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Damien McKenna's avatar

Growing up in Ireland in the 1950's my parents' generation were taught everything through the Irish language and spoke it at home. When they got into their later teens and went looking for work they found that the Irish language was worthless to them - they needed to speak fluent English and never heard an Irish voice. That ingrained a resentment towards the language.

A few decades later, my generation growing up in the 1980's despised the language, and along with it much of the culture seeing it as uneducated. We only ever used the language doing the mandatory Irish language class in school, outside of certain common phrases the language was never part of common culture, culture was heavily driven by Britain and entirely in the English language.

Jump to the first two decades of the 21st century and the language was starting to make a comeback. That was, right up until the department of education announced that elementary schools needed to start teaching additional foreign languages to support the significant number of immigrants being brought into the country. This feels like the death knells of the language, just when it was starting to recover.

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NormaJeanne's avatar

This is exactly what has happened in my area to my Mennonite husband’s Pennsylvania Dutch language. His grandparents were fluent, but his parent’s generation saw it as sounding uneducated and never taught their children.

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Swabbie Robbie's avatar

See my post below

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