Language revival revisited

[KathTheDragon]

But those are all part of a dialect continuum. Welsh, Irish, and English do not belong to any such continuum with each other.

[Dewrad]

There already is plenty of media in Welsh. Some of it even gets consumed.

*LOL!!*

Only one of the best things to come out of British telly.

[linguoboy]

There already is plenty of media in Welsh. Some of it even gets consumed.

*LOL!!*

Only one of the best things to come out of British telly.

Rwy mor grac oherwydd na alla i gael y fersiwn Cymraeg fan hyn.

[echt]

Are you blown away by the English competence of people from the Balkans? Or the Portuguese? Moreover, what proves the causation isn't the other way around?

Actually, when I traveled in the Balkans I was pretty surprised by the amount of English people spoke, particularly when comparing those countries to certain other Central European countries. Not blown away, but it's something I noticed. In my experience, people in the former Yugoslavia really do have more English than people in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and I think the main reason for this is subtitling vs. dubbing. I'm speaking particularly about a passive understanding of the spoken language, particularly among people who either never learned English in school at all or claim not to have paid attention in class. I suppose you could say that Balkan people are more exuberant and extroverted than the reticent Central Europeans, and it may be that English was taught more widely in the former Yugoslavia than in Czechoslovakia prior to 1989 for political reasons or that more English-speaking tourists visited, or that people there are more likely to have relatives who are living abroad. But yeah, this is something I've noticed all over Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, so make of it what you will.

[Dewrad]

There already is plenty of media in Welsh. Some of it even gets consumed.

*LOL!!*

Only one of the best things to come out of British telly.

Rwy mor grac oherwydd na alla i gael y fersiwn Cymraeg fan hyn.

Creda neu beidio, well gen i'r fersiwn dwyieithog na'r fersiwn Cymraeg. Dwi'n meddwl bod Mathias yn fwy diddorol fel allanolwr di-gymraeg. (Hefyd, mae o mor ffit â ffwc, yn y marn fi...)

[marconatrix]

There already is plenty of media in Welsh. Some of it even gets consumed.

*LOL!!*

Only one of the best things to come out of British telly.

Rwy mor grac oherwydd na alla i gael y fersiwn Cymraeg fan hyn.

Creda neu beidio, well gen i'r fersiwn dwyieithog na'r fersiwn Cymraeg. Dwi'n meddwl bod Mathias yn fwy diddorol fel allanolwr di-gymraeg. (Hefyd, mae o mor ffit â ffwc, yn y marn fi...)

Da iawn, dyma un yn y Gymraeg i gyd : S02E01 Welsh with Eng. subs :

http://www.primewire.ag/external.php?ti ... loggedin=0

A diolch i chi yll dau, dwi wedi gwastraffi awr a hanner o'm bywyd wrth wylio hyn. Duw annwyl, erbyn y diwedd roeddwn i'n hollol barod i wthio pob un ohonyn nhw dros y dibyn yn ddidrugaredd.
Let's just say it's slow, not so much ara' deg as ara' dros blydi ben. Partly it's the editing, I could probably edit it down to less than half the length without losing anything important. Long long scenes where people walk around empty building without finding anything at all, or drive around the hills without really getting anywhere. I don't doubt that normal police work in a rural area inhabited by depressed isolated natives nursing lifelong grudges is probably like this, i.e. messy and boring. But it hardly makes good TV. It all goes so s-l-o-w-l-y. They even speak Welsh slowly! But mostly they just brood. Boring characters, boring story such as it is. It's in colour but it feels B&W, dull, drap. And when they do try for a cleverly framed atmospheric shot it just makes it all worse. Several hundred people probably resolved to leave Wales for ever the night this went out. Maybe it's all some cunning plot by the English ...

Sorry but I've watched and enjoyed some of the Scandinavian shows and empathised with their characters even though the settings were alien. Just better writing I suppose. "One of the best things to come out of British telly", really? That's *so* depressing. @Yng : This isn't consumed, rather it consumes the watcher, it eats away your brain and your will to live. Aaaah!

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Key: "Dark blue is dubbing for children only, otherwise subtitling. Purple is dubbing in all cases except non-children's films. Red is all dubbing. "

Within Canada, Quebec should be red; everything is dubbed, even adult stuff. However, when in Montreal, you can simply go and watch the original version without any sub.

that goes for standard Dutch. Nobody is arguing that standard Dutch is endangered. I was talking about the dialects (Zeeuws in my case) which are still going strong despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing in terms of orthography, media or literature in the dialect. Even the regional TV station does everything in standard Dutch, only sporadically having a tiny thing on the dialect (this is word X and it has etymology Y).

Because language switch does not actually work the way most people have written here. The most important thing is not its use in media; it's its use in daily life.

Languages can be quite resilient in very isolated situations. French has endured without much disturbance in most of Quebec, New Acadia and Northeastern Ontario; the latter despite being in an environment that provided almost no media in French. It's probably why Welsh remainded a lot stronger than Irish.

However, Welsh, Irish and French in many parts of Canada, the problem is not really about media, but about daily life.

Children have a huge tendency to level differences. For most of the first six years of my life, speaking French led nowhere; my peers were English more often than not. French was only the language I'd use at home and ostensibly as school. (French schools.) This resulted in my own awkward acquisition of English as a native language, which has surprised many an online person (many expect a thick French/Quebecker accent; I am always happy to disappoint).

If we go back to when Ireland was occupied by the English, you'd found quite some oppression on anything not English. Most effective however was probably this policy, the Plantations of Ireland. Having every lord or master speak a language is a huge incentive to learn it yousefl. Brussels is now French speaking for essentially the same reason in Belgium. (It famously isn't part of the whole Wallon dialects, because it is more closely aligned with Old French and Parisian) It also explains why Irish may be worse off than Welsh, which did not have something that harsh. Still, it had its own issues of dispossession, including this Act, which excluded Welsh as a vehicular language for anything remotely political. These two policies, alone, give more incentive to learn English than anything over the centuries, especially for those who want advance socially; this is exacerbated during the industrialization, especially in Wales.

With people slowly switching to English, localities were increasingly turning bilingual, with all services given in English. Imagine kids, going along together; from my personal experience, we don't maintain distinct languages if we live on the same streets. Somehow, we choose one language, and where I lived that one turned out to be English. (It's French in the old Ecumene of French in Canada, but that's not where I lived.) My older peers were all English; where such immigration from England was important as in Ireland, the effects must have been disastrous.

In Ireland, Wales and Gaelic Scotland, the issue, therefore, isn't really about media. The issue is about being alone and, for the most part, they are not. Include the whole isolating idea that may come with a distinct language, and it may never catch on. A third of Canada used to be Gaelic; it has now dwindled to a small community of less than a few dozens, as far as I know. Something like that may await the Gaelic languages. They're minority languages in their own countries (imagine the Netherlands having only 10% of the people speak Dutch and 90% speak English), and there is no incentive to learn them whatsoever.

Dialects can survive without media; Saguenay twang won't disappear because most TV comes from Montreal. It's related to distinct communities, and Saguenay is probably the most insular community in the whole of Quebec, already insular in its own way. But for Ireland and Wales, insularity got shared with England, and well, it did not favor the Gaelic speakers on either side of the Irish Sea.

[Sumelic]

Because language switch does not actually work the way most people have written here. The most important thing is not its use in media; it's its use in daily life.

Languages can be quite resilient in very isolated situations. French has endured without much disturbance in most of Quebec, New Acadia and Northeastern Ontario; the latter despite being in an environment that provided almost no media in French. It's probably why Welsh remainded a lot stronger than Irish.

However, Welsh, Irish and French in many parts of Canada, the problem is not really about media, but about daily life.

Children have a huge tendency to level differences. For most of the first six years of my life, speaking French led nowhere; my peers were English more often than not. French was only the language I'd use at home and ostensibly as school. (French schools.) This resulted in my own awkward acquisition of English as a native language, which has surprised many an online person (many expect a thick French/Quebecker accent; I am always happy to disappoint).

This all sounds reasonable. In light of this, though, I find your post earlier in this thread about the incursion of English in Japan even more peculiar, so I'd like to ask you to explain it a bit more. 6-year-olds growing up in Japan, with Japanese-speaking peers, will certainly learn Japanese and not English, right? I didn't have the impression that there is a very large community of native English-speakers in Japan, so it's not like these children, no matter how rich their parents, will be growing up with English-speaking peers.

Because of this fact, I find it extremely difficult to believe what you said earlier:

I mean there are some kids going from Kindergarten to University in English only, with some of them losing proficiency in Japanese.

How can their using English later in an academic context, even from as early as kindergarten, cause them to lose proficiency with the Japanese language? Do they stop talking to their friends, family, people at stores? It seems unbelievable. Do they switch to using English with everybody? It seems inconceivable. It sounds like a myth to me, or like an incomplete story that's missing part of the context. By "losing proficiency," are you just talking about character amnesia? If so, it's a rather misleading way of putting it. And the idea that these people lose spoken Japanese proficiency just seems impossible to me: they can't be isolated in their English-speaking classroom all the time, and they and the majority of their peers have Japanese as a native language. Even if they consume English media, read English books, watch English TV, I can't imagine they stop using spoken Japanese to speak to people in their day-to-day life.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

This all sounds reasonable. In light of this, though, I find your post earlier in this thread about the incursion of English in Japan even more peculiar, so I'd like to ask you to explain it a bit more. 6-year-olds growing up in Japan, with Japanese-speaking peers, will certainly learn Japanese and not English, right? I didn't have the impression that there is a very large community of native English-speakers in Japan, so it's not like these children, no matter how rich their parents, will be growing up with English-speaking peers.

Because of this fact, I find it difficult to believe what you said earlier:

I mean there are some kids going from Kindergarten to University in English only, with some of them losing proficiency in Japanese.

How can their using English later in an academic context, even from as early as kindergarten, ccause them to lose proficiency with the Japanese language? Do they stop talking to their friends, family, people at stores? It seems unbelievable. Do they switch to using English with everybody? It seems inconceivable. It sounds like a myth to me, or like an incomplete story that's missing part of the context. By "losing proficiency," are you just talking about character amnesia? If so, it's a rather misleading way of putting it. And the idea that these people lose spoken Japanese proficiency just seems impossible to me: they can't be isolated in their English-speaking classroom all the time, and they and the majority of their peers have Japanese as a native language. Even if they consume English media, read English books, watch English TV, I can't imagine they stop using Japanese to speak to people in their day-to-day life.

I must first say that the emergence of such situations is, for now, rare. But the fact that it exist where I am, which is rather isolated countryside region, forces me to wonder if its not stronger in urban areas, which tend to be the most innovative places. However, this is how it goes.

I have discussed peer relations, but in Japan, something weird happens, where most if not all sociat interactions happen at school between peers. I've been in Japan for 3 years now, and I have yet to see anything similar to the street lives of Canada. (I've had more than enough time to experience it, as much of my work at first closely related to the school curriculae.) I rarely seen children interacting on streets or in any social endeavor that isn't related to school. This does account for a lot of oddities. Funnily, interactions with the parents can come to a strict minimum, to a point of not being able to communicate. I was flabbergasted by the whole thing in a very specific case.

While the whole isolated in English schools thing is still by all accounts rare, it is enough to see a few Japanese exasperated at the whole issue, especially considering the difference in culture. I know of no case beyond kindergarten for total isolation, but until kindergarten, it is quite easy to isolate a child in Japan, considering the lack of street life. Afterwards, it might be impossible yet; I'd need some data about International Scools.

I have been fortunate to meet a Japanese language teacher in such a school; she was lamenting their awful Japanese skills (they mostly wrote Japanese as spoken, bad still in Academic Japanese) but also their general un-Japanese-ness when it comes to things as simple as the use of pencils and erasers. (As a corollary, they still acquired Japanese, but it's definitely not treated as something more than a mere communication tool, and certainly not an academic tool. So the loss of proficiency is, here, qualified : unacademic. There's a huge difference.)

I also have become friends with a young guy who was unlucky enough to be raised in the US until age 13; integration to Japanese schools was a disaster. He's now studying in English in one of Tokyo's English universities.

It's nowhere near a change in momentum, and it's only rare isolated cases, but more than enough to warrant a form of study about this. Yet, it must be like when the first Brusselers decided to swtich to French at first, with an education in French, but people around still using Dutch. (Except that not learning Japanese in Japan can be quite a liability in the long term, though that too may change in the not-so-near-future.)

[Sumelic]

Thanks, I'm a lot less confused about this now. There certainly is a world of difference between not acquiring the written academic register of a language vs. losing proficiency in colloquial spoken language.

Thank you also for mentioning the case of Brussels; I hadn't known about its linguistic history before now, and it was interesting to read about. It may be similar; but then again there are also differences; who can tell. I was sort of mentally comparing the possible, projected future Japan where English has become the dominant academic language with Algeria, where from what I understand French is the main academic language used, and when Arabic is used it is generally Standard Arabic, which is nearly a different language (there has also been some use of English in academic contexts). Despite the fact that the Algerian native language is not used for academic writing, as far as I can tell it doesn't seem like the language is in any immediate danger of disappearing. There are plenty of French loanwords in the vernacular, of course, just as Japanese has a fair amount of English loanwords, but no amount of loanwords is sufficient on its own to effect language change.

Perhaps I've been misunderstanding the slow, but sure path you see Japan as going on, though. If you merely mean that you see Japanese as falling in importance in the academic sphere and in education, and increasing use of English in Japan, you may well be right, however unfortunate that may be. If you mean that you see a significant possibility of English actually becoming the main spoken language in Japan, with Japanese becoming less and less spoken, I still can't see that happening (even considering the greater importance of the school environment in Japanese children's social lives). Your allusion to the language situation in Canada is what made me think you were suggesting the latter, since I believe at least some people have the attitude that French as a native language in Canada is doomed to fade away.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Thanks, I'm a lot less confused about this now. There certainly is a world of difference between not acquiring the written academic register of a language vs. losing proficiency in colloquial spoken language.

There certainly is, and I was (still am?) guilty of quite a loss in academic register in English. (Though it seems to be strong enough to have passing grades.)

Thank you also for mentioning the case of Brussels; I hadn't known about its linguistic history before now, and it was interesting to read about. It may be similar; but then again there are also differences; who can tell. I was sort of mentally comparing the possible, projected future Japan where English has become the dominant academic language with Algeria, where from what I understand French is the main academic language used, and when Arabic is used it is generally Standard Arabic, which is nearly a different language (there has also been some use of English in academic contexts). Despite the fact that the Algerian native language is not used for academic writing, as far as I can tell it doesn't seem like the language is in any immediate danger of disappearing. There are plenty of French loanwords in the vernacular, of course, just as Japanese has a fair amount of English loanwords, but no amount of loanwords is sufficient on its own to effect language change.

Perhaps I've been misunderstanding the slow, but sure path you see Japan as going on, though. If you merely mean that you see Japanese as falling in importance in the academic sphere and in education, and increasing use of English in Japan, you may well be right, however unfortunate that may be. If you mean that you see a significant possibility of English actually becoming the main spoken language in Japan, with Japanese becoming less and less spoken, I still can't see that happening (even considering the greater importance of the school environment in Japanese children's social lives). Your allusion to the language situation in Canada is what made me think you were suggesting the latter, since I believe at least some people have the attitude that French as a native language in Canada is doomed to fade away.

Japan is dissimilar to both in many ways. For instance, there are no English speaking authorities, which precludes many total all-English moves. So, in many ways, it is far from the position of French in both Brussels and Algeria. Academia is still done in Japanese. And the Japanese government would not, for now, go as far as Iceland and produce a huge report in English only.

I am definitely first and foremost thinking about the first situation, which is quite similar to Quebec. A country completely bilingual, where knowledge of both languages will become not merely a bonus, but mandatory to expect any position whatsoever. Being from a place where it is pretty much the case, and now living in one where I feel it at every turn, it has turned me away from Japan as a whole. I am going back.

But, as I see it mostly done in the private sector (that is, in a sector that usually is usually last to change when there is no legal issue), it means something practical, something economically justified, is going on. Quebec has gone that road, and could have indeed completely switched to English in about two generations. And Japan, to my understanding, having about no qualms when it comes to legal issues, going straight into that, I feel something similar to Quebec (which I experienced for 20 years, for better or for worse) going on. Japan does not have Quebec's English infrastructures to be able to switch en masse, but something's fishy about the whole thing, from my perspective.

I do not know if French will go away as a native tongue in the near future in Canada; laws certainly will prevent it in most of Quebec as is now. But a declining use as a vernacular language can be seen from the inside, even in largely French Quebec. Which indeed has made me think about myself, and my own kids. There's always the possibility of a combo like I got, but it's a chancy education if not done right. Might as well go full English.

[clawgrip]

Frankly, I really have trouble imagining Japan switching from Japanese to English in even the remotely near future. Sure, there are many people studying English, but with the quality of English-language education in general combined with the practical differences between the two languages, and of the actual purpose of English education (rather than what people think it's for) makes it just really hard to understand what you're feeling.

You say that there is no street life, but I have seen my own kindergarten-age children interact with strangers in the park. I have seen them interact with people in stores and so on. They have heard announcements, seen outdoor performance type things, and so on in Japanese. I have also seen them interact with their Japanese family members. I have seen them interact with Japanese friends of ours. Real isolation of the sort you insinuate is borderline cruel, as it permits no life outside of school and the immediate family. I have trouble believing there will ever be enough people willing to cut off all interaction, such that the children are even prohibited from talking to their grandparents/aunts/uncles/etc.!

On the academic side, there are certainly some rich folks who send their children international schools, but this is a major exception to the rule. In any society you will have parents sending their children to some sort of class that gives them prestige. Sure, full education in a language not of that area is a bit extreme, but I went to French immersion elementary school in Toronto, and obviously there are no signs that Toronto is shifting towards French as its standard language.

And the key here is prestige. English has always been associated with prestige in Japan. In the Meiji era, Japanese people had to get an extensive, passive knowledge of English (and other European languages) to import all the technological advances that had occurred while Japan was shutting itself up. This eventually became irrelevant, but it was followed up by the rise of the United States after World War II which helped maintain the prestige of English, this time for reasons of cultural export as well as the more business-related reasons. People study English in Japan, but they often don't know why. You would (or maybe you wouldn't) be surprised how many people say "to talk with foreigners" or "for travel" or "to watch movies with no subtitles" even if the only foreigner they interact with is their teacher, or they have only travelled two or three times to Hawaii and Guam where everyone speaks Japanese anyway. These are the best excuses people can come up with, because they don't all know why; many just feel a vague societal pressure to do so. A lot of these people's proficiency plateaus because the differences between English and Japanese are very difficult to overcome (as I am sure you know well), and they don't have any practical use for the language that can push them over the hump.

However, there is one other important reason in Japan for studying English: English proficiency is an arbitrary marker of social prestige. To get into a good university, you need to pass entrance exams that include difficult English tests. To get jobs at a large number of companies, or to get raises, you need to get X score on the TOEIC test. In these cases, English test scores, rather than English itself, are what matter.

My point is that it is only a very small number of people who are learning English for the actual purpose of using the language itself practically on a daily basis to improve their lives, and the rest who study English only do so either out of the need to pass some test that uses English test results as a marker social prestige, or out of some sort of fuzzy social obligation that knowing English is "good" or "cool" or "important". That this society will ever transition from this mostly meaningless use of English into the standard of communication in the country seems highly unlikely.

EDIT: re-reading my post, if I seem a little harsh or excessively argumentative, I apologize!

[clawgrip]

Also, I admit the French immersion argument is not really relevant, because there is really no conceivable reason for a region that speaks English as a vast majority language to switch to any other language.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Frankly, I really have trouble imagining Japan switching from Japanese to English in even the remotely near future. Sure, there are many people studying English, but with the quality of English-language education in general combined with the practical differences between the two languages, and of the actual purpose of English education (rather than what people think it's for) makes it just really hard to understand what you're feeling.

You say that there is no street life, but I have seen my own kindergarten-age children interact with strangers in the park. I have seen them interact with people in stores and so on. They have heard announcements, seen outdoor performance type things, and so on in Japanese. I have also seen them interact with their Japanese family members. I have seen them interact with Japanese friends of ours. Real isolation of the sort you insinuate is borderline cruel, as it permits no life outside of school and the immediate family. I have trouble believing there will ever be enough people willing to cut off all interaction, such that the children are even prohibited from talking to their grandparents/aunts/uncles/etc.!

I was surprised myself when I learned about those cases where the children go out to an English kindergarten in my region and end up speaking no Japanese at all; while I didn't find the whole thing cruel (I can think of many things that may make children not visit family much, including expatriation, where most family members are quite far away, like with one of my cousin), I have found the whole situation weird enough to shock me and try to see how that could happen; as it happens, it's really a weird combination of sururban life where all interactions with the child are done in English. It is not common, admittedly.

On the academic side, there are certainly some rich folks who send their children international schools, but this is a major exception to the rule. In any society you will have parents sending their children to some sort of class that gives them prestige. Sure, full education in a language not of that area is a bit extreme, but I went to French immersion elementary school in Toronto, and obviously there are no signs that Toronto is shifting towards French as its standard language.

I went to a French school in North Bay, ON. However, Canada has its own language issues, and my going to a French school was a garanteed right there... and I have become a rather (un)fortunate product of it.

And the key here is prestige. English has always been associated with prestige in Japan. In the Meiji era, Japanese people had to get an extensive, passive knowledge of English (and other European languages) to import all the technological advances that had occurred while Japan was shutting itself up. This eventually became irrelevant, but it was followed up by the rise of the United States after World War II which helped maintain the prestige of English, this time for reasons of cultural export as well as the more business-related reasons. People study English in Japan, but they often don't know why. You would (or maybe you wouldn't) be surprised how many people say "to talk with foreigners" or "for travel" or "to watch movies with no subtitles" even if the only foreigner they interact with is their teacher, or they have only travelled two or three times to Hawaii and Guam where everyone speaks Japanese anyway. These are the best excuses people can come up with, because they don't all know why; many just feel a vague societal pressure to do so. A lot of these people's proficiency plateaus because the differences between English and Japanese are very difficult to overcome (as I am sure you know well), and they don't have any practical use for the language that can push them over the hump.

I am not; indeed, I was the unfortunate target of such behavior, which has tainted my experience here, and I just got to see a feed on my Facebook about one who's doing exactly that.

And I am fully aware indeed of the whole no-practical use. Even Tabletop RPGs can be done entirely in Japanese, to my odd surprise, amusement and pleasure. (It's been the activity that has been quite effective in making me feel homely here.) I feel the same plateau when it comes to Japanese, incidently; I have to kick myself out of my plateau to actually start learning new stuff, but I've generally been able to find ways to make me need new Japanese.

However, there is one other important reason in Japan for studying English: English proficiency is an arbitrary marker of social prestige. To get into a good university, you need to pass entrance exams that include difficult English tests. To get jobs at a large number of companies, or to get raises, you need to get X score on the TOEIC test. In these cases, English test scores, rather than English itself, are what matter.

My point is that it is only a very small number of people who are learning English for the actual purpose of using the language itself practically on a daily basis to improve their lives, and the rest who study English only do so either out of the need to pass some test that uses English test results as a marker social prestige, or out of some sort of fuzzy social obligation that knowing English is "good" or "cool" or "important". That this society will ever transition from this mostly meaningless use of English into the standard of communication in the country seems highly unlikely.

EDIT: re-reading my post, if I seem a little harsh or excessively argumentative, I apologize!

The first part of this is one reason I'm getting out, though I am sure my own children would probably be able to get English proficiency anyway, given I'm sure I'd still use English in my daily life. (I never did the tests myself, though; I'll have to do one, eventually, I suppose.) Proficiency tests are a huge culture in Japan, with this plethora of tests being one of the subjects at my seminar last year, so it's not only about English, though the test-as-a-badge is quite a thing. (Incidently, as a Quebecker, this whole culture falls flat on me; our focus on actual proficiency is quite different.)

But I know English is not exactly near any tipping point in terms of actual knowledge or proficiency in Japan, but I find the whole thing quite disturbing in itself too. And I am still wondering if this might actually happen in the long term. French is slowly giving way in Montreal today, despite Law 101, and I am speaking of my huge bunch of bona fide Quebeckers; I wouldn't be surprised if that could happen to Japan in the long term, given time to produce its first generation of English university graduates, considering everything they seem to be trying.

(1. French isn't disappearing from Montreal, and they still use French. However, the use of French has strong parallels with the use of Luxemburgish and French in Luxembourg. It's an interesting development.

2. Funnily, Japan is being bitten by the whole English thing; most people visiting Japan today come from non-English speaking Asian countries, to the annoyance of many tourism bureaus. It's highly educational, and entertaining to watch from the inside.)

And no, you don't, and your needed contribution is appreciated.

[jal]

Although I can't find figures supporting it (the CBS* site seems void of language / dialect statistics), recent decades have spoken of both massive dialect loss and revival attempts in the Netherlands. sirdanilot's anecdotal evidence notwithstanding, my understanding is that dialect use is dwindling in large parts of the Netherlands, with strongholds in Limburg and Frisia**.

*Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics
**I'm aware Frisian is a language, but I side with sirdanilot that the difference between (strongly divergent) dialect and language is of no importance with regards to this discussion.

EDIT: Note that the situation is radically different in Belgium, and that since sirdanilot lives in an isolated part of the Netherlands that borders Belgium, Zeeuws Vlaanderen may also be an exception to the rule. My own anecdotal evidence suggests the situation is radically different on the other Zeeland islands.


JAL

[linguoboy]

There's an interesting wrinkle to the situation in Ireland: The constitution is officially bilingual but--in cases of conflict--the Irish version takes precedence. Nowadays amendments are draughted first in English and then translated, rather than being worked out in parallel, as was earlier the case. Here's a brief article on some of the complications involved, with specific reference to the recent referendum on same-sex marriage.

[marconatrix]

There's an interesting wrinkle to the situation in Ireland: The constitution is officially bilingual but--in cases of conflict--the Irish version takes precedence. Nowadays amendments are draughted first in English and then translated, rather than being worked out in parallel, as was earlier the case. Here's a brief article on some of the complications involved, with specific reference to the recent referendum on same-sex marriage.

It struck me that bilingual drafting, especially in two dissimilar languages, would help focus on the underlying meaning/intention of the legislation, rather than the superficial form of words. The danger I suppose is that even then, once the process becomes bedded in, there would simply arise parallel sets of matching jargon with a one-to-one correspondence in each language.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

It struck me that bilingual drafting, especially in two dissimilar languages, would help focus on the underlying meaning/intention of the legislation, rather than the superficial form of words. The danger I suppose is that even then, once the process becomes bedded in, there would simply arise parallel sets of matching jargon with a one-to-one correspondence in each language.

In Canada, this is exactly what happens. There are one-to-one corresponding terms in each language. Due to Quebec's constitutional requirement to have all laws translated into English, you have the whole civil code translated into Legalese English, while, due to New Brunswick's bilingual institutions, common law terms have been worked out by the University of Moncton as required. So while the intention is still important, parallelisms are probably the norm.

[Copperknickers]

What I also find funny is that the situation of Irish (official language, orthography, lots of literature, more speakers) is worse than the situation of my native dialect of Dutch (not recognized as a language, no fixed orthography, almost no literature at all, only about 100.000? speakers). Children here in the villages still learn my dialect (Zeeuws) and it's normal in the villages to speak it. It has only been lost in the larger towns.
Even I, coming from parents not originally speakers of Zeeuws, have learned the dialect through friends who spoke it. I know a lady who is virtually monolingual in Zeeuws. Although there is hardly any written material due to lack of an orthography, people are starting little websites, make music in Zeeuws and there are all sorts of Zeeuws facebook groups and stuff like that to keep the language alive.

Why can a bunch of farmers and fishermen on some remote south-western Dutch islands do better than the Irish?

Everyone has been forgetting the key fact in the cases of Scotland and Ireland: Irish and Gaelic are not the traditional languages of the main population centres of Ireland and Scotland and haven't been for 500 years. In Scotland we speak Scots, in Ireland they speak Hiberno English, one of the more unintelligible English dialects when in full flow. After the highland clearances, Gaelic pretty much dissappeared as a major language in Scotland and existed only in islands and highland areas. People do make music and websites and Facebook groups for their regional languages, but their regional languages are dialects of English, same as in the Netherlands with Dutch. The only places where people still speak Gaelic are infested with monolingual English speakers, and in the case of some of the Irish ones are so small you can throw a stone from one end to the other. They're little more than glorified hamlets excepting the bigger ones in Donegal, Southern Connaught and the Aran islands.