Irish-speaking society and the state

peer-reviewedThe people of Ireland have a complex relationship with the Irish language. Until the middle of the nineteenth century Irish was widely spoken throughout the country, but even before the watershed of the Great Famine in the 1840s, a linguistic and cultural division of labour had appeared whereby Irish speakers were predominantly found in rural areas and in farming, unskilled or family-based professions socially and economically peripheral to the largely anglophone economy of the growing urban areas, industry and large farms.ACCEPTEDPeer reviewe

La pratique de l’irlandais et la minorité irlandophone

Une petite minorité des Irlandais parle la langue irlandaise comme langue de foyer, mais les enquêtes montrent régulièrement que la majorité des personnes nées en République irlandaise connaît l’irlandais, au moins un peu, grâce à son enseignement obligatoire tout au long de la scolarité, et que presque 200 000 d’entre eux ont ces compétences linguistiques en Irlande du Nord. Si la politique en faveur de la langue a connu une certaine réussite, très peu d’Irlandais la parlent couramment et régulièrement. Cet article interroge le statut actuel véritable de la langue irlandaise, les politiques linguistiques de la Gaeltacht et en dehors de celle-ci, des variété-cibles des locuteurs et s’il faut comprendre les irlandophones comme étant d’une minorité culturelle dans le pays ou simplement des Irlandais comme les autres, quoique bilingues.While only a small minority of Irish people speak Irish in the home, surveys consistently show that the majority of people born in the Irish Republic know at least a little Irish as a result of its compulsory teaching throughout the school years and, furthermore, that almost 200,000 people in Northern Ireland also have these language skills. While the language policy has had some success, very few Irish people speak it either fluently or regularly. This article examines the true current status of the Irish language, the language policies of the Gaeltacht and beyond, the speakers’ target varieties and whether Irish speakers are to be understood as a cultural minority in Ireland or simply as Irish people, albeit bilingual, just like any other

Identity, accent aim, and motivation in second language users:new Scottish Gaelic speakers’ use of phonetic variation

This paper examines the use of phonetic variation in word-final rhotics among nineteen adult new speakers of Scottish Gaelic, i.e. speakers who did not acquire the language through intergenerational transmission. Our speakers learned Gaelic as adults and are now highly advanced users of the language. We consider variation in their rhotic productions compared to the productions of six older traditional speakers. Previous approaches to variation in second language users have either focussed on how variable production will eventually result in native-like ‘target’ forms (Type 1 study), or have investigated the extent to which second language users reproduce patterns of variation similar to ‘native speakers’ (Type 2 study). We additionally draw on sociocultural approaches to Second Language Acquisition and apply notions of accent aim, identity construction and learning motivation in order to fully explore the data. In doing so, we advocate a ‘Type 3’ approach to variation in second language users