National identity and belonging among gay ‘new speakers’ of Irish
John Walsh | National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
‘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.
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