Ah, the numbers in my head we 90k Chinese speakers and 60k Irish speakers, but I couldn't figure it out from the reports on the census. Do you have a reference I can look at?
In actual census (2011) numbers, it's 15,000 Chinese speakers (presumably as a grouping) and 1.7 million Irish speakers, 110,000 of whom speak it on a weekly basis outside of education.
The number of Polish speakers just about beats Irish with almost 120,000.
When they say natively, I think they mean as a primary language. My impression is that there's only a small percentage of people on the West Coast who speak it daily, but Gaelic used to (and may still be) required in a lot of schools as sort of a token secondary language (kind of like Latin in US Catholic schools, or Hebrew schools for Jews), and a fair amount of official government business was/is done in Gaelic.
EDIT: "secure" talks about this further down the page. He says it's still taught in sort of a token way in the schools, but that he didn't run into any Gaelic in his dealings with the government.
Irish person here, I can't speak much Irish and I cannot think of a situation that would ever require me to, since leaving school (though since I live in San Francisco now, its even more unlikely).
We're required to learn Irish throughout school (all the way til we finish secondary school), and even need to pass Irish exams to get into university.
Government business can be done in Irish, but its very rare. When you see it at the top-level, like in parliament, its almost always done for effect.
Why is there a lack of interest in linguistic revival? Asserting independence from the UK has been a big theme in Ireland for a long time. Wouldn't re-embracing the Irish language be one prominent way of doing that?
There is an interest, which is why we are forced to learn it in school. Ironically, this forces a very large amount of the country to start to hate Irish (why are we learning this, this isn't useful, etc). IMO, making Irish optional would be a good step to making people actually want to learn it.
I think learning it as a foreign language makes it difficult to truly internalize it. I recall reading that in some countries, they teach STEM classes all in English, but liberal arts/social science classes in their native language. You get to use both on a daily basis in both the spoken and written form, rather than only in one class.
Funnily enough, its not taught as a foreign language. That would be much better, because most Irish people only care about being able to speak it. Its currently taught like Latin is - a lot of rote learning of tenses and conjugations, then literature and poetry study.
My grandaunt is a famous Irish poet - her work is part of the curriculum. When she tutored me she focussed on reading from newspapers and speaking out loud, because going straight to literature makes no sense.
Oh wow, that's even worse. Why would anybody be interested in that, especially children?
I learned Japanese as a foreign language in college, and very little time in class was spent on grammar, and not much time was spent on reading/writing. We spent the vast majority of our time on the spoken language, which we learned in the context of simulated real-world conversations. The result was that while we were weak in the written language, our pronunciation and grammar was top-notch.
We had no trouble subsequently teaching ourselves the written language (though children might not have the initiative to do that). But if we had not properly learned the spoken language in class and the grammar outside of class at the same time, we might not have had the foundation necessary to progress with the written language. It's much more difficult to teach yourself the spoken language than reading/writing/grammar.
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Funnily enough, there's probably more native Chinese speakers in Ireland than there are native Irish speakers!
Actually, there's around half the number of native Chinese speakers (~60k) as there is native Irish speakers (~120k).
Ah, the numbers in my head we 90k Chinese speakers and 60k Irish speakers, but I couldn't figure it out from the reports on the census. Do you have a reference I can look at?
In actual census (2011) numbers, it's 15,000 Chinese speakers (presumably as a grouping) and 1.7 million Irish speakers, 110,000 of whom speak it on a weekly basis outside of education.
The number of Polish speakers just about beats Irish with almost 120,000.
Haha, I just checked and only 2.9% of the Irish population speaks Irish natively. That's pretty crazy.
When they say natively, I think they mean as a primary language. My impression is that there's only a small percentage of people on the West Coast who speak it daily, but Gaelic used to (and may still be) required in a lot of schools as sort of a token secondary language (kind of like Latin in US Catholic schools, or Hebrew schools for Jews), and a fair amount of official government business was/is done in Gaelic.
EDIT: "secure" talks about this further down the page. He says it's still taught in sort of a token way in the schools, but that he didn't run into any Gaelic in his dealings with the government.
Irish person here, I can't speak much Irish and I cannot think of a situation that would ever require me to, since leaving school (though since I live in San Francisco now, its even more unlikely).
We're required to learn Irish throughout school (all the way til we finish secondary school), and even need to pass Irish exams to get into university.
Government business can be done in Irish, but its very rare. When you see it at the top-level, like in parliament, its almost always done for effect.
Why is there a lack of interest in linguistic revival? Asserting independence from the UK has been a big theme in Ireland for a long time. Wouldn't re-embracing the Irish language be one prominent way of doing that?
There is an interest, which is why we are forced to learn it in school. Ironically, this forces a very large amount of the country to start to hate Irish (why are we learning this, this isn't useful, etc). IMO, making Irish optional would be a good step to making people actually want to learn it.
I think learning it as a foreign language makes it difficult to truly internalize it. I recall reading that in some countries, they teach STEM classes all in English, but liberal arts/social science classes in their native language. You get to use both on a daily basis in both the spoken and written form, rather than only in one class.
Funnily enough, its not taught as a foreign language. That would be much better, because most Irish people only care about being able to speak it. Its currently taught like Latin is - a lot of rote learning of tenses and conjugations, then literature and poetry study.
My grandaunt is a famous Irish poet - her work is part of the curriculum. When she tutored me she focussed on reading from newspapers and speaking out loud, because going straight to literature makes no sense.
Oh wow, that's even worse. Why would anybody be interested in that, especially children?
I learned Japanese as a foreign language in college, and very little time in class was spent on grammar, and not much time was spent on reading/writing. We spent the vast majority of our time on the spoken language, which we learned in the context of simulated real-world conversations. The result was that while we were weak in the written language, our pronunciation and grammar was top-notch.
We had no trouble subsequently teaching ourselves the written language (though children might not have the initiative to do that). But if we had not properly learned the spoken language in class and the grammar outside of class at the same time, we might not have had the foundation necessary to progress with the written language. It's much more difficult to teach yourself the spoken language than reading/writing/grammar.
It makes sense. There's barely any incentive to speak Irish, apart from Nationalism (and we've had far too much of that IMO).