MEITS Blog

A week ago (on 31 October), the Irish-language channel, TG4, celebrated its first twenty years in existence; its advent had been greeted with scepticism by many and the cost of establishing and running the station had been resented by some. While Irish as the ‘national language’ has the status of first official language in the Irish Republic (English being the second), Irish speakers are in a minority; of a total population of around 4.5 million people, some 1.77 million answered ‘yes’ to the question ‘Can you speak Irish’ in the 2011 Census. However, as few as 1% of the population may be habitual speakers of the language, i.e. those for whom Irish is the main home, work and/or community language.

As an English language assistant at a school in suburban Paris in 2009, I remember thinking that the way the pupils spoke was far removed from the French I’d learnt at school and university, and that no amount of book-learning could make me understand them. This experience might be familiar to language learners seeing a foreign language used in its natural habitat. If you’re used to Molière, Booba’s a shock. (In any case, he’s better, as he’d tell you himself.)

A few months ago I was in the park with a friend and her seven-year-old son. As he was playing he started talking to two other young boys, one of whom was Asian. After a while he came back over to us, and his mum asked who his new friends were. He excitedly replied: “They're called Tom and Kevin and they go to my school, but Kevin is from China, I didn't even know I could speak Chinese!”