Language and Identity in Twentieth-Century Ireland

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRELAND MARIA TYMOCZKO AND COLIN IRELAND What the eye is to the lover . . . language—whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue—is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities The exercise of power, in modern society, is increasingly achieved through ideology, and more particularly through the ideological workings of language. Norman Fairclough, Language and Power what is the language of “the Irish patriot”? Can a country be composed of patriots who speak different languages? Can patriots have more than one language? Can a patriot be ignorant of his language? Questions such as these have been central to cultural and political debates in Ireland for more than a century, and they have problematized interpretations of history as well. Language issues were fundamental during the Irish Revival, they were cornerstones of Irish nationalism, and they remained part of public discourse both in the Irish Republic and in Northern Ireland throughout the twentieth century, continuing on into the twenty-first. These questions about language derive from a paradigm of nationalism that took shape in the nineteenth century and that continues to inform contemporary understandings of nation. In this paradigm a people must have more than a territory to claim nationhood: there must be a language, a distinct culture, and a national history as well. Language—belonging to the social sphere and rooted in the depths of time—becomes a figure for the imagined community and its history projected into the past (Anderson 1991:144–45). From the middle of the nineteenth century, Irish nationalEDITORS ’ INTRODUCTION 4 ism has responded to this paradigm. It fueled the nineteenth-century publication program unearthing the medieval treasures in the Irish language— the annals, the laws, the lore, and the ancient literature—as well as the philological project of the twentieth-century Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, financed by the Irish state. It lies behind Douglas Hyde’s program to de-Anglicize Ireland and revive the Irish language, as well as late twentieth-century efforts to claim Ulster Scots as a distinct minority language. Such a paradigm made possible turn-of-the-century accusations of “West Briton.”1 It drove the de Valera constitution of 1937 and public policy in the Republic for decades, and it continues to influence the way cultural and linguistic groups position themselves within European Union policies both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic. Inspired by Enlightenment discourses and the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité, nationalism in the eighteenth century did not share this fixation on language or privilege questions of language. Eighteenth-century paradigms of nationalism were more tolerant of coalitions across language boundaries, more inclusive along cultural lines. The difference can be seen in the 1798 Rising, which attempted to forge solidarity across faultlines of ethnicity, religion, and language. In many ways Daniel O’Connell was such an Irish patriot, speaking Irish fluently himself but content to encourage the nation to turn to the English language. Ironically for Ireland the shift from eighteenth-century to nineteenth-century models of nationalism coincided with the rapid decline of the Irish language. Having held onto the Irish language throughout the eighteenth century, the harsh restrictions of Penal Laws notwithstanding, in the nineteenth century the Irish people made a dramatic shift to English, and the majority gave up speaking Irish. The reasons for the shift are many—the required use of English in the national schools certainly, but more pressing were economic compulsions , factors that became inescapable to the citizenry after the terrible losses of the Great Famine in mid-century.2 Just when nationalism demanded the possession of a national language for nationhood, therefore, Irish was on the wane in Ireland, threatening the EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION 5 1 A good example is found in James Joyce’s “The Dead” (1969:188–90). 2 The famine hit the Irish-speaking population disproportionately and disastrously; from 1851, after the famine, when Irish speakers constituted 25 percent of the population, Irish speakers declined to 12 percent in 1911, according to census figures (Edwards...