The Belfast Telegraph reports amazing growth in Irish language medium schools in Northern Ireland. Great news on St. Patrick’s Day Eve.
Irish language flourishes at Notre Dame.
Nice to know that the Fighting Irish are fighting for the language and culture as well.
Reality TV show to have Irish version.
Irish TV station “TG4” has has agreed to buy the format of a successful Welsh TV show. It is a reality television show which follows celebrities as they start learning Welsh. An language learning system called “suggestopedia”, based on visual imagery and memory techniques, will be used to teach the celebrities the basics of the language.
Radio na Gaeltachta.
I frequently tune into Radio na Gaeltachta, the Irish language radio station, from my office. As we’re 10 hours behind them, I catch their late-PM and early-AM programming, which is quite eclectic. Today I’ve heard an interesting mix of traditional Irish, including sean-nos, as well as classical, flamenco, latin, as well as other world music forms, but the DJ speaks in Irish. There was one solo guitar piece in there that was very similar to our own ki ho’alu (slack key guitar) traditional, but the DJ never mentioned the artist or song title, or if she did, I simply didn’t…
Irish language has been loser in North-South clash.
There is some interesting conversation on Slugger regarding the state of the Irish language, and some suggest that it would benefit from a pairing with programs championing Ulster-Scots, another minority language of the country. It seems that advocates of the two language often find themselves in competition with each other as opposed to being support of each other in the face of English language homogeny.
Have you heard of Yola?
While I was aware of the variety of languages and dialects spoken in Ireland, I had never heard of Yola. The Yola Folk Park & Wexford Genealogy Centre has more. Slugger O’Toole always comes up with some great links.
My mother’s sister in Philadelphia can catch ‘Ros na Run’ and has started taping for me.
Low-tech, yes, but still effective. Our email exchanges were interesting. Like my mother’s other sister, she thought that Irish was simply the heavily accented Hiberno English that she had heard spoken by Irish immigrants in Philadelphia. Nope, Irish is not even in the same language group as English. I’ve heard about how immigrants to the U.S. have learned English by watching American soap operas. Maybe it’ll work for me with Irish.
TG4 soap ‘Ros na Run’ has been sold to a television station in Philadelphia.
Cool. I have family in Philadelphia; hopefully one of them receives WBYE and can record some episodes for me.
Geoffrey K. Pullum makes an interesting post on the the future of Cornish on Language Log.
A timely follow up to our earlier discussion. I’m sure Scott won’t like this news. “Cornish is dead, stone dead” and Irish “will be dead in thirty years.” Thankfully there are people who will continue to fight for their survival. We can only hope that it is not in vain, because most of us won’t live long enough to see what happens one way or another. I can relate to his observation of that “almost every story they (“The Economist”) do on language is goofy.” I’ve done very few newspaper and magazine interviews on any subject, from Hawaiian language to…
Scott Waters gently reminds me that Irish is not the only Celtic language still being used.
Of course not, it’s just the one I’m most interested in. Scott points to this site dedicated to Cornish, or Kernewek. The language received some good publicity some time back on the cartoon “The Simpsons” when Lisa Simpson shouted ‘rydhsys rag Kernow lemmyn’ (Freedom for Cornwall now). There is a page dedicated to this episode on the Warlinenn site. So Scott, I’ll learn Irish, you learn Kernewek, and we’ll meet over a few and determine between us if there is mutual intelligibility