Dev wrote:
It is a dying language and should be promoted at all levels including the government.
I have to disagree with this, mainly for the reason that promoting the language has been largely ineffective in doing anything in the past century or so that the government has been trying.
At the moment, most of the country's children are taught the Irish language in school. This sounds like quite the promotion, given that this is probably the biggest chunk of the 1.2 billion spent on promoting Irish annually. However, roughly 80,000 people or less; about 2% of the Republic's population, claim to be fluent in Irish (most of whom are living in the Gaeltacht regions, of course).
The current system of teaching the Irish language, from my experience as a secondary school student, is remarkably poor. No one that I know of has ever acquired English through copying down sentences word-by-word from a blackboard, or being dragged through lessons on where an 'e' or an 'i' should go and when. These things are picked up gradually through listening to the language casually and having the opportunity to improve your understanding of it through speaking it with others. In the 9+ years I have spent being tutored in the Irish tongue, I have perhaps been given an opportunity for genuine Irish conversation 4 times. You cannot possibly expect to pick up a language by treating it as a subject. Languages are learned, not studied.
I do agree that the language is something worth salvaging, and I would love to see it grow to become as equally used as English, but the methods used to promote it have done very little to improve the situation.
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