After a century of often bitter controversy, the politics of language have of late taken on a jaded quality in Ireland. But just as it seemed there was little left to say, along comes this book which invests the Irish experience of language revival with a global significance, seeing it as remarkable, momentous and, perhaps most controversially, successful.
The author is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and he presents his argument in both an English-language and an Irish-language version. He argues that debates on Irish have been marked by an insularity and a set of mostly mistaken assumptions, which have failed to take the global context into account.
For McCloskey this global context is a dramatic one. Of the estimated 6,800 languages in the world, some 50 per cent are moribund as they are spoken by only a small number of older people and are not being learnt by children. Of the remaining 3,000 or so, linguists expect 90 per cent will die in the next century, a profound change which is taking place "virtually without notice, comment or debate".
He credits the impact of imperialism and of nationalism for this decline as some languages come to dominate others in the process of specific groups achieving dominance at national and international levels. As a result, monolingualism has come to be seen as something natural, especially among English speakers. This, he argues, is "a recent aberration, characteristic only of first world nation-states".
"Every language that succumbs to the economic, political, and cultural pressures being applied all over the globe today, takes to the grave with it an encyclopedia of histories, mythologies, jokes, songs, philosophies, riddles, superstitions, games, sciences, hagiographies - the whole cumulative effort of a people over centuries to understand the circumstances of its own existence. It is an enormously frightening thought that nine tenths of that accumulation of wisdom, speculation and observation is to be lost within the next century or so," he writes.
McCloskey points out that languages are easily lost once people cease speaking them to their children and that abandoning an older community language in favour of a dominant language "is always taken in the presence of powerful and destructive external pressures". Reversing these pressures and seeking to promote the weaker language is very exceptional, he argues, and this is what makes the Irish experience "remarkable" and "unique".
While the aims of the early revivalists of a hundred years ago might have been unrealistic, McCloskey recognises that what has been achieved is "utterly extraordinary": "It is possible (and this is remarkable) to cover news stories in every part of the country and on every imaginable subject through the medium of Irish. It is possible to write about and to teach technical linguistics in Irish (I have), and similarly with many other demanding disciplines."
Perhaps most important is the significance he sees in the new urban varieties of Irish "created by something like the pidginization process and probably self-sustaining" and "the even stranger mixes that are now being created by children in the Irish-speaking schools - Gaelscoileanna - by the process of creolization". This language might not have been approved of by the early revivalists but it can now be numbered among the 10 per cent of world languages that are for the time being reasonably sure of survival.
This little book deserves a wide readership, in both Irish and English. It is to be hoped that it will lead, not to a complacency, but to renewed efforts to address with coherence one of the great hypocrisies of Irish life - the extent to which we are willing to make the effort to become a truly bilingual society.
It seems remarkable that, amid all the rhetoric about multiculturalism, we resist what would be the greatest guarantee of multiculturalism - to become again an Irish-speaking society.
Peadar Kirby is a senior lecturer in the School of Communications, Dublin City University. His book on the Celtic Tiger is to be published by Palgrave next year