Finding the Irish Language in Canada

Abstract

Finding the Irish Language in Canada Sarah McMonagle In Canada today, Irish language learners may avail of a variety of formal and informal contexts. A number of higher-level institutions offer instruction in the language. The development of a multiculturalism policy after the 1960s sought a place for Canada’s “heritage languages” and led to the establishment of the so-called “ethnic” chairs for the study of Canada’s heritage groups other than the British or French and their languages. Subsequently, a chair of Celtic Studies was founded at the University of Ottawa, a chair of Gaelic Studies at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, and a chair of Irish Studies at St. Mary’s University, Halifax. Elsewhere, the Celtic Studies program at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto was born out of a strong research interest in Anglo-Irish literature. It has run for some thirty years. And the School of Canadian Irish Studies/École des Études Canado-Irlandaises at Concordia University in Montreal focuses on both the history and culture of Ireland and “the contribution of Irish immigrants in all regions of Canada to the social, cultural, economic, religions [sic], educational and political life of the country.”1 Thanks to such initiatives as the Ireland Canada University Foundation Irish Language Programme (established in 2009), Irish can continue to be taught, and increasingly offered at Canadian universities. As well as the offer of instruction though university programs, the Irish experience in Canada is also very much lived and remembered through informal Irish-language learning. As such, the Irish language resonates among those contemporary Canadians who have actual or cultural memories of migration from Ireland. In a recent memoir, John Donahue recalled that he had inherited a prayer book which was brought over from Ireland by my ancestors, a prayer book written in Irish. My mother recalls that her grandmother could not say her prayers in English. It was one of those things that sparked in me an interest [End Page 134] in the language which I began to study a few years ago and which continues to fascinate me.2 Such adult learners of Irish play a significant part in the presence of the language in Canada. In several Canadian cities, volunteers conduct and maintain classes and comhrá or conversation groups. The groups’ success has led to a network of sorts, attributable to the commitment of those choosing to learn or maintain Irish-language skills; this, in turn, has led to the single most striking development for the Irish language outside of Ireland in recent history: the establishment of Gaeltacht Thuaisceart an Oileáin Úir (North American Gaeltacht) in Ontario in 2007.3 This site has been developed as a dedicated space for the speaking and learning of Irish. It is, in turn, both historically and symbolically significant to Irish diasporic identities in Canada. The establishment of Gaeltacht Thuaisceart an Oileáin Úir prompted the present author to investigate historical aspects of Irish migration and the Irish language, seemingly contained in the diasporic memory of many learners and speakers of Irish abroad. Library shelves and online catalogues show a regrettable dearth of scholarship on this topic, not just in Canada but also in other parts of the world to which large numbers migrated from Ireland. There is, thus, a considerable discrepancy between the memories of present-day Irish-language enthusiasts in Canada and a largely undocumented past of the Irish language outside of Ireland. Of course, it would be unsound to suggest a straightforward cause-and-effect relationship between contemporary memory constructions and sociolinguistic realities of the past. A collective or cultural memory of a group’s ancestral language often relies on imagery perpetuated through narratives of identity, and not necessarily based on solid knowledge—however that may be acquired—of historical linguistic behavior and choices. In a recent work on cultural memory, Jan Assman and John Czaplicka describe how memory is maintained through fixing on “fateful events of the past.”4 In the stories of the Irish diaspora, the “fateful events” are those of emigration from Ireland, predominantly during the nineteenth century. [End Page 135] Emigration from Ireland during the nineteenth century was...