Speaking in tongues: language and learning in modern Ireland

Foreign Languages: Victorian language learning & the shaping of modern Ireland, by  Phyllis Gaffney

(UCD Press,  €30.00 / £25.00)

Though intended initially for an academic audience, Dr Phyllis Gaffney’s new book will have an appeal to anyone in any way interested in the evolution of modern Irish culture, not merely literary, but also social and political.  It is a long book, some 350 dense pages, but full of wide ranging interest.  It is also likely to promote further research into aspects of what she reveals.

Many will know of Dr Gaffney from her fascinating narrative Healing Amid  the Ruins: The Irish Hospital at St Lô 1945-1946 (1999), which recounts, among other things, the post-war social action of Samuel Beckett.  This new book is very different in manner and complexity, and important in quite different ways.

The first thing to keep in mind is that in the periods she largely deals with, a university education was not as it is today, a normal thing.  It was then a concern only of  perhaps the elite,  the top five percent of the country.

Work

Most people in 1900 on leaving school went directly into work, either on the farm or in the family shop in the local town, or in some other commercial concern.  Others leaving school came forth specially educated by the Christian Brothers to pass the exams for the banks or the civil service, jobs which were as the saying was “permanent and pensionable”.

University was also for those aiming at the higher professions, law, medicine, commerce, or the clergy (of all traditions).

James Joyce,  for instance,  when at University College, taking the exams of the Royal University, studied modern languages, “the girls course” at the Royal University exams, in the minds of his cruder male friends at UCD.

Mostly these ladies were aiming at being school teachers; teaching providing an escape from home, parents, and even Ireland. They were none of them just putting in time before marriage. Indeed marriage was then still seen as the  proper destiny of a woman.

In this scene then languages, either modern meaning French, German or Italian,  were important. Then there was, for student clergy, a vital need for Greek and Latin.

Then there was the matter of  ‘The Language’,  meaning what was variously called Celtic, Irish, or Gaelic (depending on the nuance of  one’s politics), the battle cry of the rising forces of Irish nationalism.

It is difficult to give a résumé of this book, as it covers a wide range of ground.  But I must emphasise its importance in several directions. This study is divided into four parts, the first dealing over nearly fifty pages with the matter of the context.

Foundation

The second part deals with ‘Laying the foundation’. Here the battle between the needs for modern languages and the demand for Irish language teaching at all levels is investigated.  Part three deals with the academic response in the emergence of a professorial class dealing in these conflicted matters. The role of professorial women in the Irish language movement is an important aspect that is explored too.  The fourth part, deals with the situation after the establishment of the Irish state,  when the universities went on as before  provided in the old ways for the moment.

It was only in the later 1950s and early 1960s that the universities began to respond to the new needs of the emerging, more technological Ireland, indeed of a more deeply educated intelligentsia in the American style that had emerged after the rapid expansion of the American college scene as a result largely of  the GI Bill of Rights after 1945 and the needs of industry and defence responding to the new scientific challenges of the Soviet Union.

What Dr Gaffney supplies is a well sourced account of very important  transformations in Irish society”

When in my own case,  I emigrated in 1964 to the United States where I studied at one of these universities, my school mates at home were planning on doing  medicine or commerce as of old.  When I returned  a decade or so later, ‘commerce’ had become ‘economics’, medicine was being challenged by technology. New language needs, Russians, Chinese Arabic , were emerging.

In all of this there might have been in Dr Gaffney’s pages more said about the extraordinary   transformation of Trinity College, followed by the transformation in turn of the NUI into separate competing universities, and then the development into something quite new of the old ‘Techs’. The scene today is quite different from the days of  James Joyce  and his ‘girls course’.

But what Dr Gaffney supplies is a well sourced account of very important  transformations in Irish society.  There was a time when a professor of English could pass with a mere MA. Nowadays he might feel he needs a second  PhD to even get an initial job.

Emphasis

Her emphasis lies always on the matter of languages.  These remain a challenge. On first picking up the book and glancing through it, I found  towards the end of the book, among the supporting matter, a table. This revealed in stark clarity the sudden collapse in the teaching of Greek and Latin. These are not deemed important now to the economy. Mandarin and Arabic are likely to take their place  in the minds of some, especially in the more culturally diverse Ireland of today.

But there on the page one could see how rapidly the two languages that had sustained and transmitted the culture of Western Europe for three thousand years were cast off.  This for many was a saddening outcome. For most though, it was a matter of little concern. Does it matter?

I think it does. When the matter of language learning comes up in discussion, I am often reminded of that passage in the Acts of the Apostles  (Acts 2: 5-11) where the followers of  Jesus ventured out into the marketplace of Jerusalem to begin the task of spreading the word.

The languages referred to are those that functioned in the broad Middle East, still a major conflict zone, but also a major source of astonishing wealth, even for Ireland”

“Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians—we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?”

That is a question we might well ask still. The languages referred to are those that functioned in the broad Middle East, still a major conflict zone, but also a major source of astonishing wealth, even for Ireland.

English may have replaced Latin and French as a universal language of diplomacy and trade, but minor languages are still important. And in the universities of modern Ireland a variety  of languages are now taught.

The very great interest of this book is that it reveals the whole nature of Ireland’s efforts to speak in tongues, as one might say. We are a country in which languages have always been important, as Dr Gaffney reveals in such immense and revealing detail.