Wednesday 21 November 2007

Mind Your Language

If Gaelic needs a BBC television channel to keep it going, then its speakers should just give up. And that is the case being made: not that this channel is needed in order to serve Gaelic-speakers as, say, BBC One serves English-speakers, or indeed S4C serves Welsh-speakers, but rather that it is needed in order to save the language itself from extinction. How, exactly? Are people going to be compelled to watch it, and then to discuss in Gaelic what they have just viewed? (It is also always worth noting that there are absolutely no monoglot speakers of any of the Celtic languages.)

Welsh was all but illegal into the twentieth century, but it survives and thrives. Whereas Irish is an official language of Northern Ireland the only official language of the Republic, yet it is all but dead. However strongly I might believe in a great deal of State action, or indeed however critical I might be of a great deal of other State action, there are some areas in which it makes not the blindest bit of difference one way or the other. And this is one of them.

What is not one of them, however, is the enforced bilingualism or multilingualism used to keep down the working class, broadly defined ("anyone who works", "anyone who can be sacked"), in Wales, and increasingly in Northern Ireland, in London, in certain other urban centres, and wherever there are concentrations of recent immigrants. It must end in those places, and it must not be permitted to happen in the North of Scotland or anywhere else. You know what you have to do.

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