I am from Canada and have never been to Ireland. I was surprised by the story of this film which seems to imply that the Irish language is disappearing. How widely spoken is the Irish language in Ireland?
Only fools are enslaved by time and space.
VERY rarely.
You'd be lucky to find many (if any) speakers in Dublin for example. It's still compulsory in Irish schools, but something must be going wrong with the teaching method as children don't enjoy learning it and the number of fluent speakers is dwindling.
I used to be able to speak it rather well myself, but i've started to lose it recently due to its lack of use, and the fact i'm learning other foreign languages.
But, as seen in the film, there are quite a few Gaeltacht areas (Irish speaking areas) in and around the country outside of the cities, mainly in the west. Here the resident's day to day language is Irish, and English, to the best of my knowledge is usually frowned upon!!
Thanks. It's important to keep it alive.
Only fools are enslaved by time and space.
I dont really believe this thing about Irish being badly taught..kids pick up on the lack of will (and embarassment) that most Irish people have regards to speaking it...We will regret it later..maybe that fact that we now are becoming a multicultural country will inspire us to take more interest in our own culture instead of the imported anglo-american culture dominant here..to be seen...
shareI don't know how it is nowadays, but I definitely have bad memories from my years learning Irish in school. The teachers all had a very punitive approach, and you were not supposed to speak a single word of "Bearla" during Irish class or you would get a biff or two (this was back when they still had corporal punishment.) Now a total immersion approach would have been all very well if the class had been focused on actually speaking the language conversationally, but instead it was all brain-numbing rote memorization of the dry-as-dust nitty gritty grammatical details, the various endings and irregular verbs and what not. Woe betide you if you got your tuiseal gineadach confused with your modh connileach. And the books we had to read, good grief, I would have given anything to go back in time and strangle Peig Sayers before she wrote that godawful boring tedious book.
It's only after I grew up and moved to the US that I started to realize how valuable Irish is as an ancient but still barely surviving language. I wish I'd had decent teachers who taught it as a living language rather than a dead one like Latin or ancient Greek, and had become fluent in it. Oh well, maybe people like Daniel Wu and others from an immigrant background will keep it from dying out!