A chara - Your columnist Tony Kinsella (August 11th) appears happy that "we abandoned our national language when it became a handicap".
Though I do not share Kinsella's satisfaction on the matter, I can accept that the desirability of a nation abandoning its language might be a matter of opinion and values.
Where Kinsella is objectively wrong, however, is in claiming that Irish people speak "a strongly Hibernicised version" of Shakespeare's English. On the contrary, by any linguistic analysis the English of Ireland has become virtually indistinguishable in syntax and lexicon from that of other countries, principally Britain. Pronunciation remains local to a large degree, but even that is tending towards some cosmopolitan norm.
Kinsella's claim that the English of Ireland may be "on its way to becoming a language" is even more baseless. The opposite is the case: Irish English, a speech as old as Carleton and Maria Edgeworth, is now arid and defunct.
Its proponents rely on a few over-cited chestnuts, such as "crack" and "grand", but they can adduce no evidence of vitality or originality left in the dialect. Kinsella goes close to claiming that the Irish of England can somehow be claimed as our national language, but the fact is that the only national language that the Irish have ever had is Irish. - Is mise,
Dr DAVID BARNWELL,
Roinn na Spáinnise,
Ollscoil na hÉireann,
Má Nuad.