A survey commissioned by Conradh na Gaeilge shows just over 28% of people aged 16+ have confidence in their spoken Irish ability. How does this compare to minority, indigenous languages in other European countries?
AT THE LAST census, almost 1.8 million people reported being able to speak Irish – that’s 40% of the population.
How does that compare with minority languages elsewhere in Europe? Ireland is one of 79 minority languages used across the EU, according to the most recent European charter for regional or minority languages In other ways, though, the comparison is unfair. Finland was part of the Swedish empire for centuries, making Swedish the “prestige language” of the elite and many ordinary settlers along the southern coast. Plus there’s the fact that Swedish speakers aren’t culturally isolated – they can always watch TV from Sweden itself, which Irish speakers tired of TG4 can’t.
Malta is a former British colony where the proportion of the population who speak at least some English or better rose from 88% in 2005 to 92% in 2011, according to its census returns. But the native Maltese is under no obvious threat, with 94% of the population fluent in the Arabic-derived language.
Mass emigration and English-medium education then turbo-charged existing trends. “There was no mass exodus of native speakers from Malta or Luxembourg” comparable to the Famine, he points out.Comparison with Welsh Current government policy emphasises Irish-language streams in English-medium schools rather than full-on Gaelscoils, de Spáinn says, which is “going the wrong way about it. That’s not what they’re doing in Wales. If you’re going to have Irish-medium teaching, they should be fully immersed in the language”.
“People are fond of saying ‘Irish hasn’t done very well, look how few people speak it’. I don’t think that’s true. Considering all those factors, I think Irish has done very well. “The prices of the houses that are available are way out of reach of a lot of young people who would like to settle down in the Gaeltacht. We have to have the housing and we have to have state services through Irish”.
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