\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>here\u2019s an Irish saying, t\u00edr gan teanga, t\u00edr gan anam<\/em>: a country without a language is a country without a soul. Representatives of some of Europe\u2019s estimated 60 minority languages \u2013 or minoritised, as they define them \u2013 met in Barcelona recently to discuss what it means to lose a language, and what it takes to save it.<\/p>\n Language diversity is akin to biodiversity, an indicator of social wellbeing, but some of Europe\u2019s languages are falling into disuse. Breton, for example, is dying out because its speakers are dying, and keeping languages alive among young people is challenging in an increasingly monolingual digital world.<\/p>\n Catalan, which is spoken by about 10 million people, is the poster child of successful minoritised languages. Thanks to decades of linguistic immersion in public education, from nursery to university, about 93.4% of the population can speak or understand Catalan, in addition to Spanish. Both are co-official languages in Catalonia, and the result is a culture that is almost completely and unselfconsciously bilingual.<\/p>\n However, the latest figures show that only 32.6% of adults say Catalan is the language they habitually use, and the numbers are falling, especially among younger people. Not without reason, many Catalans view the language as being in constant danger of being engulfed by Spanish (and, increasingly, by English too). One consequence of this concern is a tendency to treat Catalan more as a sacred, unalterable cultural artefact than a living language.<\/p>\n In addition to regular subeditors, Catalan media employ \u201ccorrectors\u201d \u2013 effectively a language police, who stamp out any perceived impurities, word play or neologisms from broadcast or published output. The result is that the language can seem stiff and uncool, which partly accounts for its declining use among young people.<\/p>\n \u201cI speak a Valencian dialect of Catalan and it annoys me that people correct me, as though we all have to speak some perfect version of the language,\u201d said Blanca Trull Armengol of the European Language Equality Network (ELEN), who organised the Barcelona conference. \u201cIt\u2019s a living language, and just because we introduce words from other languages it shouldn\u2019t be seen as some form of contamination.\u201d<\/p>\n Frisian is the mother tongue of Mirjam Vellinga, along with about 500,000 people in the northern Netherlands. She is a firm advocate of letting people indulge their creativity with the language, rather than bowing to a purist doctrine. \u201cIf it means introducing some Dutch or English, that\u2019s fine,\u201d she told me. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to put it in a museum. When we lose a language, we lose a way of being and the connection with our ancestry. When people\u2019s language is suppressed you see more depression and ill health because you\u2019ve been robbed of part of your identity.\u201d<\/p>\n In a world increasingly dominated by identity politics, Vellinga added, some young people see speaking Frisian as a marker of cool. \u201cThere are rock bands that sing in Frisian, but we don\u2019t have a Kneecap unfortunately. We\u2019re a bit jealous of Kneecap.\u201d<\/p>\n Rappers Kneecap are a key part of why Irish is riding the crest of a wave, with a big increase in people choosing to study the language at all levels of education. \u201cKneecap are rooted in the reality of young people,\u201d says Conch\u00far \u00d3 Muadaigh of Irish language association Conradh na Gaeilge. \u201cKneecap reflect the life and diversity of young people through the medium of Irish. But it\u2019s not an academic language. Young people in their thousands are gravitating to them because of their authenticity.\u201d<\/p>\n In the Republic, about 1.9 million people can speak Irish; it is in daily use by about 624,000. The language received an unexpected boost during the Troubles in Northern Ireland when Republican prisoners took to learning it, in what became known as the Jailtacht, a play on Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking regions of Ireland.<\/p>\n When the prisoners were released under the Good Friday agreement in 1998, many went into education and community activism and Irish began to flourish north of the border, where before it had been virtually extinct. In the Gaeltacht in the west of Ireland, however, the language is in decline, partly as a result of the huge rise in the demand for holiday homes forcing young people to leave.<\/p>\n This view is echoed by ELEN\u2019s president, Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones, who says depopulation in rural areas is leading to a decline in the Welsh language in some parts of the country. \u201cIf you don\u2019t have proper investment, you\u2019re going to have depopulation, young people moving away, and if other people with more capital are buying second homes, you have a complete mismatch,\u201d Jones says. \u201cWhat we see is that wealth inequality equates with lack of language equality.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to This is Europe<\/span><\/p>\n The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans \u2013 from identity to economics to the environment<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n One success story has been the rise of the Basque language, Euskera, which, like Catalan, was suppressed under the Franco dictatorship. In Spain\u2019s Basque region, parents can choose between three educational models: 100% Spanish, 50% Spanish and Euskera or 100% Euskera. Close to 90% of the population opt for the full Euskera model.<\/p>\n Euskera is an ancient tongue, unrelated to any of the 100 or so Indo-European languages, and linguists continue to puzzle over its origins. However, to Manex Mantxola Urrate of the Euskera language association Kontseilua, that\u2019s not the point.<\/p>\n \u201cTo us, the mystery isn\u2019t where it came from or when, but how it managed to get to where it is today, despite the hegemonic French and Spanish states, and the answer is because of an enduring sense of community,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat we need to protect is ourselves, it\u2019s we who are in danger. We don\u2019t have to save the language, the language is what will save us.\u201d<\/p>\n Clearly languages that are spoken by as many as 10 million people are very much alive, and a Eurobarometer survey last year showed that 84% of Europeans support the EU\u2019s minority languages. However, their limited presence on digital and social media threatens to increase their marginalisation. If they are to continue to evolve, the Kneecap effect suggests that the gatekeepers dedicated to maintaining their purity need to loosen their grip, and let these languages live a little.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There\u2019s an Irish saying, t\u00edr gan teanga, t\u00edr gan anam: a country without a language is a country without a soul. Representatives of some of Europe\u2019s estimated 60 minority languages \u2013 or minoritised, as they define them \u2013 met in Barcelona recently to discuss what it means to lose a language, and what it takes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[3897,19924,1136,1003,4986,2284,14105,13905,2046,2039,19923],"class_list":{"0":"post-35324","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-bit","9":"tag-burgen","10":"tag-digital","11":"tag-europes","12":"tag-facing","13":"tag-future","14":"tag-jealous","15":"tag-kneecap","16":"tag-minority","17":"tag-stephen","18":"tag-tongues"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}