Wow, this discussion is incredibly interesting! Thanks Parallo for bringing it up.
I agree with what you said about the problem of teaching a "native" language as part of a nationalist project. I think that nationalism definitely DOES have an inherent racism to it, if it has an ethnic or racial focus (I suppose you could have non-racist nationalisms that were politically based... like maybe a communist nationalism, or a decolonizing nationalism of indigenous land still occupied by colonizers). This is because any kind of nationalism that is based on race or ethnicity is claiming that a certain kind of person has legitimate claims over territory to the exclusion of others - who are of different races/ethnicities.
So how does this relate to the topic? Well, if we look at the historical shift of European languages, we can see that smaller peasant and
vernacular languages were erased with the rise of print-capitalism, where regional print-languages were developed so that the print industry could profit from publishing. Since most early print was done in Latin (which was a language used primarily by the elite), it was no longer profitable to print solely in Latin since the market wasn't very big. Printers/publishers wanted to selling more books and newspapers to more people, so print languages were adopted - usually one of the dominant vernacular language. Languages like French, English, German, Italian, etc... are all examples of this process. So as these print languages developed, they began to be adopted at the administrative level as well. So we can point to the erasure of small languages and the rise of dominant ones in Europe to the rise of capitalism (aided by the rise of print).
(you can read all about this in a book called "Imagined Communities" by Benedict Anderson)
Once these new print-languages had developed, European nations (rather than kingdoms) were developped based on language. These new nations (previously there was just a whole mix of different populations and cultures living under various royalties) had solid limits - the limits of the national language. Therefore, everyone within the nation had to speak the national language. Nationalism inevitably arose in these situations, since everything that was not the national-language had to be "other", and was therefore not legitimate. So this is where we get back to the question of Irish. I'm not totally clear on the history of the United Kingdom and Ireland, but my understanding is that Irish represents perfectly what I was talking about above as a vernacular language that is being erased by English. Because Irish didn't have a print (according to someone's post, I can't remember who), it has suffered a loss with the rise of english as the primary language learned and the language of print.
So why would people speak English instead of Irish? Well, primarily, it's because of capitalism. However, the situation of the Irish language is complicated by this problem of nationalism. There are a few issues that arise that may be relevant to this discussion:
1) On the one hand, maintaining cultural identity is important for a variety or reasons, and I fully support attempts to not lose cultural differences in favour of monolithic dominant cultures. Yet, I also think it's important to recognize that cultures are never fixed, and are always changing, so they need to be maintained but not at the expense of remaining fixed or rigid. In this situation, we can see the push to maintain Irish as possibly an anti-capitalist resistance, and a refusal to assimilate completely into a dominant culture.
2) On the other hand, the push to make Irish a national language (is this being done?) through the formalization of Irish and turning it into a print-language, figures into the risky terrain of nationalism and capitalism. Irish is of no use to capitalism if it is not a print-language. Making Irish a print/national language can be understood as part of a capitalist project. So rather than being about resisting assimilation into dominant monolithic culture, it becomes about making a new market with fixed limits based on the nation.
So to conclude, I think this is a pretty complicated issue that involves more than just thinking about identity and heritage. I think language can be used to push for nationalism and growing capitalism in a way that is dangerous of repeating the same problems of racism that we've seen all over Europe and other parts of the world. Again, my lack of knowledge of the political history of recent conflict between the UK and Northern Ireland, or the history of Ireland for that matter, doesn't allow me to say much in particular about those cases, but I think the issues I point to are relevant. When a "native" language is pushed at a national level, to be learned in schools, and published in books and newspapers, there is a certain amout of resistant that is going on, but at the same time, there is a risk of becoming dominant and repressive, and being used to serve racism and nationalism. This doesn't mean that "native" languages shouldn't be kept up, but that those involved need to look critically at how this is happening and what implications it might have.
Sorry that this post was so long, I just find the topic incredibly interesting and is very relevant to the work I do. I hope it isn't hard to follow and contributes to the discussion
