A Soft Place To Fall

So one of the most difficult things to explain has been one of my classes. Whenever I say I am taking Communicative Irish, I get a great array of responses from the "does that mean you're going to learn to speak in an Irish accent," to the "You mean Gaelic" and ultimately the blank stare. Well we talked about this today in Communicative Irish. So let me try to explain, mainly I found it absolutely fascinating, especially because I've studied the history of Irish Nationalism through the Literary Revival and subsequently the GAA (which was on campus last week recruiting) and the Gaelic League. We are all keenly aware of the debate about the character of a nation and its relation to a national language that is going on back home. Well that tie between Nation and Language arose in the mid-nineteenth century, which is the age of Nationalism. Since then, there has been an almost undeniable logic that to be German one must speak German and that all areas that speak German are filled with Germans. You see the pattern? Well, that is a very affirming thing. It humanizes people and fosters community.

This, my friends, is exactly what the British did not want for their closest and most troublesome colony. So instead of allowing this community-building phenomenon to run rampant in Ireland, the Brits squashed the use of the Irish Language. They banned it from schools, from commerce, from government. Eventually people began to see it as useless, so they stopped teaching it to their children. They didn't stop there. They further alienated people from that identity by calling the language Gaelic, making it exotic and not of the people. Thus to refer to Irish as Irish justifies the use of the language and the community of the people. So, no I am not taking Gaelic. I am taking Irish!