Video: Galtahty - islands of communication in the Irish language
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Centuries-old British rule over Ireland led to the fact that now almost all the inhabitants of the island speak English. But there are still special areas, galtakhty, the population who prefers to use their native language – Irish.
Irish is one of the few surviving Celtic dialects in the world. Thousands of years ago they were spoken by millions of people throughout Europe from the Carpathians to the western coast of Spain, from the Bosphorus to the British Isles. However, now only in certain regions of the continent there are people who protect the Celtic culture and languages.
We are talking about Scotland, Wales and Cornwall on the island of Great Britain, the Brittany Peninsula in France, as well as the Isles of Man and Ireland.
The Republic of Ireland has a population of four and a half million, with another half million living in Ulster, the northern part of the island controlled by Great Britain. But only 1.66 million of them said they speak at least some Irish language. In everyday life, ten times fewer people communicate on it.
Realizing that the Irish language is threatened with extinction, the authorities have taken a huge number of measures aimed at preserving and reanimating it. All official information in the Republic of Ireland is published in two languages: bilingual signs, road signs. Television and radio programs are broadcast in the island's autochthonous language. More and more often he can be heard in Parliament.
But there are special regions on the island where Irish is the main language. The use of English in the official sphere is prohibited there (in the private, however, it is not prohibited). We are talking about the galtakht - territories with a special legislative status, located mainly on the west coast and in the countryside of Ireland. These are individual villages for a couple of yards, and entire districts with dozens of settlements.
The total population of these areas is about 100 thousand people, of which about 70 thousand use mainly Irish in their everyday life.
However, the special status plays a cruel joke with the Galtakhts. After all, tourists from other regions of the country, the UK and the rest of the world tend to come to these villages, expecting to plunge into the atmosphere of Celtic culture there. And this forces their residents to increasingly use English in communication.
A separate conversation about the so-called neo-galtakhs - areas of cities whose residents deliberately switched to Irish as the main language of communication relatively recently, in recent decades. Such neighborhoods exist in Dublin and Belfast, and in smaller towns. Moreover, their number is constantly increasing - the process of reviving the language at the official level brings positive results.
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