According to the EU, the Irish language, and many other lesser spoken are in grave danger. The language supports for these tongues are basically non existent (Judge, Rehm, Uszkoreit, 2012). Even here on our own island we cannot manage to adapt our information systems, as evident by this man who is suing several Irish state bodies under GDPR for the incorrect storage of his information. The error? A fada has been omitted from his name in their databases (Hutton, 2019).
Is it just Irish state bodies, with the technical skills of leprechauns that struggle to handle our beautifully complicated language? Nope. It’s tough having an Irish name no matter what information systems you try to use, local or global.
My wonderful spelling of Aoife, gives me a whole host of issues. Autocorrect? Go on, try it… armadillo is my favourite. I’m also not called Alice @everyOnlineFormEver. Autocorrect is entirely useless when faced with an Irish name chucked into an English sentence. That little squiggly red line under my name is the reason I won’t forgive my parents for giving me the only Irish name in the family.
Your name looking like a dropped scrabble board also likes to mess with text to speech. Google does a good job at “eefa”. This site on the other hand… A-if??A-if Not even close (Naturalreaders.com, 2019). Again the language translator is happily reading along in English than BAM Aoife, 4 vowels and an f; didn’t stand a chance.
For us poor Irish, there’s more than one issue to contend with. We cannot just blame those brutish English speakers that are debordering the landscape by forcing us all to speak English. The Irish have to take some blame for our own complicated bilinguality. Our insistence to speak, a language that only 73803 people speak (compared to the 378 million that speak English), not only as its own language, but also chucked into English like some strange hybrid beast is a real issue (The CSO, 2019)(En.wikipedia.org, 2019). Word doc can handle English, it can even handle Irish, but if I want to write this blog in English, then whack my Irish name at the end… maybe I’m the problem.
We also refuse to agree on our own language, dialect borders do not help anybody. Maybe, the fact we cannot agree on a dialect between those 70000 people is problematic in our ability to build our own information systems (The CSO, 2019).
The Irish language is at risk from all sides. The extinction of external borders protecting us, and our refusal to unite across our internal lines of division is at the heart of our problem. In danger of extinction, we need to either, commit, and create information systems that function for Irish and English, or cut and run and stop naming our children like vowels are going out of fashion.
References
Hutton, B. (2019). Omission of fadas from Irish names by public bodies investigated. [online] The Irish Times. Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/omission-of-fadas-from-irish-names-by-public-bodies-investigated-1.3780757 [Accessed 10 Feb. 2019].
Naturalreaders.com. (2019). text to speech online. [online] Available at: https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/ [Accessed 15 Feb. 2019].
Judge, J., Rehm, G. and Uszkoreit, H., 2012. The Irish language in the digital age. Springer.
The CSO. (2019). Census of Population 2016 – Profile 10 Education, Skills and the Irish Language. [online] Available at: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cp10esil/p10esil/ilg/ [Accessed 9 Feb. 2019].
En.wikipedia.org. (2019). List of languages by total number of speakers. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers [Accessed 10 Feb. 2019].
Beyond The Border 