Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Languages and Culture in History: A New Series
- Part I Approaches to Multilingualism in the Past
- 1 Codes, Routines and Communication: Forms and Meaning of Linguistic Plurality in Western European Societies in Former Times
- 2 Capitalizing Multilingual Competence: Language Learning and Teaching in the Early Modern Period
- Part II Multilingualism in Early Modern Times: Three Examples
- 3 Plurilingualism in Augsburg and Nuremberg in Early Modern Times
- 4 Multilingualism in the Dutch Golden Age: An Exploration
- 5 Literacy, Usage and National Prestige: The Changing Fortunes of Gaelic in Ireland
- Index
5 - Literacy, Usage and National Prestige: The Changing Fortunes of Gaelic in Ireland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Languages and Culture in History: A New Series
- Part I Approaches to Multilingualism in the Past
- 1 Codes, Routines and Communication: Forms and Meaning of Linguistic Plurality in Western European Societies in Former Times
- 2 Capitalizing Multilingual Competence: Language Learning and Teaching in the Early Modern Period
- Part II Multilingualism in Early Modern Times: Three Examples
- 3 Plurilingualism in Augsburg and Nuremberg in Early Modern Times
- 4 Multilingualism in the Dutch Golden Age: An Exploration
- 5 Literacy, Usage and National Prestige: The Changing Fortunes of Gaelic in Ireland
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The Gaelic-Irish language has declined in a long, complex but relentless process over the last five to six centuries, to be replaced by English. This article surveys the driving factors and main trends in that decline, with special attention to the remarkable rise in cultural status for this socially dwindling language. This cultural prestige – first antiquarian, philological and romantic in nature, later as a political identity symbol – has led to a curious ambivalence in the language's position: very weak as a medium of social intercourse, very strong as an ambient, phatic expression of national and cultural identity.
Keywords: Ireland, Irish language, language extinction, language revival, Nationalism
The pre-1600 situation
Ireland's senior language is Irish-Gaelic, one of the Celtic languages: closely related to Scots-Gaelic (the two did not start to diverge meaningfully until the seventeenth century), more distantly to Welsh and Breton. Literacy was introduced together with Christianity in the fifth century, and the coexistence of Gaelic with Latin throughout the Middle Ages has left many lexical traces (leabhair, ‘book’ < liber, to name but one significant example).
Ireland's medieval literary tradition was bilingually Gaelic and Latin, with Latin used for religious, Gaelic more for secular purposes. We encounter the usual genres: chronicles, genealogies, learned tracts, poetry. In addition, some epic-heroic materials reflecting pre-Christian antiquity were written down, most importantly the Ulster Cycle around the Cattle Raid of Cuailgne (Táin Bó Cuailgne) and the hero tales around the warrior Fionn Mac Cumhaill. The dominant secular poetic mode of the Middle Ages was the encomium on clan chiefs. This type of learned verse was entrusted to a hereditary class of literati whom I shall here call ‘bards’, and whose responsibilities ranged from the recall of past glories to the rehearsing of genealogical lines of descent and the almost-liturgical legitimation of the ruler by means of their poetic praise. (As a result, the medieval poem books were often kept by their addressees, and organized, not by author but by subject.) The bards used a highly recondite form of prosody and diction in a somewhat analogous form to Skaldic verse in the Nordic tradition. Their function was wholly embedded in the structure of Gaelic society, divided into rival clans with some sense of a common Irish cultural framework.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Multilingualism, Nationhood, and Cultural IdentityNorthern Europe, 16th–19th Centuries, pp. 169 - 182Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2016