Suchergebnisse

While the dominant narrative of Irish nationalism occludes Irish-speakers' participation in the First World War, the war is a key component of the story of the Irish language in the early twentieth century and is the critical element in understanding Conradh na Gaeilge/the Gaelic League's politicization, radicalization and ultimate demise as one of the most powerful forces in Irish cultural politics. Controversies concerning recruitment and conscription played critical roles in shaping public attitudes within Irish-language discourse. The war not only created the conditions for the League's radicalization but also triggered Douglas Hyde's departure as president in 1915. The Great War politicized the Gaelic League and the British reaction to the Rising helped to establish the relationship between physical force nationalism and the Irish language that has become a familiar feature of the cultural memory of the revolutionary era in early twentieth-century Irish history.

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between the game of cricket and the Irish language in Ireland. In our analysis, dictionaries are invoked as indices of formations of cultural purity and political power, documents of defiance, tools of codification, assertions of confidence, representations of linguistic identity. By examining the treatment of the term "cricket" in Irish language dictionaries from the eighteenth‐century to the present day, we find an index of cultural values, responding and adapting to ongoing changing cultural power and capital. This demonstrates how the game, and its translated presence in the lexicography of the native language, functions as a form of cultural hybridity in the nineteenth‐century, yet is cleansed in the twentieth as part of the process of Irish cultural purity (as it fights for an established postcolonial nationhood). The article offers a new way of understanding social and linguistic conventions, in the context of the colonial/postcolonial, and how such conventions function in the field of sport. Given the dominance (with the exception of India) of English as the lingua franca of sport's colonial and ludic diffusion, the article's ability to access and interrogate the processes of inclusion/exclusion in the linguistic and sporting Irish setting marks it out as an original and innovative way of understanding how cultural transfers occurred and were later annulled.