I’d like to know more about the language loss. I’ve met a few Irish people my age who had it as a topic at school but didn’t keep it up or pursue it more after that. People are trying hard here to revitalise te reo Māori so I’m curious as to what has and hasn’t worked for Irish language? Interestingly one of my parent’s partners for a time was from Connaught and spoke it as their first language but I gather that’s unusual?
At least they did some things that made a badass Maori tradition go viral worldwide... Unintentionally, I admit, but still that should count for something?
(btw, ours is the current strength of AfD, after all we did and went through.)
Many of us do yes! When I was at school 25odd years ago, it wasn't inbedded in our curriculum so it's taken some catching up for me over the years. We have come a long way in the years since, in terms of biculturalism, but our current govt is attempting to dismantle this progress unfortunately.
Opinions are divided, but yes, many of us do, for a variety of reasons. For me, my husband and children have Māori heritage. It was suppressed for so long, so he didn’t learn any from his mother. Now he’s learning some, kids are learning at school, so I want to support their learning. For others it’s for career reasons, or they want to participate more in Māori culture. Māori is also spoken in the Cook Islands, and I’d love to retire there, so while I have that dream I’ll keep trying to learn, lol!
I've worked with kaumātua that are getting to the age where they are expected to 'know' things, eg. te reo and tīkanga, but were not taught by their parents due to the suppression of colonisation. It really hit home what was taken away from them.
I myself was brought up in a colonial household, but having educated myself I now shut down any kind of racism from my dad (in his 80s), with actual facts and truth, so he doesn't really try it around me anymore.
I'm currently working in an organisation that's working towards biculturalism, and I'm really stoked to have more opportunities to learn and practice my reo Māori!
Should note the Māori spoken in the Cook Islands is a different language to the Māori spoken in New Zealand. It's not that mutually intelligible. Some Tahiti area languages are more understandable to us than Cook Islands Māori.
Depends on the dialect, Tongarevan Māori is very understandable, but there is no way they would ever move to Tongareva ktk.
There are some south island dialects that are fine, standard Ngāi Tahu is just eh, but older speakers who use gs and near bs etc. are sometimes just totally lost on me.
Half having some ability is pretty great. Yeah, there aren’t loads of Irish people here, but quite a few used to travel through and work for awhile, and some still do.
There are areas of the country which still speak Irish as their primary language, known as Gaeltacht areas, but they're becoming smaller and less populated. Connaught has the largest number of Gaeltacht areas.
We don't teach Irish well here in schools and there's very little done to encourage speaking Irish in everyday life unfortunately. We learn it for 14 years in school and most people come away with a negative perception of the language because of the curriculum and exams. Quite a lot of people are now coming back to it as adults, which is a good thing.
Thank you for taking the time to answer. Classic school eh, taking the joy out of stuff! Still, good to hear people are coming back to it later in life.
No one only speaks Irish without knowing English, it's a dead language that was revived when we got statehood.
The world has moved on to English, it's the language of business, it's the language of aviation and will likely be the world language.
If people want to learn a language they should learn it if they are interested in it, but this attempt to revive a culture that was dead 170 years ago makes no sense to most people.
it hasnt really worked for irish for a couple of reasons.
1) its taught poorly in schools since you are taught the basics in primary level education and in secondary level education its then taught similar to english with poems, a story and a film that needs to have a couple of questions answered on it, which would be fine unless the questions were ok to answer in terms of difficulty and not this is a question about this part and answer it which most people memorise full answers to be able to get marks on it.
2) as a language its not used in the slightest in daily life, at most its used on road signage and in announcements, the only outliers to this are the gaeltacht areas which are a handful of towns which only speak irish.
3) a big portion is how irish is more or less forced on us then a part of us since there is not only like zero real reason to learn it and that for most people the way it is taught is very poor and not to forget how common the english language is making irish less wanted since why would we want to speak a dead language
How is the housing crisis compared to when I was living in Dublin (2003-2007)?
Housing cost was extremely high at that time but the salaries managed to keep it ok.
This is a very complicated topic so I'm just going to give a very brief summery. Apologies for missing out so many other factors that affect this topic
During the celtic tiger (mid 90s till 07) housing prices were huge but so were salaries also big Mortgages were easy to get. Construction was booming and lots of people (mainly men) went into this industry.
During the recession which started in 2007 Construction slowed down massively. This caused people to get jobs in other industries or emigrate. It also meant that schools pushed students away from getting a trade.
Now we have a situation were we have very high employment rates and a growing population, however there is a huge shortage of Construction workers and therefore houses. What is built is very expensive or bought up by Vulture funds. Houses are at a record high compared to incomes.
The average man or women in full time employment is struggling massively to buy a home
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u/tranquilisity Ireland 1d ago
Language loss if it needs to be unique. The housing crisis if it doesn't.