Monday, March 3, 2014

Survival of the Fittest - Future of The Gaelic Language



There are not that many people who speak the different Gaelic languages anymore.
Will the Gaelic language die out in the end, and if it does, when will it happen? In this text you are going to learn more about the three Gaelic languages, differences between them, and I’m going to deal with the question: will it die or will it survive.

Table of Contents
       The reason why
       Background
       What is Gaelic language?
       Scottish Gaelic
       Irish Gaelic
       Manx Gaelic
       Differences and similarities
       Will it die out?
       Summary
       Sources


The Reason Why
You may wonder why I chose to write about this topic. It’s as simple as this; I was born in Scotland, but raised in Norway with Norwegian parents, and I wanted to learn something more about the culture in Scotland. My first thought was to write about Scots, which is one of the languages they use in Scotland, but I thought it would be a bit hard and boring to write page up and down just about that. My teacher gave me the brilliant idea to write about the Gaelic language, and so I did.

Background


Above you can see a language tree of all the main languages in the world. You can see that the Gaelic languages are a part of the Celtic language family, and divided into three. It is quite interesting to see how the different languages are connected to each other. From this tree you can see that Scottish and Scottish Gaelic don’t look alike and that Irish and Irish Gaelic don’t either. But all of the Gaelic languages are similar, especially Scottish and Irish Gaelic.


 

Scottish and Irish Gaelic started out as the same language.
When you are standing on the coast of Northern Ireland on a good day, you can actually see the tip of Scotland, or to be more specific a territory that belongs to Scotland. Hundreds of years ago the language of the Irish spread across the sea into Scotland as the Irish moved towards Scotland. At that point Ireland and Scotland had the same language with different dialects and accents. The people who spoke Irish and Scottish Gaelic can still understand each other although it is two different languages.

What is Gaelic language?
Gaelic is an English word for any of the three languages that form one half of the Celtic language family. The Gaelic language is divided into the three following languages: Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic. Many people get confused about Gaelic and Celtic. Example: Welsh is a Celtic language, but not a Gaelic.  
Here you can see a comparison between Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic:



 Scottish Gaelic 


                                                       
They speak Scottish Gaelic in Scotland. There were 58,652 people in Scotland who spoke Scottish Gaelic in 2011, and that’s 1,2% of the Scottish population. Scottish or Scots Gaelic is mostly talked on the West coast, for instance Glasgow.  In Scotland there are only two schools that teach Gaelic, one in Glasgow and one in Skye. If you don’t go to these schools you have to go to a private tutor or attend a course. Most people don’t think it’s worth the effort or expense. Therefore most people in Scotland just speak English, but there are still some families who speak Gaelic as their first language at home. They often switch to English if they get visitors.
People who speak Gaelic tend not to speak Scots. They speak Gaelic and Standard English.  Scots is the third language they have in Scotland, and is mainly spoken in the North East, Orkney and Shetland.


 










Scottish Gaelic is written in just 18 letters. Each of them is named after a tree or a shrub. All the consonants have several pronunciations depending on their position in the word and which vowels precede or follow them.





Irish Gaelic


Irish Gaelic or just Irish belongs to Ireland. In the Republic of Ireland there are 1,77 million people that speak Irish Gaelic, and in Northern Ireland there are 64916. Irish is spoken as the first language by a small minority of Irish people, and as a second language by a rather larger group. In the Republic of Ireland Irish is the national and official language.
Irish Gaelic isn’t only spoken in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, but also in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia.


Schools in Ireland teach Irish to the students as fist or second language, and therefore every Irishman can talk Irish. Actually, children learn Irish in school for about thirteen years, but still many people in Ireland claim that they don’t speak a word of Irish. However the number of people who claim some fluency has increased.  
Now most people in Ireland support teaching of Irish in schools.

In the end of the 19th century Irish was close to extinction.
On the website askaboutireland.ie the author writes that Irish Gaelic is among the 10% of the worlds languages deemed safe from extinction in the future.  It’s quite interesting to read how fast it changes, but then it may change back fast too.

Her is the Irish Gaelic alphabet. They use the same letters as Scottish Gaelic, with other pronunciations.





Manx Gaelic

Manx Gaelic or Manx is the third of the three Gaelic languages. Manx is the language of the Isle of Man. The Manx people historically spoke this language.
The Isle of Man, or just Mann, is an island located in the Irish Sea between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland. It is a self-governing British Crown Dependency, and the head of state is Queen Elizabeth II.

In Mann there are only a small minority who is fluent in the Manx language, but a larger minority has some knowledge of it. The last native speaker of Manx died in 1974, but still Gaelic in Mann is considered to be an important part of the islands culture and heritage. The language has never fallen completely out of use.


Nowadays people are more interested in learning Manx. Since 1992 Manx has been thought in Manx schools, and the classes have proved popular. Now the Isle of Man has a number of playgroups and primary schools with Manx lessons. They even have one secondary school with these lessons, and the classes for adults are quite popular.


The Manx alphabet has a few more letters than Scottish Gaelic and Irish.





Differences and Similarities

Through all this reading and writing I have found out that the three different versions of the Gaelic language have more differences than similarities. All of them sounds like the same language to me, but for the people speaking the languages they are all understandable, but still different.  Irish and Scottish Gaelic has the same alphabet, but Manx has its own. There is different interest in learning these languages. In Ireland they don’t have any option, they all learn Irish in school. In both Mann and Scotland they have to show interest and take an initiative to learn the language, if they don’t go to one of the few schools that have lessons and classes in Gaelic.

Here is an example of some of the differences and similarities between the Celtic languages. Not just the Gaelic, but also the rest of the Celtic languages, which are called: Brythonic. The red ones are Gaelic languages, and the blue are Brythonic. It all means,
“I live in Scotland”.

       Scottish Gaelic - Tha mi a' fuireach ann an Alba
       Irish - Tá mé i mo chónaí in Albain
       Manx - Ta mee cummal ayns Nalbin
       Welsh - Dw i'n byw yn yr Alban
       Cornish - Trigys ov yn Alban
       Breton - E Bro-Skos emaon o chom



Will it Die Out?
I think that all of the Gaelic languages will die out at some point, but not at the same time. The first to go is probably Manx Gaelic and then Scottish Gaelic and eventually Irish Gaelic. In Mann there are no native speakers of Gaelic anymore, and few who speak it fluently. Therefore I personally don’t think it will take that many years before this language will die out. In Scotland it seems to me like the majority of the population don’t use this language, and there are few who make an effort to learn it. If no one does something with their attitude towards Gaelic, the language will surely disappear. In Ireland, however, every child learns Gaelic in school and there are people who use Irish Gaelic as their first language. It may take a long time until this language vanishes, maybe several hundreds years, but it will at some point, I think.

There is some disagreement as to whether they all are dying, only one, two, or none of them. Some people say that Manx died out in the beginning of the 20th century, because Mann is such a small island heavy influenced by England and the English language.
These people often also mean that Scottish Gaelic is about do die, because people in Scotland have no interest in the language. They don’t see it as a useful language.
About the Irish language they mean there are less chance that it disappears than the other Gaelic languages, because more people are now getting the interest learning it. But the use of Gaelic has decreased ever since the independency.
Now there are about 10% of the population who speak it fluently.


Summary
I have learned a lot from writing on this project work, and realised how little I knew about the Gaelic languages.  The only thing I knew for sure before I started on this project was that the Gaelic language is spoken in Scotland. Now I know a lot more about it. I have learned that there are three different types of Gaelic and they all belong to the Celtic language family, so does Brythonic, but still Brythonic is not part of Gaelic.  
All the types of Gaelic have differences and similarities. They have a lot of different words, and ways of pronouncing the words they have in common, but still they can understand each other.
If you ask me I think the whole Gaelic language will die out at some point, but it may take quite a long time.






Sources
Wikipedia.org (26.01.14) “Isle of Mann” On: Wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Man Localized (16.01.14)

Thompson, Irene (06.03.13) “Irish Gaelic” On: aboutwordlanguages.com: (http://aboutworldlanguages.com/irish-gaelic Localized (25.01.14)

LGMA Libraries Development, nd ”The Irish Language Today” On: askabouteireland.ie: http://www.askaboutireland.ie/learning-zone/secondary-students/irish/an-cultur-gaelach/translation-irish-languag/the-irish-language-today/Localized (03.02.14)

(06.2009) “Do we let Gaelic die?” On: scotster.com: http://www.scotster.com/forums/scottish-language-gaelic/Do-let-Gaelic-die.1717.html Localized (06.01.14)

Wikipedia.org (11.02.14) “Irish language” On: Wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language Localized (28.01.14)

Ager, Simon, nd “Scottish Gaelic” On: omniglot.com: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/gaelic.htm Localized (06.01.14)

Wiki.answers.com, nd “Why is Gaelic language dying?” On wici.answers.com: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_is_Gaelic_Language_dying?#slide=3 Localized (03.02.14)

Wikipedia.org (04.02.14) “Scottish Gaelic” On Wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Gaelic Localized (16.01.14)

“How do Scottish people feel about Scots Gaelic?” On: answers.yahoo.com: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090126072627AAFTgYZ Localized (18.01.14)

Bitesize, IrishGaelic (2013) “Irish vs Gaelic” On: youtube.com: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWBUnixqX5g Localized (28.01.14)

Ager, Simon, nd “Manx Gaelic” On: omniglot.com: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/manx.htm Localized (17.02.2014)



Picture Sources

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