Language shift and language revival in Ireland

Abstract

Revivalists faced a momentous challenge to achieve the aims of a bilingual Ireland, reinstating the spoken Irish language, and adapting it to urban structures of ‘the worlds of commerce, politics, official religion, the professions and printed word’, from which it had been banished ‘as a result of complex socio-economic and political circumstances’ (Daly and Dickson 1990: 12). The use of the public sphere of the media was important in creating a forum for public discourse in Irish while many campaigns within the movement brought issues to light which helped to reinstate the language to some degree. Despite the success of these endeavours, the aims of a bilingual Ireland were not fully realised. Scholarly research on the Gaeltacht areas and on new speakers has brought both encouraging issues and some concerns to light,1 while much important work has also been undertaken to give an overall view of the successes and failures of the revival movement.2 It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully assess all these issues conclusively and indeed to fully evaluate the results of the Irish language revival. However, an examination of the revivalist ideology and the forums and methods used to promote that ideology are helpful in an analysis of linguistic change in Ireland.