| Chapter 1: | The Dying Gael |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
and anthropological background provided in the history of the effort to revive the Gaelic language, the theoretical underpinning of the importance of minority language revival, and the naturalistic observations of some aspects of the movement as it unfolds and is expressed in formal and nonformal education.
The framework for this study can best be imagined as scaffolding built upon a structure of rationales or arguments:
The opening chapter sets the historical background for the effort to revive the Gaelic language. The sources of this chapter include historic secondary sources, as I attempt to outline the history of the shrinkage of the Gaelic world in the face of the English-language culture that first spread over the British Isles and dominates much of the world today. This chapter also touches on the phenomenon of language extinction, a process that involves the die-off of a large number of the world's extant languages. It is this die-off of languages and cultures that serves as the backdrop for the efforts of the Gaelic people to save some small linguistic territory for themselves. Additionally, part I introduces the theory that underlies one of the central tenets of this study, namely the Whorfian hypothesis (Whorf, 1938, 1956), which holds that languages contain cultural knowledge that is irretrievably lost every time a language dies.
Later in this section, I describe the arguments for heritage language maintenance and revival and attempt to lay the theoretical groundwork