infundibulum

The story of a guy who tries to use only Irish as he travels around… well, Ireland:
Cá Bhfuil Na Gaeilg eoirí? * | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited

Today, a quarter of the population claim they speak it regularly. I have always suspected this figure and to test its accuracy I decided to travel around the country speaking only Irish to see how I would get on.

Things don’t go well. He can’t buy a map, he struggles to buy a map, and he gets a lot of unfriendly, even menacing stare-downs from people all over.

What I had not factored for was the animosity. Part of it, I felt, stemmed from guilt - we feel inadequate that we cannot speak our own language.

I think he’s right about that. I think that generally speaking, people would like to be able to speak any language at all; if we really had Babelfishes, everyone would use them all the time. (Would they forget what language they were speaking at all?)

Of course, this article is meant to be interesting and to raise a rhetorical point. The problem he faces with the people he tries to talk to is that they know  he also speaks English, but he’s refusing to. I can’t help but think that he could have gone about his task more wisely, and dropped the charade. I imagine that some of those people who felt so flustered might well have been more willing to use what Irish they had if he’d gone about it differently.

I dunno, maybe saying that makes me a sell-out or something, but I believe that you can’t learn or promote any language without being pragmatic about it. If you want to revitalize a Native American language, you have to allow for teenagers wanting to talk about their iPods and Metallica (or whatever you whippersnappers are listening to these days) as much as traditional stuff.

And anyway, he finally finds the real, indisputable, 100% certain answer  to how to revitalize a language:

Teach kids.

I was rapidly approaching a point of despair when some children came on the line. I found they spoke clear and fluent Irish in a new and modern urban dialect. They told me how they spoke the language all the time, as did all their friends. They loved it, and they were outraged that I could suggest it was dead. These were the children of the new Gaelscoileanna - the all-Irish schools that are springing up throughout the country in increasing numbers every year.

Yep, that’s how you do it. And it takes about one generation’s-worth of students.

(Kohanga reo teach the same lesson.)