Gregynog

I’m at a bilingual workshop this week in Wales at Gregynog Hall. The location is fantastic and you don’t really get a sense of the scale of it until you’re here. The focus of the conference is on assessment of bilinguals. It was organized and sponsored by ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practices. There have been a number of interesting talks and exciting discussion. What’s fun about this kind of workshop is that everyone is studying bilingualism albeit in different populations (children and adults for example) and different languages in any number of combinations (including Welsh, Irish, Spanish, Basque, Dutch, and English) and for different purposes (proficiency, ability, dominance). So, I’ll be posting over the next day or so (and probably once I get back) on what I’ve learned here.

Learning a Language Not Spoken by a Community

I was reading today about Irish or Gaelic which is an endangered language (yes, I realize that the story came up because it’s St. Patrick’s day). It struck me that it is a somewhat different bilingual situation from that which we find here in the U.S.– although it might be parallel to taking a foreign language in high school or college. What’s different here is that Irish is required in the Irish school system and that it is Ireland’s official language. Yet, there are fewer and fewer people who speak it.