Wider Community Stance and Irish-Speaking Families in the Gaeltacht
- Autores: Tadhg Ó hlfearnáin
- Localización: Transmitting Minority Languages: Complementary Reversing Language Shift Strategies / Michael Hornsby (ed. lit.), Wilson McLeod (ed. lit.), 2022, ISBN 978-3-030-87909-9, págs. 105-135
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Several prominent studies that have informed key aspects of official Irish language policy for the Gaeltacht (designated Irish-speaking areas) and wider public discourse on the future of Irish have observed a decline in both language proficiency and frequency of usage by Irish speakers and have hypothesised the imminent and terminal decline of Irish as a community language. This contribution critiques aspects of this prevailing discourse by showing how the wider community in a ‘weak’ Gaeltacht area provides some of the support mechanisms that allow it to sustain a small but consistent number of Irish-speaking families in its midst. Drawing on data from sociolinguistic fieldwork in the Múscraí Gaeltacht, Co. Cork (August 2000 to May 2019), and the extensive research carried out by the community for their local language planning initiative (October 2016 to June 2017), combined with a critical exploration of data available from the national census and state support schemes for Irish, the discussion identifies a constant level of between 25 and 30 predominantly Irish-speaking families with school-age children from the start of the data collection in the 1990s through to the present. Although these represent less than 10% of the overall number of households with children, the consistency in the proportion of Irish-speaking families in a period spanning more than 30 years shows a remarkable capacity for minority language regeneration, albeit on a small scale. The language ideologies and practices of these core parents and families, and their social networks are key, but crucially, so too are those of the peripheral linguistic community.
