[LINK] "Talk to me, I'm Irish: Embracing a tricky tongue in Montreal"

[rfmcdonald]

Kate Sheridan's article in the Montreal Gazette looks at an ongoing effort to revive the Irish language in that city. What I particularly like is that this places the current effort in the context of Québec's long Irish history.

The Irish language, or Gaeilge, is experiencing a mini-Renaissance in Montreal with the help of Concordia’s School of Canadian Irish Studies and Comhrá, a non-profit group that organizes Irish language classes and events.

Siobhán Ní Mhaolagáin has been teaching the language in Montreal since September, when she first arrived to accept a year-long position as Concordia University’s Ireland Canada University Foundation Irish language scholar. Comhrá had restarted its Irish language courses in the summer and when organizers asked if she’d like to teach their classes in the fall and winter, Ní Mhaolagáin said yes.

“People in Ireland sometimes don’t believe that I’m over here teaching Irish,” she said. “I’ll say, I’m heading off to teach Irish in Montreal. And they’ll be like, ‘Why?’ And I’ll say, ‘Well, there are Irish speakers in Montreal.’ And they’ll say, ‘You’re having a laugh.’ “

The Irish language is notoriously complex; the unusual sentence structure and confounding phonetics can create a steep learning curve. It’s also “definitely endangered” in UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. There aren’t many people who speak Irish here — certainly fewer than in Ireland, where 25,000 students attended an annual event in November that challenged them to speak Irish, and only Irish, as much as possible for 24 hours.

In Montreal, about 20 people attended a satellite event, which Ní Mhaolagáin helped organize, to celebrate the Irish language with music, dancing and movies and to speak it as much as they could muster.