Madam, - Your Editorial of November 27th, "The way we use Irish", suggests that "we should foster our native language, but through gentle encouragement and incentive, rather than crude compulsion".
The argument that doing away with compulsion and allowing the freedom to choose to study Irish would result in a positive outcome for the language has no basis in fact. If the freedom to decide whether or not to opt to study a language at school were a guarantee of enthusiasm for language learning, second languages would not be compulsory, as they currently are, in most European countries. The removal two years ago of the requirement to study foreign languages from the age of 14 years in the United Kingdom (apart from Scotland) resulted, almost overnight, in a 25 per cent decline in language uptake at second level - as high as 80 per cent in the state school sector in one region. In fact, language education is becoming something of a class issue in the UK, with private schools holding their numbers and those from less advantaged backgrounds opting out, thus paving the way for serious language study to become once more the preserve of the elite.
Conversely, in Wales, the census has - for the first time in over 100 years - recorded an increase (of 2 per cent of the population) in the numbers of Welsh speakers. This increase, while small, follows a hitherto steady pattern of decline, and is being attributed by experts to the introduction of compulsory Welsh in 1999. The suggestion, therefore, that compulsory Irish is killing the language is as absurd as the notion that compulsory mathematics causes innumeracy.
It takes much more than "gentle encouragement" in the use of the more robust language to reduce an indigenous language to the status of minority language in its own country. And most linguists agree that, in order to reverse language shift, state support is vital. One of the immediate aims of the Official Languages Act was to change the linguistic landscape, to ensure that Irish was visually present wherever English features in those areas of public life which are within State control.
Bilingual signage and stationery are an example of this. They are an attempt to acknowledge the existence of our first national language on a daily, mundane basis, to take it beyond schools, so that not only Irish speakers from the Gaeltacht but also those from outside, such as the many gaelscoileanna pupils and former pupils, may see the language reflected in their daily reality and may be allowed to use it.
The one-size-fits-all monolingual English approach has done us a lot of damage. We should welcome this attempt, enshrined in law, to undo some of that damage. - Yours, etc,
ANNE GALLAGHER, Director, Language Centre, NUI Maynooth; President, Irish Association for Applied Linguistics.