Efforts to Preserve the Irish Language

After years of decline, the Irish language has seen a recent resurgence.

County Donegal in Ireland, home of one of the largest concentrations of Irish speakers on the island. Giuseppe Milo (www.pixael.com). CC BY 2.0.

Before the 1800s, the Irish language dominated Ireland. Irish, or Irish Gaelic, is in the Celtic language group, related to Scottish Gaelic and Breton, and is one of the oldest languages still in existence today. However, as England gradually conquered Ireland over many centuries, the Irish language began to diminish. Under the dominion of the British crown until 1922, English was the language of the imperial administration. When the Republic of Ireland was founded, only a scattering of people in rural areas of the island could speak Irish. 

Today, the Irish language has seen a reversal of fortune. It is now spoken by 1.2 million people, with 98% of them located within the Republic of Ireland. 42% of the Irish population reported to be able to speak Irish in the 2006 census. There is even a part of Ireland called the Gaeltacht where Irish is the primary language in use. How did this resurgence occur?

The interest in the Irish language re-emerged in the late 19th century as Ireland was struggling for independence. Irish nationalists wanted to use the Irish language as a means to differentiate themselves from the English. To “de-anglicize” Ireland, the Gaelic League was founded in 1893 to promote the Irish language. During this Gaelic Revival, as it was soon called, writers started to produce literature in the Irish language while others such as W.B. Yeats produced literature in English but in a distinctively Irish style.

By the mid 20th century, the Irish government, now fully independent from Britain, took on the mantle of the preserver of the Irish language. The government made the Irish language a compulsory subject in school and attitudes toward the language changed.  No longer was it seen as a backwards language; the Irish population began to take pride in their language. There are even some schools where Irish is the primary language of instruction.

A sign in both Irish and English representing Irish pride. jodimarr. CC BY-NC 2.0.

Irish was declared an official language of Ireland, requiring the government to provide services and resources in the language. In 2007, it was declared a working language of the European Union. Having official status in Ireland, most public signs are now written in both English and Irish.

But, it is not all good news. While much of the resurgence of the Irish language is occurring largely in urban areas, the Gaeltacht, the area designated by the Irish government as areas where the Irish language predominates, is diminishing. Always having been a rural area with small populations, Gaeltacht, and the youth in the area, is preferring to use English as their primary language rather than Irish. 

Irish is now a language of the urban elite, and its turnaround is a linguistic revival unparalleled in modern times except for the case of modern Hebrew, according to Reg Hindley. Visitors to Ireland can tune in to the radio station Raidió na Gaeltachta to hear traditional Irish tunes and watch TG4, the Irish language television station. While there is still work to be done to revive the language even further, the Irish language has grown considerably since Irish independence.

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Bryan Fok

Bryan is currently a History and Global Affairs major at the University of Notre Dame. He aims to apply the notion of Integral Human Development as a framework for analyzing global issues. He enjoys hiking and visiting national parks.

Singapore’s Dying Dialects

Singapore is a tiny Southeast Asian country often celebrated for its diverse and multilingual population. Despite efforts to preserve its cultural heritage, the country is at risk of completely losing the speakers and history of its Chinese dialects. 

A street in Singapore’s Chinatown showcasing the four official languages of the country. Courtesy of Rhiannon Koh.

Singapore is an island nation located on the tip of the Malay Peninsula. This city-state is an international port known for its cleanliness, law and order, and neo-futuristic cityscapes. Under its sleek veneer of lights, however, Singapore also harbors an impressive heritage thanks to its multicultural populace.

The official story of Singapore begins in the third century. Early Chinese records show that this island was frequented by the Malays, the Javanese, the Indian Cholas and other passing tradesmen. According to legend, the 14th-century Srivijayan prince Sri Tri Buana stumbled upon the island, saw a tiger, and mistook it for a lion. He then named the island “Singapura,” or the “Lion City.” After nearly five centuries of obscurity, the island resurged into the spotlight when the British statesman Stamford Raffles founded what is now considered modern-day Singapore. Even before Raffles’ influence, the island was already home to an ethnically diverse mix of Chinese, Malays and Indians. 

Since its independence in 1965, Singapore has encoded multiculturalism and linguistic diversity into its constitution. Statute 153A states that Malay, Mandarin, Tamil and English shall be the four official languages in Singapore; no person shall be discriminated against for whichever they choose. Consequently, multilingual signs are considered the norm and it can cause a public uproar when signs fail to be inclusive. In recent years, however, English has dominated communication in many homes.

Singapore’s city plan emphasizes historical preservation, fostering an urbanscape of both old and new. Courtesy of Rhiannon Koh.

When Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, came to power, he believed that knowledge of dialects undermined the mastery of key languages. Since Singapore was a former British colony and was largely comprised of those of a Chinese background, Yew pushed for English and Mandarin education in schools, essentially cutting down a “thriving linguistic tropical rainforest.” Though these languages gave Singapore a competitive edge in global markets, many Singaporeans lost knowledge of their mother tongues—Hokkien, Teochew, Hakka and others—as well as their connection to grandparents and elders who spoke exclusively in those dialects. A 2015 Department of Statistics study found that in-home dialect use decreased from 18.2% in 2005 to 12.6%. In the wake of this reckoning, many youths are taking steps to reclaim their heritage. Students like Lee Xuan Jin came to understand that Hokkien and Teochew were his “true mother tongues” as opposed to mainland Mandarin. To rekindle the language and improve literacy, Lee launched a Facebook page called Writing in Hokkien.

Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, a testament to the country’s endemic botany and the potential of its future. Courtesy of Rhiannon Koh.

In an op-ed piece for Rice, Natalie Tan questions Singapore’s Speak Mandarin Campaign—a program that effectively rendered dialects obsolete in favor of a unified but vague Chinese culture. Tan argues that Singaporeans lost a bridge to the past. If this trend continues, Singaporeans will lose their ability to translate interviews and other important historical documents. Locals will also lose the stories of their elders as well as the rich histories still bound up in fading languages. 

The demise of Chinese dialects taps into the overarching issue of dying languages across the globe. Some feel the dissolution of language is inevitable, citing cultural differences in value and multicultural diversity. Others argue that dying languages should be saved, referencing the invaluable knowledge Indigenous languages harbor. Many languages disappear each year; the difficult question is whether anything should be done to prevent this fate.

Rhiannon Koh

earned her B.A. in Urban Studies & Planning from UC San Diego. Her honors thesis was a speculative fiction piece exploring the aspects of surveillance technology, climate change, and the future of urbanized humanity. She is committed to expanding the stories we tell.

Explore Seychelles

Seychelles is an island republic in the western Indian Ocean, comprising about 115 islands with lush tropical vegetation, beautiful beaches, and a wide variety of marine life. Considerable efforts have been made to preserve the islands’ marked biodiversity. In fact, Seychelles’ government has established several nature preserves and marine parks. Seychelles’ Aldabra Islands, a large atoll, are the site of a preserve inhabited by tens of thousands of giant tortoises, the world’s oldest living creatures, which government conservation efforts have helped rescue from the brink of extinction. Though its history is unremarkable and fairly typical of islands in the days of European colonialism, the Seychelles is quite unique even beyond its wildlife, in its own right. It has a rich culture made up of a blend of many different people, developing its own language and customs. Although swanky hotel resorts dominate and often fill the landscape, ultimately the provide access to this stunning archipelago.

Curves of Iran

“Curves are everywhere in Eastern culture: our writing, our architecture, our instruments, the way we dance; even the tone of our language is curved. The West was built on angles. The East was built on curves.”

Ukraine: How a Controversial New Language Law Could Help Protect Minorities and Unite the Country

Ukraine is celebrating 28 years of independence – but since 1991 the country has struggled to find the right policies and practices to protect and promote Ukrainian, the state language. It has also tried to prioritise policies of inclusion for ethnic and linguistic minorities while supporting the languages and cultures of Ukraine’s indigenous peoples. A new law passed in July 2019, if successfully implemented, may finally help strike the balance.

Ukrainian is currently is the eighth most spoken language in Europe with more than 33m speakers. Along with Belarusian and Russian, with which it shares Cyrillic script, it is an East Slavic language. Despite having some similarities with Russian, it is a separate language. Russian is widely spoken in Ukraine with small concentrations of Romanian and Hungarian speakers in the west. Ukraine’s indigenous languages (Crimean Tatar, Karaim and Krimchak) are recognised by UNESCO as endangered languages.

Over the past three decades, Ukrainian politicians have too often, in my opinion, exploited the issue of language policy – especially the question of giving Russian official status in the country – as a way of mobilising their respective bases, at the expense of national solidarity and cohesion.

This is despite the fact that Ukrainians routinely rank the issue of language very low on a list of the country’s problems. In 2018, only 2.4% of Ukrainians viewed the status of the Russian language as the most important problem in the country. Despite this, the former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, made the support of the Ukrainian language a key element of his re-election campaign. But it didn’t give his campaign any discernible lift and he was ousted at the April 2019 election by comedian Volodymyr Zelensky.

Russian gets weaponised

In 2014, the Kremlin used the issue to justify its military aggression against Ukraine. Vladimir Putin repeatedly claimed that Ukraine’s post-Maidan government was targeting Russian-speakers in the country. Given that the government was led by native Russian-speakers, such as Oleksandr Turchynov and Petro Poroshenko, this was an absurd argument. But nonetheless, some western observers appeared to accept it.

The law, On the Provision of the Functioning of Ukrainian as the State Language, passed in April and took force on July 16. Unsurprisingly, it was met with a fierce reaction from the Kremlin, which called for the United Nations Security Council to debate the issue.

Russian influence: Vladimir Putin with members of the pro-Kremlin biker gang Night Wolves in Sevastopol, Crimea, August 2019. EPA-EFE/Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik/Kremlin

But beyond the political bluster, what are the actual features of this law and does it have the potential to allow effective functioning of Ukrainian and other languages and, at the same time, bring the country together?

Securing official status

The law affirms Ukrainian as the main language of inter-ethnic communication – a role most recently played by Russian and by German and Polish in earlier historical periods. It also ensures that information and services are available in Ukrainian – something that was not previously the case in the majority of cities in eastern and southern Ukraine, where Russian dominates in all spheres of public life. But the law also allows official interactions in languages that are “acceptable to both sides”, and it doesn’t completely rule out the use of Russian.

Drafts of the law in development were criticised for forcing media (including academic publications) to publish equal numbers in Ukrainian and other languages. It was argued that this makes the existence of such newspapers like the Kyiv Post – the most famous Ukrainian newspaper in English – very problematic. As a response to this criticism, the law was changed to allow publication in English and “other official languages of the European Union”. So, while supporting multilingualism, the law clearly rules out Russian as the language of inter-ethnic communication.

But the law’s requirements to ensure that all theatrical performances and 90% of films are in Ukrainian, with an undefined exception for “artistic necessity”, seem both unproductive and excessive.

Supporting language minorities

If successful, the law will go a long way towards protecting Ukraine’s indigenous languages. Media outlets are obliged to produce a certain percentage of their content in the indigenous language, while all higher educational institutions must have the capacity to teach indigenous languages to all students who express a desire for it.

Protesters demonstrate against the disappearance of Crimean Tatar activists. Tatars are one of Ukraine’s oppressed minority groups, October 2016. EPA/Roman Pilipey

The law also stipulates that language courses must be available in the languages of Ukraine’s ethnic minorities and, for the first time in Ukraine’s history, Ukrainian sign language is given protection and support. This empowerment has been somewhat overlooked in the recent comments on the law that mostly focused on the rights of Russian-speakers.

But Ukraine’s parliament has still to pass additional legislation on the rights of the indigenous people and minorities of Ukraine, which is required under the terms of the language law. This should provide additional mechanisms to protect the rights of Russian-speakers and other minorities. The newly-created party, Servant of the People, recently won power and has declared that it will “deal with this issue”.

As we’ve heard, despite the outside world’s obsession with language as one of the critical issues in Ukraine, only a small minority of people see it as a high-priority problem. The 2018 survey referred to above also showed people are far more worried about the ongoing military conflict and the effect it is having on living standards and the economy.

What’s clear, though, is that these problems won’t be solved without national cohesion. So, whether or not Ukrainians themselves think it important, the right formula for establishing Ukrainian as the official state language, as well as supporting and protecting indigenous and minority languages, will be key to helping the embattled country pull together.

IVAB KOZACHENKO is a Postdoctoral research associate, University of Cambridge.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE CONVERSATION.

There’s a Dark Political History to Language That Strips People of Their Dignity

Dehumanizing language often precedes genocide.

One tragic example: Extreme dehumanizing language was a strong contributor to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. As I have written, the Hutu majority used a popular radio station to continually refer to Tutsi tribal members, a minority in Rwanda, as “cockroaches.”

As support for this characterization grew among Hutus, it essentially stripped away any moral obligation to see Tutsis as fellow humans. They were just vermin that needed to be eradicated.

Students of 20th century history will also recognize this pattern of dehumanizing language in the lead-up to the genocide committed by the Turks against Armenians, where Armenians were “dangerous microbes.” During the the Holocaust, Germans described Jews as “Untermenschen,” or subhumans.

On July 27, President Trump tweeted that Baltimore was a “"disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and “No human being would want to live there.”

The Baltimore Sun charged back with an editorial headlined “Better to have a few rats than to be one.”

I’m a scholar of conflict management. This back-and-forth got me reflecting on how extreme, dehumanizing exchanges like this can escalate into destructive outcomes.

President Donald Trump. AP/Carolyn Kaster

Insults and conflict

The goal of my research in hostage negotiation and divorce mediation is to help police negotiators and court mediators shift out of a charged situation into problem solving.

Generally, when people respect one another they have a fairly easy time problem solving. But when one person challenges the other’s identity with personal insults, both parties forget about the problem-solving task and focus only on what I call “identity restoration,” which means trying to save face and restore personal dignity.

This shift pushes them into a charged conflict that can quickly escalate.

After all, many studies over the last several decades have reinforced the finding that a human being’s group identity is their most prized possession. People craft their identities to fit into a core group – as a member of a family, a profession or a tribe, for example – that is vital to our social standing. In some cases, such as adopting the identity of a U.S. Marine, for example, group belonging may be necessary to personal survival.

Most of the time identity challenges are fairly minor and easily ignored so that problem solving doesn’t get off track too quickly. A boss might say at a meeting, “Weren’t you supposed to have that report ready today?” A quick defense of one’s identity as a competent professional for that company and the matter is dropped and we’re back to work.

Conflict and Escalation

When the challenges are more severe, the identity defense becomes fiercer. Voices get raised, emotions swell and people become locked in a spiraling conflict, which is characterized by a sustained attack-and-defend cycle.

Hostage negotiators and divorce mediators are trained to shift dialogue away from identity threats and into problem solving by isolating divisive issues and coming up with specific proposals to address them.

Unfortunately, if there are no controls over language escalation, and parties start making references that can be interpreted in extreme, dehumanizing terms, they may come to believe that the only way to restore their identities is by physical domination.

Words no longer work. When parties cross over this very thin line, they fall into an identity trap with little hope of escape until the violence ends.

While I don’t expect the conflict between the president and Baltimore to escalate into actual violence, these kinds of exchanges can make it more acceptable for followers to use this kind of language.

When the President encourages crowds to chant, “Lock her up,” and “Send her back” at rallies, or describes a city as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being” would want to live, it sets a climate in which using lethal, dehumanizing language seems normal. That is simply dangerous.

WILLIAM A. DONOHUE is a distinguished Professor of Communication at Michigan State University.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHING ON THE CONVERSATION.

PERU: Saving an Ancient Language Through Pop Music

Renata Flores is a 16-year-old singer from Peru who is using her voice to save an ancient Incan language. Though Quechua is the second-most spoken language in Peru, native speakers have suffered from discrimination and social stigma for generations, and today, many young people aren’t learning the language at all. But with her powerful vocals to covers of pop songs by Michael Jackson and Alicia Keys in her native tongue, Flores is sparking a renewed celebration of Quechuan language and culture.

Renaissance on the Bayou: The Revival of a Lost Language

In the summer of 1930, at the dawn of the Great Depression, a 21-year-old linguist named Morris Swadesh set out for Louisiana to record the area’s Native American languages, which were disappearing rapidly.

Morris and his peers were in a race against time to document them, and in the small town of Charenton on the Bayou Teche, he encountered Benjamin Paul and Delphine Ducloux, members of a small tribe called Chitimacha – and the last two speakers of their language.

But today, if you visited the Chitimacha reservation, you’d never know that their language went unspoken for half a century.

Over the past several decades, many Native American tribes have participated in what has become a robust language revitalization movement. As their populations of fluent speakers dwindle and age, tribes want to ensure that their heritage languages are passed on to the next generation – before it’s too late.

But because the Chitimacha tribe had no living speakers for a number of decades, it made the challenge that much greater. In the end, the story of the language’s decline, loss and rebirth is a remarkable example of cultural survival.

Why document a language?

Unlike some other cultural legacies, languages leave no trace in the archaeological record. There’s often no trace in the written record, either.

Only a small portion of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages are well-documented in places like dictionaries and grammar books. Those that are least well-documented are the most endangered.

Many dead or dying languages contain exotic features of verbal and written communication. Chitimacha, for example, doesn’t use a word “be” in phrases like “she is reading.” Instead, speakers must use a verb of position, such as “she sits reading” or “she stands reading.” These are things that challenge linguists’ understanding of how language works.

By working with Ben and Delphine, Morris was trying to capture a small piece of that linguistic diversity before it vanished.

One day, with Morris sitting on Ben’s porch dutifully scribbling down his every word in a composition notebook, Ben finished a story (a riveting tale of how the Chitimacha first acquired fire by stealing it from a mythical old blind man in the west). He then went on to tell Morris:

There were very many stories about the west. I believe I am doing well. I have not forgotten everything yet. When I die, you will not hear that sort of thing again. I am the only one here who knows the stories.

Ben passed away three years later, and Delphine not long thereafter. After their deaths, it seemed the Chitimacha language was doomed to silence.

Why do languages die?

How does a language come to have only two speakers? Why have so many Native American languages become endangered? The causes are manifold, but there are two main ones: sharp reductions in the population of the community that speaks the language, and interruptions in the traditional means of transferring the language from one generation to the next.

In the past, the former caused the most damage. Native American peoples were decimated by European diseases and subject to outright warfare.

A portrait of two Chitimacha by French-born painter François Bernard (1870). Wikimedia Commons

Prior to European contact, the Chitimacha were lords of the bayou, with a territory stretching from Vermillion Bay in the west to present-day New Orleans in the east. They were expert canoe-makers and wielded extensive knowledge of the region’s labyrinthian network of waterways.

But by the time the French arrived in present-day Louisiana in 1699, the tribe’s numbers had dwindled to around 4,000, their communities gutted by European diseases that spread faster than the Europeans themselves.

After a protracted war with the French, they retreated deep into the bayou, where the their reservation at Charenton sits today. The 1910 census recorded just 69 people living there.

Only later did the second cause of language decline occur, when children on the reservation were sent to the infamous Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which interrupted the transmission of the language to the next generation.

Ben and Delphine, born in the latter half of the 1800s, were part of the last generation to learn the language at home. Eventually their parents and many of their peers passed away, leaving them as the last two speakers of the language.

Renaissance on the bayou

Ben probably never imagined that the efforts of him and Delphine would spark the tribe’s linguistic renaissance, awakening their language from 60 years of silence.

Delphine Ducloux was one of the two last speakers of the Chitimacha language, prior to its revival. State Library of Louisiana

In the early 1990s, cultural director for the tribe Kim Walden received a call from the American Philosophical Society Library informing her that they had all of Morris’ notebooks, and even his drafts for a grammar manual and dictionary, which totaled hundreds of pages in all. Thus began the herculean effort to revive the language.

The tribe put together a small-but-dedicated team of language experts, who set out to learn their language as quickly as possible. They began to produce storybooks based on Ben and Delphine’s stories, and word lists from the dictionary manuscript.

In 2008, the tribe partnered with the software company Rosetta Stone on a two-year project to create computer software for learning the language, which today every registered tribal member has a copy of. This is where I came in, serving as editor and linguist consultant for the project, a monumental collaborative effort involving thousands of hours of translating, editing, recording and photographing. We’re now hard at work finishing a complete dictionary and learner’s reference grammar for the language.

Today, if you stroll through the reservation’s school, you’ll hear kids speaking Chitimacha in language classes, or using it with their friends in the hall. At home they practice with the Chitimacha version of Rosetta Stone, and this past year the tribe even launched a preschool immersion program.

The kids even make up slang that baffles adult ears, a sure sign that the language is doing well – and hopefully will continue to thrive, into the next generation and beyond.

Author Danny Hieber presents the story of the Chitimacha language at the University of California’s Grad Slam competition.

DANIEL W. HIEBER is a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the University of California in Santa Barbara.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE CONVERSATION

This Man Speaks 32 Different Languages

Ioannis Ikonomou works for the European Commission as a translator. It's a prestigious position, and yet it still sells him short. You see, Ioannis speaks 32 living languages. He belongs to a very small and special group of people called hyperpolyglots who have the extraordinary ability to attain fluency in many different tongues. According to Ioannis, there's no special trick or easy way to become a hyperpolyglot, but the best way to start is to boldly put yourself out there and speak.

VIDEO: Migration vs. Traveling

“Migration vs Traveling” explores the double standards in the way we stereotype migrants as “something negative” and travelers as “something positive,” and proposes an idea on how to overcome them. This video was awarded the Prix de l'EYP 2015, the European Youth Press's award, for the best journalism on media freedom (category video), during the European Youth Media Days 2015 at the European Parliament in Brussels. It was also invited to be continuously screened to EU officials during the Dutch EU Presidency in the Netherlands in 2016.