Having a long, though comfortable, early morning work trip I have succumbed to a MP3 player instead of the customary book. This week has been quite Irish: The Pogues, Cruiskeen, The Dubliners and the excellent Tartu band Paddy have been providing Celtic mornings and afternoons. Listening to those familiar and confident, defiant cadences I have been reflecting on this wonder of Irish anti-imperialism - the colonization of the English language itself. It is undeniable that Ireland, real and imagined, has stayed triumphantly un-English even with the loss of the native language. This is an interesting fact for a Finnish person coming from a tradition of very strictly language centred nationalism (albeit in many senses a bilingual tradition). Nationalism is not necessarily bounded with language, it can have many, even polyphonic and pluralist incarnations.
Of course it is an ideology that has very negative connotations - often expressed by writers and thinkers from great powers. Somehow, they do not often seem to notice that their imperial and metropolitan nation is also nationalist and narrow, so English, French, Russian, American nationalisms go often unnoticed, excused. Non-threatening, non-expansionist small nation nationalism is something not even perceived. I welcome a world with vibrant and thriving small nations and national cultures, such as Finland, Ireland, Estonia and many others - the tradition of Finnish nationalism has been one of the central factors preventing this country from being subsumed into the Russian imperial sphere and gradually losing her language, her uniqueness. A process that is now heart breakingly happening for several small Finno-Ugric peoples and languages within the neo-aggressive and uncaring Russia. Of course we have to always beware exclusivist, aggressive and narrow ideas and movements everywhere, perhaps especially when they are disguised under false "universalist" labels of selfish great power politics.
I say he rose again and joined the British Army...
5 comments:
The Irish language is beautiful. You should go to YouTube and listen.
Oh, I did listen to it when living in Dublin. TG4 was the Irish channel - it was very strange to hear the language, you could see how it has led to the varieties of Irish English pronunciation. The language itself was visible everywhere even in Dublin, but it only lives on in small areas mainly in the West. I heard a story recently that two Irish speaking visitors got shouted at in Dublin by a drunken local: "Go home to Poland!"...
I heard young people speaking Irish in Dublin the last time I was there. It was incredible, because you think of the Irish as an Anglophone nation, but they do have their own language that is totally foreign to English.
I heard Gaelic in the Scottish Highlands too. These are not dead languages.
My personal favourite of the Celtic languages is Welsh - it looks so beautiful in writing, the pronunciation seems quite strange, but it is a fascinating language nevertheless. I gather that all Celtic languages have quite complex grammar.
Yep, Irish lives, but as a first language it's used by a small minority and in Dublin it is very rare indeed. The great majority of the Irish population has only the basics. I suppose the only modern revival that has fully succeeded is Hebrew...
I don't think you should worry much about Finnish. It's alive and kicking. Even some foreigners like me speak it at home ;-)
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