Family language policy, first language Irish speaker attitudes and community-based response to language shift

This paper describes the complex and sometimes ambiguous attitudes of Gaeltacht Irish speakers towards the intergenerational transmission of Irish. It focuses on first language speaker data that was gathered as part of a larger field-based project among fluent, habitual speakers of Irish in the Múscrai Gaeltacht region in County Cork, Ireland, and compares the findings to Riagain's study of the more strongly Irish-speaking Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht some 20 years beforehand. It concludes by describing a contemporary in-group initiative to encourage Irish-language socialisation and some of the challenges faced in persuading Irish speakers of the merits of an all-Irish household approach to language retention.