by Laís Kiehl Laís Kiehl is a Linguistics major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He composed this blog entry on Irish language teaching and language revival in the ‘Language and Minorities in Europe’ (LING 418) course in the spring of 2013. Image Source As we all know, English is the vast majority language spoken in the Republic of Ireland. But did you know that Irish Gaelic, even being considered a minority language, is actively taught in schools? Irish enjoys a prestige status in Ireland, as it is the national and first official language of the Nation. However, it is not the first language spoken by a long shot -- only 3% of the population, located in the Gaeltachtaí, an Irish language speech community, speak Irish as a first language (O Laoire, 2012). Merely looking at that little percentage may cause you to think that Irish is a dead in the water language. You would be mistaken. The ardent prote...