storbarnsförälder

From pne: Do you have an opinion on the status of the Irish language? Is it moribund, vital, in between? Is the money being put into sustaining/promoting it well spent, or is it too much, too little, or put into the wrong areas?

(And, out of curiosity, though it has little bearing on being interesting or well-rounded: do you speak Irish? How well? Did you learn it at home or at school?)

From browngirl: if you did want to write about anything having to do with language, that would be interesting indeed.

So there you go.

My information on the Irish language is ten years out of date, really.

It's sort of... ghettoised. There are areas where it's spoken as a primary language, though those are shrinking. There are lots of schools where it's the primary language. But probably most of the population, in spite of learning it in school, is neither fluent nor interested in it.

There are more and more Gaelscoileanna (plural of Gaelscoil, Irish Language School) opening all the time, according to what my family tell me - and a lot of English immigrants to West Cork send their children to Gaelscoileanna for primary level at least. People are still writing poetry in Irish, definitely, but I don't know whether there are any new songs or novels.

I don't know how much money is spent on sustaining it. I don't know, for example, how much more expensive a Gaelscoil is to run than an English language school. I don't know what proportion of the cost the State contributes to schoolchildren's trips to The Gaeltacht, where they lodge with an Irish-speaking family for a week or two and attend Irish College or similarly titled things during the day, and Ceilidhs and things at night, all using Irish as the main language (often the only language, lapsing into English being punishable by expulsion), the idea being that they become fluent through immersion. I have no idea how expensive it is to have bilingual road signage and bus signs and so on.

I don't know how expensive Radio Na Gaeltachta is to run, nor the cost of producing An Nuacht (The News, the evening news in Irish, which used to be on the secondary TV channel but could be anywhere now - there's Teilifis na Gaeilge or something now, too, a whole Irish-language channel which shows dubbed Welsh and Danish soap operas and children's TV).

So I have no idea how much is spent or whether it's effectively spent. But enough people seem to usethe resources - sending their children to schools or lobbying for schools to be started, for example - that some expenditure seems to be justified.

I was fluent in Irish; I went to school from just before I turned 4 to just before I turned 17 (I dropped out, oops) and all the schools I attended were Gaelscoilleanna. But I haven't spoken it much for the last ten years. I can't bring myself to join the local Irish Centre because nationalism frightens me, and I feel strange talking it to my babies when no-one else does. Linnea is beginning to show an interest in other languages now so she has a few words, which she never ever uses, and I have a feeling that more will come up as they grow older - we have books and music and things.

I am really fond of it and I sometimes regret the fact that my children will never have the fluency I used to. I also get great pleasure from things like the huge similarities with Swedish and German - German grammar is similar-feeling and Swedish vocabulary has a lot of words which are basically the same but spelt differently (the words for rabbit, table, good and some others).

And I love the way Irish is spelled - it's so simple and reliable and consistent. Sitting in Reading (redding) Berkshire (bark-shur), consistent phonetic spelling warms the cockles of my heart.