Ngg Wa Thiongo - Tumblr Posts
big m00d - maybe it has something to do with the prevalence of "irish" culture globally? i mean the majority of that is some kind of contemporary Stage Irish-ness™ & harking back to an imagined ireland that doesn't really exist, largely for the benefit of the admittedly massive irish diaspora & their descendents to try to connect their roots to (9-10 million people born in ireland have emigrated since the 1700s and we have a minister of state appointed to our diaspora) (i could also talk about how appropriating faux irish culture is used as an excuse for a drunken good time and further adds to the general simulacrum and muddying of how people view ireland/irish people, but that sounds tiring to me so i’m not gonna). I mean even as far back as like 1910, Desmond FitzGerald recalled visiting the Blaskets to learn Irish and observed the linguistic landscape in writing: “There in that Irish-speaking district one could, as it were, watch the progressive death of the language. Not only was there a difference between the language of these old men from pre-Famine days to that of the middle-aged men, but also between that of the middle-aged men and the younger generation. The old men spoke Irish all of the time, even when they went into Dingle; the middle-aged spoke Irish at home in the village, but Englsih when they went to town. And often even in Ballyferriter one would hear the younger men [only] speaking English together.” In 1910. Like the area he visited is still one of the most active Irish-speaking regions in the country but the effects of british colonisation weren’t entirely ceased with irish independence and the celtic revival movements that were entwined with it. The Blaskets haven’t even had any permanent residents since 1953, there’s no one even there to speak that variation of the language anymore. The thing about living in a postcolonial country is that you’re still living in the detonation site of a cultural bomb, the effect of which “is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their untiy, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves... It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other people’s languages rather than their own.” [Ngûgî wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (Oxford: James Currey, 1986), 3] We were colonised by the English for 800 years and live in a post-colonial world in which English is the third most spoken language. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Ludwig Wittgenstein) - and as Irish has been strangled and smothered progressively over centuries, as barely anyone in the country learns it as a first language, as it’s dying and misrepresented and misunderstood, there’s understandably a sense that there are more practical languages to learn to expand the limits of the world. Even Daniel O’Connell, The Liberator himself, viewed “the old language [as] a barrier to modern progress.” I mean, in an ideal world, reviving our language, which has shaped the hiberno-english we speak and is a part of our heritage, would be more of a priority for us as deconstruction of the limits imposed within our identities by colonialism. But like I’m saying this as an Irish person who has barely any Irish, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(woops i wrote a lot)
tl;dr Irish is Irish, not Gaelic, and also very few of us can even speak it, so having Irish characters start philosophising romantically as Gaelige to impress the people around them usually comes across as completely and utterly ridiculous and drenched in cringe
PSA for the raven cycle fandom or any other fandom with irish characters or characters of irish descent - irish people call the irish language irish or, in irish, gaeilge. the word gaelic is usually used to refer to gaelic football. no one says that they speak gaelic here.
there are gaelic languages - scots gaelic, for example, being the name of the gaelic language spoken in scotland - but, if you’re talking about irish people speaking the gaelic language of ireland, it’s called irish/gaeilge. thanks so much for tuning in.