As We Sit in Quarantine, Is Now the Time to Breathe New Life into Gaelic?

Till now, the venerable language of the Emerald Isle has been preserved by government edicts, educational requirements, dwindling native speakers and diehard Irish nationalists.  But for most of Ireland’s population, Gaelic is a nostalgic linguistic throwback of scant use in daily life and a sop to patriots who refuse to let it die a natural death. However, machine translation and translation services have the potential to revive and reactivate a language heading to extinction.  Can Gaelic hope to gain a new following? Could this be a good thing for Ireland? And how would a campaign to revive the Irish national language be conducted?

During the Coronavirus crisis, as we wait out the pandemic, it may seem trivial to discuss a subject as esoteric as the resurrection of Gaelic. But as we retreat from pubs, clubs and football pitches, we find ourselves with more time on our hands to learn something new. We are asked to distance ourselves even from classes and social gathering. So it may well be an ideal moment to bring to life a tongue long left by many for dead. How to do it? From language tools available, for free, on our phones and computers.

What is the status of the Gaelic language in Ireland?

Irish – Gaelic or Gaeilge — belongs to the Celtic language family. It originated in Ireland and was historically spoken by Irish people throughout Ireland. It is still spoken as a first language in some counties — Galway, Kerry, Cork and Donegal chief among them. In 2016, native speakers were counted as 73,000 in Ireland and 4,000 in northern Island. It has also been adopted by non-traditional speaker in Irish cities for cultural or nationalistic reasons, albeit as a second language.

Gaelic also has what is considered the richest literary heritage in all of Europe. And Gaelic has influenced variation of the language in Scotland and the Isle of Man, in the dialect called Manx. Irish is constitutionally recognized, as the Republic’s national and official language and as a minority language in Northern Ireland. It’s an official European Language and it’s promoted by the public body Foras na Gaeilge.

In Ireland, of course, the Irish language is taught in school, but study after study show that the language learning in schools does not really register with most student, nor is it remembered or used. Data posted on Twitter by Mapsome claimed that the Irish led all of Europe with 72% not able to speak a “foreign language” – a claim that riled many an O’Reilly, with many claiming that 100% spoke a foreign language: English!

What chance does Gaelic stand again the language of Hollywood, New York, and London, the lingua franca of the World and of global culture. Young and old alike become Anglophones whether they like it or not. But it doesn’t need to stay that way.

Still, for a nation of 5 million citizens, 1.5% native speakers is not an impressive showing. And it appears that even this piddling number is dwindling. Can something be done to restore the native glory of Gaelic? I am a language professional, head of a translation company, and I believe the question can be answered in the positive.

Which online language tools and machine translation help learn Irish?

Digital linguistic education – specifically language learning tools and machine translation tools – can change all that. You can learn Irish, online, for free. Here are some resources:

There are award-winning free apps like DuoLingo. With a mere 34 hours on the app you can equal the learning of a university semester’s worth of classes. Irish happens to be one of the post popular languages to learn, with more than 600,000 registered since August 2018 when the course debuted. The discuss forums are active as well.

Clilstore, which comes from the abbreviation for content and language integrated learning (CLIL) offers teaching materials linking videos with online dictionaries. The idea is that learners focus on a hobby or something else of interests and use that link to power language learning on a familiar topic. There are more than 150 units on offer in Irish, many offering audio and video support.

On Facebook, there’s the group “Gaeilge Amháin” (Irish Only) with more than 11,000 members and provide support for your learning adventure. Tweeters can follow @IrishLanguage and @TheIrishFor for Irish resources and vocabulary respectively.

Has Machine Translation by Big Tech failed their Host Nation?

Noticeably absent in these resources are Google and Microsoft, the two leaders in machine translation. What do we mean by machine translation? Some technical background can be found here. But you probably already know the mobile and PC apps like Google Translate and Microsoft Translator, which are great for website translation, marketing translation, and document translation.

But, given the heavy and profitable presence of the two tech giants in Ireland, one might think they would give a bit more respect to Gaelic. While it’s possible to get a text to text translation to the Irish vernacular, you can’t get a voice translation on either! While dozens of other languages have audio translations, Irish is not one of them.

It’s true, as Irish Tech News reported, that Google Translate finally introduced camera translation with support for Irish. So does Microsoft Translator. But why is simultaneous voice interpretation lagging? We’d all love to listen to the lilt of an Irish lass, even if she is a lifeless language bot like Siri or Alexa

There is really no good excuse for this. How much effort, really, would it take to provide voice output for Irish translations? Cad náire! What an embarrassment! And are there no professional translation services who can step into the breach and offer poor Alphabet Inc. and Big Blue a little help?

I envision a national effort to revive the moribund Gaelic to become a national language of Ireland and Irish people abroad. Translation companies in particular should rise to the occasion, offering discounted, document translation service to meet the translation needs of those who want to Gaelicize their content assets. Human translation may be require to deliver the quality translation that expert speakers will expect. But surely the translation industry can rise to the occasion to redress the linguistic neglect of the past!

Could Gaelic do for Ireland what Hebrew did for Israel?

I do not have green blood running in my veins, nor was I raised in fields of clover. But I was raised in a country which saw the resurrection of a language long thought dead. Today, less than a century after the living language was reintroduced, almost all of my country’s population speaks it.  I speak, of course, about Israel, and the resurrection of Hebrew, the language of the Bible.

The revival of Hebrew owes its success largely to the efforts of one man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who, in the early 20th century set out to develop a new language that could replace the mongrel Jewish vernacular known as Yiddish and other imported languages and dialects and thus form a common basis of communication for Jews who had immigrated from various regions of the world. It was a “compromise” that united the nation and continues to do so till this day.

The world has changed a lot in the century since Ben-Yehuda imposed the speaking of Hebrew first on his own family. It gradually spread out from his home to him community and eventually to all Jews in the pre-State community, later to be adopted as the first language of the nation. Unlike in Ireland, it is a language in everyday use rather than one largely paid “lip service” in elementary schools and road signs.

With due respect to the world’s current predicament, the Hebrew language became “viral” till it became endemic to the local population. Can’t the same happen for the native Irish tongue, sharp as it is?

It might be facetious to expect that something similar could transpire in Ireland today. Contemporaries laughed at Ben-Yehuda in his time. However, the current health crisis is shutting down borders and turning our societies in on themselves as never before. Now is a great time to learn the Irish lingo.

Here’s one viral idea. There has been a rumour going around, regarding coronavirus, that quantities of garlic –ingested either as whole cloves or drunk as garlic-infused tea — might have prodigious preventive or curative powers. Not proven, but followed by millions. Would it be fake news to introduce and spread the idea that Gaelic – not garlic – might have similar healing powers to the Irish soul within us all?

Is fiú triail a bhaint as. It’s worth a try!

By Ofer Tirosh, who is CEO and founder of Tomedes, an international translation company and provider of universal language services. He is a lover of Irish folk music.

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