The minority language and the cosmopolitan speaker: Ideologies of Irish language learners

The Irish language holds an unusual position among the world's languages in being the official first national language of a country in which it is also a minority language. Despite support from the government of Ireland, Irish remains a language spoken by relatively few on a daily basis. Yet it retains a high level of symbolic importance within the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and attracts interest from learners all over the world. This dissertation investigates the mixing of the global and cosmopolitan with the local and traditional in the ideologies and linguistic practices of learners of Irish Gaelic at a summer intensive language school in Ireland where students come from Ireland as well as other countries around the world, and where some students have Irish heritage and some do not.;The ideologies and attitudes expressed and enacted by the participants in this study reflect the complexity and conflicts of language revitalization efforts. Students show an instrumental orientation to language, focusing many of their complaints about the current status of Irish on the lack of practical uses for it. Yet most of them acknowledge a strong symbolic component in their own desire to learn and use Irish. They discuss the need for Irish to gain stronger associations with modernity, yet they participate in the construction of ideologies of authenticity that depend on linguistic purism and traditional images of the language and its speakers. Interviews and recorded classroom interactions provide insight into larger issues of globalization and commodification of minority languages, an issue which is of increasing relevance to sociolinguistics. The presence of students from both inside and outside Ireland at the summer language school in the Gaeltacht (the term for Irish-speaking areas) creates a setting in which participants discuss and use the Irish language with an eye to both its traditional rural associations and a cosmopolitan, urban, and globalizing present and future. This situation foregrounds connections between the learning and use of the language as well as tensions between past and future, global and local, and traditional and new ideologies and identities in Ireland and beyond.