What are the difficulties faced when trying to revive a regional language?
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at
3:08 am
Hi guys, I'm researching minority languages and would really like your opinions on what difficulties are faced when trying to revive a language such as Welsh or Gaelic Irish
Also, I would be really interested in your opinions on whether or not these languages should be revived/if it's any use learning these langauges
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Tagged with: langauges • minority languages • welsh
Filed under: Welsh Language
If you want to revive a language you need to convince people to give up their current native language and converse predominately in the revived one.
Since generally people are not very keen on doing that, it is almost impossible to revive a dead language. The only case that has ever really worked was when Hebrew was reviewed after WW2 and that only worked because almost all citizens of the new state had moved to Israel from their original countries and thus needed some language to interact with the many people that spoke languages different from their own.
In Ireland on the other hand extensive efforts to revive and expand the use of Gaelic have largely been unsuccessful. Even though the overall knowledge of Gaelic has increased to to mandatory school education, the numbers of native Gaelic speakers keep declining as people from Gaelic areas move to English speaking areas and switch to English, while people that move to Gaeltacht areas do not take up Gaelic in the same way.
me too i’m doing this and th hardest thing is findin matterials to learn them…
good luck!
Thalat fot lernt speyk proper ifntha want’s folk ‘tfursta thi.
Tha cornt lern nowt beht that.