Jupp53 wrote on 02/22/12 at 22:30:07:

So then we would get nonsense like afro-US-American, Quebecois-Canadian-American-French, Indian-Mexican-American?

Uhohspaghettio wrote on 02/21/12 at 19:57:29:

But it keeps life more interesting, especially for linguists! 

Well as with Welsh, I'd think its well worth promoting to the extent of teaching it a bit, dual language road signs etc. Its a huge part of the cultural history/identity of these countries and always sad to let languages die.

Insisting on using only it for certain things doesn't seem entirely rational given what the population actually speaks. But that'll be stuff they put in when going independent and its never easy to relax that sort of thing. Far too emotive.
(this is from an outside, mostly English, perspective )

yeah well I am Irish, I'm talking from personal experience. Advocacy of Irish is a continual debate here but I tried not to give a slanted view.

What I've always seen them talked about over here (UK) is as Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic. Never been sure how related they are

Yes it can seem a bit silly viewed from a dispassionate viewpoint, but you can't really do that here. Keeping Gaelic alive as a language is about them trying to keep their culture alive after England spent considerable efforts trying to squash it.

After all its still less than hundred years since they got independence.... 

They've also had NI around to remind them. That's getting massively less emotive now, so maybe they'll go to a fuller two language approach in time.

MartinC wrote on 02/21/12 at 15:39:14:


Actually Gaelic is a different language that I think came originally from Scotland. Gaeilge is "Irish"... in Irish, it's not an English word. Lots of people outside of Ireland think it's "gaelic".  

Irish is a dying language, but made compulsory for schoolchildren. The only people who speak Irish natively are on tiny Islands of a few thousand each, and I bet the new generation of them speak English better. 

The fact that it's the official language means all laws or government documents have to be written in Irish also... there was someone recently who even got the relatively minor case against him struck out because the legislation the court was following wasn't also written in Irish. You can also demand to have your court cases conducted in Irish. There are public tv and radio channels that broadcast mostly in Irish. All of this costs an awful lot of money to the taxpayer. Despite all this, only a fraction of Irish people actually speak Irish well enough to be able to use it, it's difficult and not like the romantic languages where a lot of the words are similar. 
    

Stigma wrote on 02/21/12 at 17:10:16:

You are only wrong because of omitting Guyana, the western neighbor of Suriname.  The country has about 770 000 inhabitants, not exactly negligible.
Typically English is the dominant language in Caricom.