The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

can converse, though they have lived apart for 1,50o years.) Its numbers are falling, but it is still spoken by half a million people.

    THE MOTHER TONGUE
    The position is somewhat less buoyant for the Gaelic of Ireland.
    There too the government has been a generous defender of the language, but with less visible success. Ireland is not even officially an English-speaking country. Yet 94 percent of her citizens speak only English and just i percent use Gaelic as their preferred lan-guage. Ireland is the only member of the Common Market that does not insist on having its own language used in community business, largely because it would be pointless. The dearth of Gaelic speakers does convey certain advantages to those who have mastery of the tongue. The Spectator magazine noted in 1986 how Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien would respond to an awkward question in the Dail, or lower house of parliament, by emitting a mellifluous flurry of Gaelic, which most of the members of his audience could but admire if not even faintly understand.
    The Irish-speaking area of Ireland, called the Gaeltacht, has been inexorably shrinking for a long time. Even before the potato famine of 1845 drove hundreds of thousands of people from the land, only about a quarter of the population spoke Gaelic. Today Gaelic clings to a few scattered outposts, mostly along the rocky and underpopulated west coast. This has long been one of the most depressed, if fabulously scenic, areas of Europe. The government has tried to shore up the perennially faltering economy by bringing in tourists and industry, but this has put an inevitable strain on the local culture. In the 197os the population of Donegal, the main Irish-speaking area, increased by a fifth, but the incomers were almost entirely English speakers who not only cannot speak Gaelic but have little desire to learn a language that is both difficult and so clearly doomed.
    *All the evidence suggests that minority languages shrink or thrive at their own ineluctable rate. It seems not to matter greatly whether governments suppress them brutally or support them lav-ishly. Despite all the encouragement and subsidization given to Gaelic in Ireland, it is spoken by twice as many people in Scotland, where there has been negligible government assistance. Indeed, Scottish Gaelic is one of the few minority languages in the world to be growing. Gaelic was introduced to Scotland by invaders from Ireland thirteen centuries ago and long held sway in the more GLOBAL LANGUAGE
    remote islands and glens along the western side of the country.
    From 8o,000 speakers in 1 96o the number has now crept up to a little over 9o,000 today. Even so, Gaelic speakers account for just 2.5 percent of the Scottish population.
    ABut almost everywhere else the process is one of slow, steady, and all too often terminal decline. The last speaker of Cornish as a mother tongue died 200 years ago, and though constant efforts are made to revive the language, no more than fifty or sixty people can speak it fluently enough to hold a conversation. It survives only in two or three dialect words, most notably emmets ("ants"), the word locals use to describe the tourists who come crawling over their gorgeous landscape each summer. A similar fate befell Manx, a Celtic language spoken on the Isle of Man, whose last native speak-ers died in the 196os.
    The Gaelic of Ireland may well be the next to go. In 1 983, Bord na Gaelige, the government body charged with preserving the language, wrote: "There is very little hope indeed that Irish will survive as a community language in the Gaeltacht beyond the end of the century"—an uncharacteristically downbeat, if sadly realis-tic, assessment.
    ;{We naturally lament the decline of these languages, but it is not an altogether undiluted tragedy. Consider the loss to English lit-erature if Joyce, Shaw, Swift, Yeats, Wilde, Synge, Behan, and Ireland's other literary masters had written in what is inescapably a fringe language.