National identity and belonging among gay ‘new speakers’ of Irish
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2019-03Author
Walsh, John
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Walsh, John. (2019). National identity and belonging among gay ‘new speakers’ of Irish. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 8(1), 53-81. doi: https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.18008.wal
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Abstract
New speakers refer to people who use a language regularly but are not traditional
native speakers of that language. Although this discussion has been
going on for some time in other sub-disciplines of linguistics, it is more
recent in research about European minoritised languages. A feature of discourse
around such languages relates to their perceived suitability for
diverse urban settings removed from their historical rural heartlands. Irish
is an example of a minoritised language which was long associated with
conservative rural communities, a reified Catholic discourse of national
identity and language ideologies based on nativism. Such an approach not
only marginalised urban new speakers of Irish but also exhibited hostility to
LGBTQ citizens who did not befit its particular version of Irishness. In this
paper, a framework of Critical Sociolinguistics is used to analyse identity
positions and ideologies expressed by urban new speakers of Irish who
identify as gay and/or queer.