Madam, - Dennis Kennedy (July 29th) opposing the official recognition of the Irish language by the European Union refers to the phrase - "significant act of language maintenance" as used in your Editorial of July 19th and adds "whatever that means".
Language maintenance is a term used by specialists and non-specialists interested in the preservation and promotion of particular languages. All that Mr Kennedy has to do is to cross the water to Wales and he will see in the excellent documents produced by the Welsh Language Board (a much more powerful body, incidentally, than our newly formed Official Languages Commission) that language maintenance is used in language planning there and subdivided into four areas of action, namely "acquisition planning, usage planning, status planning and corpus planning".
Longman's Dictionary of Applied Linguistics gives a good definition of language maintenance as follows: "The degree to which an individual or group continues to use their language, particularly in a bilingual or multilingual area". Many factors affect language maintenance for example:
(a) whether or not the language is an official language;
(b) whether or not it is used in the media, for religious purposes, in education;
(c) the number of speakers of the language living in the same area. - Yours, etc.,
DAVID NOBLE,
Clarinda Park South,
Dun Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.