely French (for a given value of French) majority so it was practical (if not ideal) to impose French on the minority.

To revive the Irish language needs a policy to make it cool and relevant to the young who will also be part of the English speaking world community. Modern spin doctors may suggest various ways to make Irish and Irish culture to the forefront of Irish life but the POD I would suggest is the beginnings of Irish politics that was the direct route to Irish independence. Not by making trouble and violence which was a route taken by some but by using the enthusiasm but by a form of civil disobedience where only Irish is used. Irish becomes patriotic and cool to the young of the day. So perhaps the 1850s onwards?
 
I had a very interesting chat with one of my Irish relatives who is visiting the UK from Eire.

We talked about the Gealic languge issue and as he has heavily studied Irish History had quite a lot to say on the subject - he said that one of the major hurdles to the languge surviving was the Irish Catholic Church!

The Irish Protestant church had translated the Bible into Gaelic in an attempt to make it more acessable to those non English Speaking Irish People and in response to this the Catholic Church not wanting Catholic Irish people to be 'contaminated' by Protestant learnings worked to marginalise the old toungue.

Given their 'foot Print' in the schools at the time they were quite sucessful in this.
 
Hebrew was revived partly because a lingua franca was needed among different Jewish communities who spoke different languages. Can we create a similar situation for Ireland as well?

How about... Have a very large group of Irish diaspora returning from one or more non English-speaking country, so that the introduction of a lingua franca becomes something of a necessity, and Irish one of the options.
 
How about... Have a very large group of Irish diaspora returning from one or more non English-speaking country, so that the introduction of a lingua franca becomes something of a necessity, and Irish one of the options.
The only question: How can the diaspora be motivated to return to the land of their grandfathers/ancestors?
 
The only question: How can the diaspora be motivated to return to the land of their grandfathers/ancestors?

Another question, from where? The majority of the dispora are in English speaking nations, top of my head Argentina might be the best option, they have a significant dispora but can't see how you could convince them to return to Ireland and even then they have English as a language more than Irish.
 
Another question, from where? The majority of the dispora are in English speaking nations, top of my head Argentina might be the best option, they have a significant dispora but can't see how you could convince them to return to Ireland and even then they have English as a language more than Irish.
I second the motion; aside from Argentina, Brazil and French Canada should also be considered.
 
1) Keep England Catholic, so Irish identity picks language as a weapon rather than religion.

2) Keep Ireland under British rule.

3) Give Ireland a political/cultural/economic elite that wants to stick it to London by using the Irish language.

They revived Basque. Arguments like usefulness or difficulty are moot in light of this.
 
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