《《language policy in scotland and__ morthern ireland》.pdf

Daniel Knauer Language Policy in Scotland and Northern Ireland Against the Background of Irish Language Development in the Twentieth Century An essay originally written for the seminar Language and Language Use in Europe in the Twentieth Century Course Tutor: Dr Robert McColl Millar University of Aberdeen School of Language and Literature Aberdeen, November 2004 Published online by PD Dr Joachim Grzega, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, June 2005 © All rights reserved by the author. Introduction The 20th century in Europe saw a strong development of languages—on the one hand, English unquestionably gained hegemony; on the other, the tendency of European countries growing together, forming a union after having developed a variety of cultures and languages for several thousand years, questioned very well the search for a monolingual continent. Moreover, people saw that it is variety that enriches mankind, which led to a European language policy that tries to do the splits between variety, protecting any inherited minority language on the continent, and unity, offering people a common language for international conversation. If you ask an average European nowadays which languages are spoken on the British Isles, he or she will probably reply, the UK is only English-, Ireland English- and Irish- speaking. Thinking about it, he or she will add then that Scotland is bilingual, too. This essay is to show that moreover, Scotland claims and tends to be trilingual, having developed a stronger national