There is a growing movement of students all across the country who would like to restore the Irish language to its rightful place as the primary language of Ireland. This is a good thing, however, very few ask the question of just how this can be achieved, if at all. Many people are unaware of the mechanisms by which language change has been achieved through history, which is unfortunate, as the lessons taught from even a cursory glance at the process of language change would be great medicine for many of the utopian activists who, though well meaning, seem to have no thought out plan on restoring the language. If we wish to resurrect Irish, we must first ask ourselves just how it was uprooted and supplanted by English. There is by no means a cut and dry answer, but when one looks at the decline of Irish, there are two big turning points, the 1600s with the destruction of the Gaelic aristocracy, and the 1800s with the dawn of mass involvement in the modern state bureaucracy, and as we cover other examples, I think it will become clear that what happened to the Irish language is an all too common trend can that be learned from.
Between 1169 and 1609 the English had ruled parts of Ireland through the local aristocrats, under this system it was only the previously existing upper class of chieftains who were incentivised to learn the English language. The majority class of peasants would rarely if ever hear the English language as their only interaction with the English state was through their lords with whom they shared a common Irish language. This all changed in the first half of the 17th century where, following two failed attempts at planting English lords into Ireland, the nine years war and flight of the earls gave way for a successful plantation in Ulster, now for the first time, Ulstermen were forced to interact with English speaking lords.
This was bad enough just happening in Ulster, but in the 1650s during the English Civil War and Cromwell’s invasion, the entirety of the Gaelic ruling class outside Connaught was uprooted and their lands given to English speaking lords. It is from this point that English starts to be adopted as a primary language by sizable amounts of the Irish population. Over the next two centuries Irish began to lose its grip on its people. But not before one more important change with the expansion of the state. Where in the 1700s most peasants only interacted with government officials on very rare occasions, from the late 1800s on, the state bureaucracy began to exert itself into every path of life. Universal suffrage made political involvement more common, economic regulations required businesses to understand the state language to make sense of ever changing laws, public schooling indoctrinated children into the anglosphere. This wave of anglicisation was so intense that even self-rule couldn’t beat it back or even slow it. When self rule was finally granted, the language of government had become the language of business, of culture and of daily life for most voters, voters who would never vote with enough numbers to repeat the same process against what is now their language.
This pattern is commonplace across the world, from what is now referred to as ”Latin” America to China, the bureaucratic language gains daily speakers at the expense of minority languages. It is no coincidence that the most spoken language in the world, Mandarin, is named after the bureaucratic class that spread it. Indeed, one needs only compare the legacy of just the two primary classical languages of Europe to see the importance of strong bureaucracy in language spread. Latin, being tied to an Empire famed for its successful bureaucracy, evolved into a language family that if combined has over a billion native speakers, and Greek, being tied to countless states and empires with varying levels of bureaucratic success, stands today as a minor language spoken only in the same backwater it was birthed. Even in the one region where Greek did completely wrestle the previous languages into submission, it too was ousted by a new invader. In a series of events not too dissimilar to what happened in Ireland, the Imperial Ottoman state ruled partly through local lords, and minority languages like Greek, Armenian and Kurdish thrived in the Empire’s Anatolian heartland until the 1920s, when the democratic Young Turks seized power and aggressively Turkified minority groups in record time via both stately assimilation and demographic exchanges.
I believe it also pays to look at the few languages that did survive in the heart of the anglosphere. Indeed, the only language that has managed to withstand the spread of global English within the British Dominions is the equally colonial language of French in Quebec. Despite being in the heart of the country that remained loyal to England in 1776, Quebec is home to seven million native French speakers, and these seven million are famously stubborn in the defence of their language. This is hardly surprising when one considers that almost immediately after Quebec was incorporated into the British Empire, they were given self-governance and autonomy, culminating linguistically in the 1960s with the foundation of the Office Quebecois de la langue Francaise, a state body whose mission statement is “to define and conduct Quebec’s policy pertaining to linguistic officialization, terminology and francization of public administration and businesses”. Even today anglophone Canadians begrudge the Quebecois for their strict language policies, but the results speak for themselves. Even after 200 years within the British Empire, 78% of people in Quebec are native French speakers and 94% claim to be fluent in French, compared to just 7% who are native English speakers. Despite the Quebecois situation being a dream scenario for Irish, there are still those in Quebec who claim that it doesn’t go far enough. The 2016 census saw a rise in English speakers, resulting in calls for even more measures to be implemented. Regardless, it is clear from this example that strong self-governance with the goal of linguistic preservation definitely has a positive impact.
The only example in the world of a true language revival, is that of Hebrew in Israel. In 1885 there was exactly one native Hebrew speaker, the son of a devoted Hebrew advocate who was widely considered at the time to be a nutjob. Today there are around five million native Hebrew speakers. The example of Eliezer Ben-Yevuda speaking to his son only through Hebrew, and indeed forbidding anyone from speaking any other language to him, inspired many Jews across the world during the early days of Zionism. Some Zionists began to teach their children Hebrew, but they understood that all this would be meaningless if there were no institutions that mandated the use of Hebrew, as such, many schools in the colonies were set up with instruction exclusively through Hebrew. Things were rocky to begin with, as Hebrew had neither the terminology nor the resources to be used for higher levels of education, indeed, many teachers barely had a strong grasp on the language, but they persevered. By 1912 there were over 50 schools, from primary to secondary and even two teacher training schools. Schools were set up in Germany and Poland to teach Hebrew to prospective emigrants before they even left for their Holy Land. The 1916 census showed that 40% of the Jewish community in Ottoman Palestine spoke Hebrew on a daily basis. In 1920 a Hebrew third level technical college opened, the college had originally planned on operating through German, due to the lack of Hebrew materials for such a college, but after strikes and protests, the decision was made to teach entirely through Hebrew. Finally, in 1922 Hebrew was made an official language in British Palestine alongside Arabic and English. The Hebrew language was revived, and could now go on to become the sole language of the Jewish community in the region.
The Indian subcontinent is another region where some parts had been under English rule since as early as the 1600s, but there are almost no native English speakers. This is due to the way in which the English ruled India where, up until the 1860s, all English land in India was ruled through the East India Company, which itself ruled mostly ruled through local lords, hardly much in the way of a centralised bureaucracy, let alone one able to enforce its language upon the locals. After the English State took over governing from the East India Company, establishing the British Raj, there were still considerable parts of India that were under British control in name only, ruled by native princes who had almost total control over their domestic affairs. Regardless, English bureaucracy only existed in India to the minimum level required to keep control over the local population, and semi-serious attempts to “civilise” India by setting up schools and banning certain cultural practices only began in the mid 1800s, ultimately resulting in little change for a plethora of reasons. One such reason was the deeply entrenched caste system which acted as a barrier against adoption by the masses, as lower castes were socially, and often legally, excluded from the opportunity, let alone the necessity, to learn English. As a result the only people who learned English were the local rulers and elites who needed to interact with their English overlords on a regular basis, much like in Ireland before the plantations and in almost every other European colony in Africa and Asia.
From this it becomes clear what our objective as Irish language particularists must be – the exclusion of other languages from our institutions, chiefly our educational institutions. As seen in the Hebrew example, even if only the schools and a few hardliners speak and militantly promote Irish, then the language will trickle down to the rest of society, who ultimately care very little for what language they speak. For the best results long term it is clear that a mimicry of the Quebecois laws discriminating against English have a positive effect on motivating businesses and individuals to adopt Irish. Will such measures be popular? No. Will they be democratic? Maybe. Will they be in line with the ideals of the students who today preach for Irish rights? Almost certainly not, but it is the best way to achieve the language change they seek.
