Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Irish/English aka Gaelscoilis (#7)

I love Ted talks. This is a Tedx talk done in Dublin on schoolkids who go through language immersion in Irish and apply certain linguistic properties of English to it. The speaker is a language teacher who is noticing the difference in these school children speaking and true native speakers of Irish. Now the goal in this context is not to create a new creole but to have bilingual speakers. He has a solution that will allow this to occur. At the end he expresses the issue as being an inability to express oneself emotionally in Irish causing a reliance on the English-isms to complete that part of speech. His solution is to integrate the everyday words in Irish into the classroom rather than the specialized scholarly communication which is currently in use.
Honestly, I don't know what to think about this. I can see when trying to reintroduce a language how this might be an issue but at the same time there is a blockage of creativity. These kids are using a slang which occurs in every single culture in the world. The youth inventing new words and new patterns is what keeps a language alive. I realize that Irish as a language was beaten out of their great grandparents and grandparents so a reintroduction must occur and at the same time care must be taken not to stunt the growth of a language.
Very informed, informative and interesting it is nice to know what is going on with the language reintroduction in Ireland. I really hope it is successful, it is such a beautiful language. It might be nice to discover an additional Creole in a hundred years time. Who knows what will come of this Gaelscoilis.