11/26/2022 0 Comments Monolingual irish![]() ![]() There are plenty of different ways of accessing information in English – guides, videos, audio resources, banners and social media graphics – but no sign of anything comparable in Irish. It contains far fewer resources about Covid-19 in Irish, and they’re scattered throughout the website rather than centralised. At the time of writing, almost two weeks after the introduction of Phase 3, the Irish version of was still referring to Phase 2. ![]() The website is almost entirely in English and when the five stages to reopening the country were announced, there was no sign of them in Irish. ![]() Since the restrictions were announced, Irish has also been marginalised in other areas, for instance online public health information. As yet, we have no rules about recruitment of bilinguals to the public service – an essential part of any bilingual public administration – and the monolingual Covid-19 signage all over the country is stark evidence that we can’t even implement the most basic and limited duties mandated by the Act. Because the provisions of the Act are quite weak, many of the duties imposed on public bodies are limited to that very visible realm which can be achieved by outsourcing text for translation. It’s no surprise that signage attracts the biggest number of complaints every year to the Irish language commissioner, An Coimisinéir Teanga. The Official Languages Act is the legislation that regulates the use of Irish in public life and signage is its most obvious manifestation. Ireland is an excellent example of this split: on the one hand we have a first official and national language, with albeit limited protection in terms of state services, but on the other it is difficult for someone to do their business in Irish with the state. We can call the covert policy the “real policy” because it is the one in which most people believe, even if they don’t say so when asked. Language policy in any jurisdiction operates at these two levels and in order to understand it completely we need to consider both. Of course, the country is also unofficially multilingual, with over 60 languages counted in Galway alone in the last census.Īn excellent book by the Israeli sociolinguist Elena Shohamy, Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches (2005), distinguishes between the “overt” language policy – that which is declared and codified – and “covert” language policy – the real story behind the bluster and the rhetoric. As we know, Ireland is officially a bilingual state, and there are statutory obligations on state bodies to erect bilingual signage under the Official Languages Act 2003. My survey isn’t scientific, but the forest of English-only signs got me thinking again about the social status of the Irish language and the state’s attitude to it. ![]() According to what I heard from others, the same applied in many parts of the country although there seemed to be some bilingual signage in the Gaeltacht. One day on Eyre Square, I counted 22 Covid-19 signs in English only, some of them standing brazenly in the centre of the park and others on bus stops or hanging from lamp posts – and this in a city which formally declared itself bilingual in 2016. The bright yellow signs all over Galway were almost entirely in English, those erected by the City Council and others bearing the logos of the Government and the Health Service Executive. Since the Covid-19 restrictions came into place, I walked, ran or cycled what seemed like every centimetre of my new world, first within the 2km limit and then the 5km limit. The question of the Charter and Irish is complex: the Irish government refused to sign it because Irish is constitutionally not a minority language, but the Council’s statement led me to begin thinking about a fundamental question for anyone who cares about language and social justice: are speakers of minority languages – in the broadest sense of the term, those who speak a language which is in a minority position in a given context – being informed in those languages about the pandemic by the authorities? How are Irish speakers and speakers of immigrant or heritage languages in Ireland being treated in this regard? The Council – responsible for the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages – said that it had noticed that information and guidelines about the pandemic were frequently not published in minority languages of member states. At the beginning of March when the pandemic was starting to spread, the Council of Europe warned that public health information about coronavirus was not being disseminated systematically by the authorities in minority languages. ![]()
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