National identity and belonging among gay ‘new speakers’ of Irish

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.