Minority languages – Gaelic languages

1

Minority languages – Gaelic languages

MINORITY LANGUAGES:

A minority language is a language spoken by a minority of the population of a country, and those speakers are called the “linguistic minorities”. Some minority lan-guages are considered official languages, but not others, because the speakers are numerically smaller than the rest of the part of the state, who speaks in the states offi-cial language.

Minority languages are many times marginalised, be-cause their small number of speakers, or because they

are many times considered as uncultured, primitive, or less important than the big offi-cial language. We have got many examples of minority languages, like Irish, Scotish Gaelic, Breton, Euskara, galego,occitan, but we are going to speak about the Irish gaelic and the Scottish gaelic, or the Gaelic languages.

Gaelic languages:

The Gaelic languages have historically been part of a big family of dialects stretching from the south of Ireland, the Isle of Man and the noth of Scotland. The Scottish gaelic and the Irish Gaelic are nowadays the two biggest Celtic languages, but there is another Gaelic language called Manx, but this is basically a mix between English and Irish.

The origins of the Scottish and the Irish Gaelic are the Primitive Gaelic, first attested in Ogham inscriptions, in the fourth century; the Old Gaelic or Irish, dated fron the sixth century and the Middle Irish (10th century), many times used in old literature by old Irish writers. The three of them are part of the indoeuropean family of languages in Europe, and part of the sub-family of the Celtics too

Gaelic language was once only restricted to Ireland, but between the 3rd and the 6th century a group of Irish Celts began to migrate fron Ireland to Scotland, and the people there started asimilating the Irish Gaelic (they originally had been spken a Brytonic language). Consequently, a new form of a Gaelic language was created: the Scottish Gaelic.

Irish Gaelic:

The original name of the language in Gaelic is Gaeilge. The Gaeilge is spoken in all Ireland and Northern Ireland, but only few people uses it every day. Since Ireland is an independent state (1922) Irish is an oficial language (with English being the second oficial language), whereas in Northern Ireland the language had been restricted and banned from education, public works, etc. It had been banned from comunication (TV and radio). The language received a degree of formal recognition in Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom in the 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement had been

2

Minority languages – Gaelic languages

aproved. The British governement had promised to encourage the language as part of Northern Ireland.

There are three different dialects in the Irish Gaelic. This dialects coincide with the three provices of Munster (Cúige Mumhan), Connacht (Cúige Chonnacht) and Ulster (Cúige Uladh) in Ireland, and the variation are some endings of the personal pronouns, the stress changes many times,...

There are parts of Ireland when Irish is spoken as a traditional native language and there the Gaelic is the stronger language, but these regions are declining and the English speakers are nowadays more. In addition, the Gaelic is not being transmitted to the younger generations in many areas of Ireland. In areas like Carraroe eo Connemara the Irish Gaelic is spoken by more than the 50% of the population, but in other areas, like big cities for example, or the south part of Ireland, less than the 35% of the population have some knowledge about the language.

The exact number of speakers nowadays is 355.000 people, with varying levels of fluency. This is a smaller number of people than when Ireland got its independence, in the first half of the 20th century. So, the decline of the language had been important. The main reason for this, is because many Irish speaker families had encouraged their children to speak in english, because this was the language of employment and education, and many irish speakers had changed their speaking habits to start speaking in English. This is the main problematic the minority languages had had during the last centuries, because bigger languages are harder (the occitanian with the french, euskera with the spanish,...).

Nowadays, Irelend is trying to normalize Irish in all public activities, and they are trying to reconverse Ireland in a bilingual country. But the damage had been very hard, and this will cost very much effort and work. There are newspapers written in Irish, many english speakers use short phrases of Irish in their daily live in Ireland, many computer programes are in Irish, there are some soap operas on TV which are emmited in irish, some sport events like football, rugby,...However, in education irish is taught like a secondary language yet, ever to native speakers.

In Northern Ireland the language has been regarded with suspicion by unionists. For many years, there was a banning prohibiting putting street signs in Irish, and the radios, TV's and newspapers did not start using the language until the early 90's, when the British parliament permited its use.

Scottish Gaelic:

Scottish Gaelic is a member of the Goidelic branch of Celtic languages. This branch also includes the Irish and Manx languages. Scottish Gaelic is often described as Scottish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, or Gàidhlig to avoid confusion with the other two Goidelic languages. Outside Scotland, it is also called Scottish, a usage dating back over 1.500 years. This language should not be confused with Scots, because since the 16th

3

Minority languages – Gaelic languages

century the word Scots has by-and-large been used to describe the Lowland Anglyc language.

After centuries of persecution and prejudice, Scottish has now achieved a degree of official recognition. Nowadays this language is being taught in schools, including some in which it is the medium of instruction, it is also used by the local council in the Western Isles. The BBC also operates a Scottish language radio station Radio nan Gàidheal and there are also television programmes in the language on the BBC and on the independent commercial channels, usually subtitled in English.The 2001 UK Census showed a total of 58,652 Scottish Gaelic speakers in Scotland (1.2% of population over three years old). Compared to the 1991 Census, there has been a diminution of approximately 7,300 people (an 11% of the total), meaning that Gaelic decline in Scotland is continuing.

Bilingual road signs (in both Gaelic and English) are gradually being introduced throughout the Gaelic-speaking regions in the Highlands and elsewhere across the nation. In many cases, this has simply meant re-adopting the traditional spelling of a name. The Ordnance Survey has acted in recent years to correct many of the mistakes that appear on maps. They announced in 2004 that they intended to make amends for a century of Gaelic ignorance and set up a committee to determine the correct forms of Gaelic place names for their maps.

The Education (Scotland) Act 1872, which completely ignored Gaelic, and led to generations of Gaels being forbidden to speak their native language in the classroom, is now recognised as having dealt a major blow to the language. The first modern Gaelic-medium secondary school, Sgoil Ghàidhlig Ghlaschu, was opened in Glasgow in 2006. A total of 2,092 primary pupils are enrolled in Gaelic-medium primary education in 2006-7.

4