Family language policy, first language Irish speaker attitudes and community-based response to language shift

hIfearnáin, Tadhg Ó

doi:10.1080/01434632.2013.794809

Cited by 42 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…While the parents in her study expressed clearly positive views on MTs, their concerns about children's educational achievement, inflicted by the bilingual policy, had made them deliberately or unintentionally choose English in their everyday linguistic practices. Similar conflicts have also been identified in indigenous language revitalisation context (King, 2000;McCarty, 2011;ÓhIfearnáin, 2013). King's (2000) study of Ecuadorian parents illuminates the inconsistencies between community members' stated explicit 'pro-Indigenous' ideology and their privately held implicit 'anti-Indigenous' language ideology.…”

Section: Language Ideologysupporting

confidence: 71%

Nurturing bilingual learners: challenges and concerns in Singapore

Curdt‐Christiansen

Sun

2016

International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism

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Singapore's bilingual policy legitimizes English not only as the language of governmental administration and interethnic communication, but also as the medium of instruction in all schools on all levels and across all subjects except mother tongues. As a result of these politics of language recognition, a visible shift has occurred in all ethnic groups away from mother tongues towards English. To rectify the language shift situation, the government has emphasized that developing bilingualism and raising bilingual children should begin in pre-schools. In this paper, we examine two top-down official documents: Review of Mother Tongue Languages Report, issued in 2011, and Nurturing Early Learners Framework for Mother Tongue Languages, developed in 2013. Attempting to identify some of the complex factors that influence language shift, we present an intertextual analysis of the Report and the curriculum Framework. In doing so, we compare the consistencies and locate the implicit inconsistencies in the policy position on bilingual education in preschools. We conclude the article by outlining the implications for changing the current bilingual educational models and providing teacher training programmes that maximize the learning opportunities of young bilingual learners.

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Section: Language Ideologysupporting

confidence: 71%

Nurturing bilingual learners: challenges and concerns in Singapore

Curdt‐Christiansen

Sun

2016

International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism

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“…This has resulted in their effort to adopt a dynamic one‐parent, one‐language policy at home in a way that when one speaks Malay, the other would speak English. Although this might appear to be a pro‐Malay or ‘pro‐bilingual policy’ at home (Altman, Feldman, Yitzhaki, Lotem, & Walters, , p. 220), it highlights the conflicting and competing ideologies parents hold about the value of languages (Ó hIfearnáin, ). While the parents value their heritage language as something that is in their blood, they have decided to use English at home as well to expose their children to the most valuable societal language of Singapore.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Siblings' play and language shift to English in a Malay‐English bilingual family in Singapore

Mirvahedi

Cavallaro

2019

World Englishes

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This research applies language socialization theory within a family language policy framework to investigate how language shift is realized in daily activities within a Malay‐English bilingual family in Singapore. Applying Goffman's frame analysis to two excerpts of siblings’ play from ninety hours of recordings of family interactions, we illustrate how children as young as four and seven enact adult roles such as teacher and student within the frame of play. In creatively enacting these roles, identities and social relations, the children draw upon their knowledge of play‐external structures – with which they have experience from other (non‐play) situations. The children consequently use English – what is typical of educational settings in Singapore – to portray an image of a teacher and student within the frame of play.

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“…Furthermore, the institutionalisation of the Irish language since the foundation of the state in the 1920s perhaps also triggered a lasting culture of outsourcing some, or indeed all, of the responsibility for the cultivation of Irish from the family and the community to the state, and especially to education. For some, the development of proficiency in English through the use of that language in the home and in the community may have become part of a folk linguistic strategy to achieve skilled bilingualism in Irish and English among children thereby again reducing access to traditional speaker models (Ó hIfearnáin 2006(Ó hIfearnáin , 2013 however, found dispersed throughout the post-Gaeltacht. This is sometimes due to migration from traditional Gaeltacht communities, but it is more commonly due to new speakers initially developing proficiency in Irish through the education system where they encounter Irish as a compulsory subject in English-medium schools or as a medium of instruction in immersion pre-primary, primary and post-primary schools.…”

Section: Traditional and Post-traditional Variation In Contemporary Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Converging and diverging stances on target revival varieties in collateral languages: the ideologies of linguistic variation in Irish and Manx Gaelic

Murchadha

hIfearnáin

2018

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

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Converging and diverging stances on target varieties in collateral languages: The ideologies of linguistic variation in Irish and Manx Gaelic This article will argue that language revival movements, particularly those founded in the ethno-nationalist era of the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, retain founding overt beliefs rooted in an ideological commitment to a specific language because of its role as the authentic and legitimate cultural vehicle of a distinct people. Revival is thus the reinstatement of cultural distinctiveness based on traditional language. Revivalists have in the past afforded the language varieties of the remaining traditional native speech communities a high prestige status based on their perceived ethnolinguistic authenticity. However, after more than a century of language maintenance and revivalism, significant linguistic institutionalisation, a strong presence in schooling and new socialisation mechanisms outwith the traditional speech communities, some minoritised languages have regained a degree of their sociolinguistic vitality by the advent of 'new speakers' who have no organic relationship with the traditional language community. The ways that these 'new speakers' and 'learners' of previously displaced languages negotiate linguistic authenticity and ethno-cultural legitimacy in our contemporary late modern period provide challenges to established value-laden perceptions about language revitalisation and regeneration of traditional speech communities and the long-held belief in the prestige of 'native' speech as the target variety. This discussion will draw on data from recent fieldwork among contemporary speakers of Irish and Manx Gaelic in order to analyse both their overt and more hidden beliefs about the utility and legitimacy of traditional and revival speech. It will further argue that 'traditional' and 'new' speakers do not live parallel sociolinguistic realities in which they are sociolinguistically isolated from one another, but rather that contemporary speakers contest the prestige of both traditional and innovative revival varieties in their language practices and ideologies in a multi-faceted fashion.

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Family language policy, first language Irish speaker attitudes and community-based response to language shift

Cited by 42 publications

References 12 publications

Nurturing bilingual learners: challenges and concerns in Singapore

Nurturing bilingual learners: challenges and concerns in Singapore

Siblings' play and language shift to English in a Malay‐English bilingual family in Singapore

Converging and diverging stances on target revival varieties in collateral languages: the ideologies of linguistic variation in Irish and Manx Gaelic

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