Overt and symbolic linguistic violence: plantation ideology and language reclamation in Northern Ireland

‘The university seeks to create and sustain a neutral working environment that values and celebrates the diversity of all its staff and its student body, in accordance with its charter and statutes.’

Letter from former vice-Chancellor McElnay to An Cumann Gaelach, QUB in 2018

When An Cumann Gaelach (the Irish Society) at Queen’s University Belfast organised a movement to restore Irish language signage to campus in 2018, the university pointed to the desire for a ‘neutral working environment’ (emphasis ours) as a reason for rejecting the effort. The irony of invoking diversity in this argument for monolingual English signage in Northern Ireland highlights the invisibility of linguistic violence that has been naturalised through centuries of colonial contact. In this Point of Departure (PoD) we explore the conditions and consequences of linguistic violence in Northern Ireland, and specifically the idea of neutrality, through two theoretical lenses. First, through a Bourdieusian analysis of symbolic power and linguistic capital. Next, through the idea of language reclamation, a specific theoretical orientation that emphasises the potential for language to disrupt the inequities resulting from colonialism. ‘Universities are territorial spaces’, argue Holmes et al. (2012 197), and the spatial and temporal nature of this territoriality shape the relations that are constructed and sustained with the institution, including, in this case of Northern Ireland, plantation ideologies that continue to inform language practice and policy in higher education. The teaching of Irish is conventional in that the modules offered cover what one might expect of a modern language course (e.g. vocabulary, grammar, literature). As with the teaching of other modern languages, Irish language is presented as an object—a set of skills to be acquired and that can be abstracted from context. This reductive, disciplinary approach severs connections between the Irish language and its home ecology, and it benefits the university by limiting the possibilities for examining the actual and symbolic violence wreaked on the language by settler colonialism, along with the acute divisions between predominantly Republican Nationalists and British Loyalists. This depoliticisation of language teaching and, more generally, language use is in keeping with the university’s stated aims of neutrality.

This PoD is intentionally local. We write together in Béal Feirste, a place that has been home to humans for millenia, and a place whose landscapes and human-land relations have been transformed by centuries of colonialism. The university that employs us was established when Ireland was still an all-island ‘doorstep colony’ – a genealogy that has deep implications for the work performed in this place. We attend closely to place in this PoD to disrupt the ‘colonial legacies of placeless-ness in the research enterprise’ (Marker 2018, 461), and we call for attention to the ways that relations within and with place are made, primarily through language.

Planting the seeds for Gaeilge as a political object

Because of centuries of colonial pressure and violence, Gaeilge (the Irish language) has long been a highly politicised and marginalised language in Northern Ireland, one of the four jurisdictions of the UK1, despite being indigenous to the island of Ireland (Mac Ionnrachtaigh 2021; McVeigh and Rolston 2021). In forcibly and permanently dispossessing people of their language and land, settler colonial rule in Ireland severed speakers’ connections to Gaeilge and, subsequently, to relationships that were mediated through Gaeilge. Local populations were ruthlessly subordinated to the non-indigenous settlers associated with the English crown, and language (i.e. the promotion of English and suppression of Gaeilge) was an early tool of control.

The hegemonic and homogenising intentions of settler colonialism continue to reverberate in modern discourses that frame the Irish language as ‘politically charged’ to such an extent that a proposed Acht na Gaeilge (Irish Language Act) to give Gaeilge and English equal status contributed to a three-year (2017-2020) collapse of the power-sharing government in Northern Ireland.2 Though the Executive of Northern Ireland was reinstated in January 2020, following talks that resulted in the New Decade, New Approach (NDNA) (The UK Government, 2020), unfulfilled proposals for the legislation and implementation of a role for an Irish language commissioner prompted Westminster (the British Parliament) to take charge of implementing Irish language legislation if the Stormont Executive failed to do so. The parties to the NDNA, the British and Irish governments, recognised the need ‘to respect the freedom of all persons in Northern Ireland to choose, affirm, maintain and develop their national and cultural identity’ (15). To support these efforts, a framework for new legislation was developed to create:

An Office of Identity and Cultural Expression to promote cultural pluralism and respect for diversity, build social cohesion and reconciliation and to celebrate and support all aspects of Northern Ireland’s rich cultural and linguistic heritage.

Legislation to create a Commissioner to recognise, support, protect and enhance the development of the Irish language in Northern Ireland and to provide official recognition of the status of the Irish Language in Northern Ireland. (15)

The legislation to support, protect and develop Irish in public life, including in the Assembly, is an important step forward in the defence of language and identity rights. The proposed legislation will also finally implement the 1998 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement, which brought three decades of sectarian and ethnic conflict between mostly Irish Catholics and Ulster (loyalist and unionist3) Protestants, known as The Troubles or Na Trioblóidí (and internationally known as the Northern Ireland conflict) to an end. Unsurprisingly, there has been speculation by various Irish language groups and advocates (for example, an Dream Dearg and Conradh na Gaeilge) on whether any legislation proposed by Westminster will fully substantiate, protect, and promote the linguistic freedoms and opportunities for Irish language speakers in Northern Ireland. This historical and political context is essential to understanding how we conceptualise language, education, and the university in this place.

According to research for the European Parliamentary Research Service, close to half of the six thousand languages spoken across the world are in danger of disappearing (Passikowska-Schnass 2016). Ninety seven percent of the world’s population speaks 4% of the world’s languages, such as English, Spanish, Russian and Arabic, while approximately 3% speak about 96% of the remaining languages (UNESCO 2003). As in other countries (for example, New Zealand, Australia, Scotland and Wales, and Cherokee, Ojibwe and Navajo programmes in the USA), community members have turned to schools to reclaim language that can no longer be maintained in English-dominant homes (Hornberger 2008; Ó Baoill 2007). Despite its growth in popularity, Irish-medium education (IME) has not, unsurprisingly, received the same levels of state support and funding (McKendry 2017), particularly from the Department of Education, as has heritage language4 education in the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Though the Belfast Agreement’s official recognition of Irish in 1998 helped to create a more favourable political environment to IME, it is still undermined by hostility to the language that stems from ideologies that have occupied the island of Ireland since the 1600s, when the architects of the ‘plantation’ of Ulster declared that successive generations would be English in ‘tongue and heart’. The plantation of mainly Presbyterians from southern Scotland and Anglicans from northern England, a clear settler colonial strategy, resulted in the expulsion of native Irish speakers and landowners to the westerly, barren, and unfertile lands of Ireland, which are today still referred to as the Gaeltacht areas of Ireland (Irish speaking areas). The plantation was also designed to sever ties between the Gaelic Highlands of Scotland and Gaeilge Ulster (Northern Ireland), regions that were resistant to English control (Steven 2014) (Gaelic Scotland also experience cultural and linguistic violence as in, for example, The Highland Clearances. See Devine 2018). Issues of land ownership were worsened by the introduction of the Penal Laws (c.1691-1760), a set of coercive laws to uphold the establishment of the Church of England in Ireland to disenfranchise, disarm and segregate the native majority from economic, religious, political, and educational power (McGrath 1996) – an example of the potential for collusion among religious, educational, and political institutions in empire-building.

The victory of the English language in this territorial and ideological struggle has been so thorough in its replacement of Gaeilge, and its close relationship with the mainly Republican Nationalists so contentious, that Northern Ireland’s largest university rejected Irish language signage because Gaeilge undermined its ‘neutral’ stance (Belfast Telegraph 2018), a neutrality which tacitly endows English with distinction and authority. In the university’s view, the absence of Irish language signage highlighted the institution’s commitment to ‘providing a good and harmonious environment free of flags, emblems, posters, graffiti or other materials or actions or language likely to be provocative, offensive or intimidatory’ (personal correspondence from Queen’s University, 6 March, 2018. Authors’ italics). This discursive construction of the indigenous language as disruptive and dangerous echoes centuries-old discourses of the barbaric Irish, not only legitimising English as necessary to the university’s work of knowledge creation, but also naturalising the use of English in this place as the outcome of consensual shifts in local language practice. Arguably, insistence on neutrality has also served to depoliticise the language in both teaching and research.

Coercive control in England’s door-step colony

The minoritised languages of the United Kingdom consist of Celtic languages such as Welsh, Scottish Gaelic (Gaidhlig), Irish (Gaeilge), Manx and Cornish (neither of which have UK Governmental policies), and other minoritised languages used by immigrants and heritage speakers. Celtic languages have experienced threats of erasure from a variety of colonial processes. On the island of Ireland, these threats included practices of coercion, control, surveillance, dominance, discrimination, and dehumanising the catholic Irish. The suppression of Gaelige was a UK settler colonial strategy to neutralise the language and sever the Irish from their Celtic roots (i.e. speaking, relating, being as Gaeilge).

Further, as Lloyd (2011) observes, the settler colonial nature of the British in Ireland was epitomised by the prison system that was established in tandem with the ‘virtually continuous Coercion Acts – declarations of emergency – by which nineteenth century Ireland was controlled. Such was the failure of hegemony – or ‘improvement’ – that coercion became the norm’ (11). The state that developed in Ireland and then Northern Ireland (after 1922), including, as Lloyd notes, institutions such as national penal and policing systems, the national school system, ordnance survey, and the census, was ‘paradoxically precociously modern’ – they developed in the UK’s ‘doorstep’ colony long before they were used in the ‘imperial core’ (Lloyd 2011, 13). Social and cultural practices were also the target for improvement or eradication – the language, culture, and social practices, such as Ireland’s rich oral tradition. Coercive methods of control continued long after the colonial enterprise ended and manifested in the counter-insurgency that resulted in The Troubles between 1967–1998 (Lloyd 2011). Not only was the Irish/Northern Irish body, particularly the catholic body, subject to coercion, restriction, and control, the language as the means of communication had also to be brought under control, and preferably made extinct. Just as land might be cleared and seeded for monoculture plantations, the linguistic landscape has been violently altered to give English the upper hand.

Reproduction of inequality through neutrality

IME has, for decades, played an important role in stabilising and decriminalising the minoritised Irish community of Northern Ireland. Vital as this role has been, reliance on a single institution to reinstate desired chains of ‘mother tongue’ transmission poses challenges for educators and families alike, and formal education alone is not enough to secure the language. Technologies, environments, and social structures that support the contextualised and relational nature of language are also necessary to linguistic regeneration. It is this relational aspect of language that is central to our discussion, and which may be absent in the teaching of Irish, as well as in the university’s view of the role of English in higher education in Northern Ireland.

Recognising that formal education is a powerful means by which to maintain or destroy minoritised languages, the university has potential for ‘world-making’ with (and without) indigenous and colonial languages (la paperson 2017). Collective understandings of the nature of the world are co-constructed in educational settings and there are complex epistemological and ontological issues involved when we consider the role of languages in this sense-making endeavour. Languages are reflections of the communities they come from and the knowledge systems of those communities. For instance, many Indigenous communities in North America rely on relational epistemologies to describe scientific concepts associated with the natural world (Bang, Marin, and Medin 2018). While many of these ideas have recently been translated into English, they have long been expressed in Indigenous languages, reflecting widely varying ideas of what ‘counts’ as knowledge and how it is recognised as such. This influences the kinds of questions we ask, the ways in which we ask them, and thus, how we continue to ‘make the world.’ Values are entangled in this process, calling into question the possibility of neutrality in monolingualism.

The university (in Northern Ireland) has long maintained a stance of neutrality with respect to the Irish language. However, neutrality is a position and in the case of Gaeilge, it means that an institution invested with power and status, both symbolic and real, took no action against the diminishment of the status of the language. By failing to recognise that Gaeilge could have parity with English, the university tacitly supported the hegemony of English. It supported, in other words, the reproduction of power relations between Gaeilge and English speakers:

3.2.2.1.2. In any given social formation, the PW [pedagogic work] through which the dominant PA [pedagogic action] is carried on always has a function of keeping order, [Authors’ italics] i.e. of reproducing the structure of the power relations between the groups or classes, inasmuch as, by inculcation or exclusion, it tends to impose recognition of the legitimacy of the dominant culture. (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990, 40)

The paradox of communication is that it presupposes a common medium – the English language, for example – that is homogenous and autonomous. What this means is that language is taken to be an objective entity, existing as if it were free from its political or social contexts, while in fact language reproduces inequality and is the mode of communication of the dominant class imposed on subordinate classes (English over Irish). Language is not neutral, and it is not unified or a unifying force. Language carries symbolic power and the traces of the social structures which habituate speakers into certain modes of speaking (and thinking). We use language to exert power, to coerce, as tools of intimidation or disparagement or condescension, to assert authority, to be polite. Accents, dialect, choices of phrases or words mark out our class and social positions. The dominance of a language (or mode of speech) is also the product of a complex set of social, historical, and political conditions, such as colonialism and postcolonialism. Why does the speech of the dominant class monopolise not just our learning, but our forms of speech? In Language and Symbolic Power (1991), Bourdieu explains why the upper classes favoured the language of the Ile de France which became the official language of France after the French Revolution. They already spoke it. The policy of linguistic unification favoured those who already possessed the official language, the upper classes of Paris, and these forms of speech became the most desirable way to speak (in mediaeval Scotland, Gaelic and Scots were supplanted by Norman French, which became widely spoken amongst the aristocracy as a mark of distinction). The normalisation and inculcation of the official language depended also on the educational system. The production of dictionaries, grammar books, a corpus of texts all of which promoted correct usage, the establishment of qualifications, not only normalised the desired language, ‘correct’ speech and written language, it also meant that the bearers of the correct ‘instruments of expression’ succeeded in the ‘market’ or ‘field’ (Bourdieu 1992). In other words, high amounts of not only cultural and scholastic capital, but also economic capital, acquired through teaching and learning, family connections, and so on, were invested in English to give it enduring symbolic and real power.

The power and ideas of the dominant class come to seem natural and legitimate through symbolic violence, which is the subtle imposition of an arbitrary culture by means of ‘pedagogic action’ (teaching) (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). Neutrality also achieves this effect. Formal education’s role in reproducing inequality occurs through the hidden linkages between scholastic aptitude and cultural heritage, where the dominant class encourage the education system to reproduce the legitimate culture as it stands, and to produce agents capable of manipulating it legitimately. In Northern Ireland, the imposition of a linguistic culture is not arbitrary, and it is not subtle – but is the consequence of centuries of colonisation. One of the complex means by which colonisation can achieve its purpose is through the habitus - or telepathy – a cultural arbitrary and symbolic violence:

Serpentine: ‘When I think to you, the thought, so far as it finds corresponding ideas and suitable words in your mind, is reflected in your mind’. (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990, 71)

The epigraph artfully sums up how the habitus operates. It is the means by which we unconsciously absorb our values from our social milieu. The reason the imposition is ‘arbitrary’ is because it is difficult to identify a universal principle, whether physical, biological, or spiritual. The linguistic or cultural arbitrary is not based on ‘nature of things’, though the dominant tend to offer as explanation that English (or any other hegemonic language) is the natural order of things. Everyday linguistic exchanges bear the traces of socio-historical-political conditions that are reproduced through unequal selection - English over Irish, scholastic English over vernacular English:

[Language] provides, together with a richer or poorer vocabulary, a more or less complex system of categories, so that the capacity to decipher and manipulate complex structures, whether logical or aesthetic, depends partly on the complexity of the language transmitted by the family. (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990, 73)

In universities, the mode of imposition (teaching/instruction) is designed to match, and reinforce, the cultural and linguistic capitals of its students; the students’ own capitals reinforce, give credence to, and sanctify the symbolic power of the institution: they are mutually legitimising. This is achieved by the courses available, methods of teaching (imposition/pedagogic communication), academic hierarchy, learning environments, examinations, timelines, and types and kinds of degrees conferred – in which English dominates. The ‘mortality rate’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990) of the Irish language is high and increasing as speakers disappear from the land. We acquiesce, unconsciously, to our inculcation, while believing we are freely doing so. The violence is invested/obscured in the mechanisms which give rise to and reproduce social power relations which are themselves arbitrary but legitimate. English, particularly its scholastic variants, is also a marker of distinction and the instrument of social success: Gaeilge carries no such markers. Arguably, the university acquiesced to symbolic violence wreaked against Gaeilge through its pretence of neutrality and conserved the dominance of the dominant social classes. In doing so, cultural, and linguistic unification was achieved by the imposition of the dominant language as legitimate, thereby throwing into indignity the indigenous language. Indeed, ‘by rising to a universality, a particular language causes all others to fall into particularity’ (Bourdieu 1998, 46). The consequence is, according to Bourdieu, that the ‘universalisation of requirements’ brought about the legitimation of a particular language ‘does not come with a universalisation of access to the means need to fulfil them’. Lack of access ‘fosters both the monopolisation of the universal by the few and the dispossession of all others, who are, in a way, thereby mutilated in their humanity (Bourdieu 1998, 46–47).

An analysis of linguistic capital also aids us in clarifying how we might see the potential transformations of hierarchy and human investment in language use when language instruction is de-institutionalised/re-institutionalised. Community-based immersion schooling for language reclamation purposes is necessarily disruptive: it upends the hegemony of the colonial language by institutionalising the minoritised, indigenous language as an academic register. However, immersive education alone will not secure linguistic regeneration or subvert plantation attitudes toward language as a commodity. Its relational nature needs the support of parents, peers, institutional, and political resources – a challenge for institutions reluctant to reckon with local language histories, including Higher Education.

Language reclamation, place, and (in)visibility in higher education

The dominance of English in higher education, certainly in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, is often kept out of institutional moves toward diversity and inclusion. It is invisibilised and unmarked—this is how it escapes undetected as a tool of ‘neutrality’, and it serves as a settler colonial technology (la paperson 2017) that allows universities to act ‘as homogenising agents for a heterogeneous population’ (Sterzuk 2015, 54), further removing context and place-ness from knowledge generation. Settler colonial technologies are tools that construct the conditions of empire, enforcing collective notions of who has certain rights and perceptions of fairness, and they work alongside policy to determine recognisable ‘conditions of humanity’ (Squire and Nicolazzo 2019, 7). The English language serves as one such tool in Northern Ireland, particularly when it is presented as a neutral (and therefore more acceptable) medium of knowledge-generation despite local community desires for the indigenous language. It is important to note that, as objects of study, indigenous and other languages are typically welcomed into academic spaces and even pointed to as evidence of the diversity that institutions aim to develop and protect for the greater good. These languages are viewed by many universities as static systems or codes that can be learned about, while English remains the medium for learning through.

Richards (1993) describes the work of universities as accumulating an archive of knowledge for the purpose of building and maintaining empire, a living record of the colonial project that also serves to legitimise it (Lowe 2015; Said 2012). Colonialism is a structural phenomenon (Tuck and Yang 2012) that relies on specific practices of coercion and control (e.g. forced removal of people from their homelands, resource extraction, incarceration, as we noted above) (Wolfe 2006) across a range of institutions (e.g. education, housing, military) to maintain its established hierarchies. Calls for decolonising the university aim to transform higher education institutions, though with a tendency to focus on ‘decolonising’ methods and theory (Shahjahan et al. 2021), which is more likely to affect research and outputs rather than teaching and administrative policy. Decolonising courses of action at the level of curriculum and teaching are less commonly addressed (Shahjahan et al. 2021) and tend to be left up to the individual to navigate within existing entrenched structures (Cushing-Leubner et al. 2021). Language plays a crucial role in this work, mediating our understanding of these often invisibilised colonial practices and demanding new ways to represent the world.

Recalling Tuck and Yang’s (2012) definition of decolonisation as literally ‘unsettling’ (i.e. a return of sovereignty and human-land relations in colonised places), decolonising the university can seem an impossible task for individual scholars for we cannot return land. Nevertheless, we can work to restore human-land relations, particularly those of us who teach and do research in places that have experienced colonial disruptions. This requires an attention to place and the specific practices and structures associated with the coloniality of that place—practices and structures such as ideologies of language that view diversity as something that can be achieved through a policy of selective monolingualism. The restoration of human-land relations in a place like Northern Ireland demands a shift in our understanding of the role of non-dominant languages as more than objects of study. Gaeilge, for instance, is a living language that connects its users with one another and with old and new ways of knowing. Reclaiming the language, especially in institutional spaces, contributes to the restoration of relations that colonialism has disrupted and making the linguistic violence of erasure more visible.

Leonard (2011) first developed language reclamation as a re-imagined alternative to dominant practices and ideologies associated with language revitalisation, a global grassroots movement to maintain and grow the numbers of speakers/users of Indigenous languages. Language reclamation requires a focus on community-specific desires around language, culture, and sovereignty rather than simply on language proficiency and technical skill (McCarty et al. 2018). This is what makes reclamation ‘decolonising’. Its aim goes well beyond increasing numbers of speakers and instead seeks to re-establish sovereignty and relations in place, including in immersive settings. Though it was developed through scholarly engagement with Indigenous languages, language reclamation has generative potential beyond linguistics and language-related disciplines. With a reclamation approach, language is not the endpoint, but rather a starting point to address grave colonial processes of dispossession and to re-establish relations among people, practices, and place. For higher education, this orientation requires an attention to genealogies of knowing and attendant structures of power that continue to determine what ‘counts’ as legitimate knowledge in a particular place and why. Orienting to indigenous language as an endpoint makes it all too easy to treat indigenous languages as objects or skills rather than living, dynamic phenomena. This product-based orientation is currently the predominant one in higher education. However, if language is seen as a starting point for inquiry, then scholars are called instead to focus on cultivating connections in and with language rather than on measuring proficiency and counting speakers.

Language reclamation rejects English as a ‘neutral’ object, and it rejects conceptualising knowledge as acontextual. Language reclamation insists on looking to Gaeilge and its users for sense-making in context in Northern Ireland.

Final remarks

There is a need for research and activism in higher education that can intervene in the colonial business-as-usual of our ‘world-making’ (la paperson 2017) institutions. Language reclamation (Leonard 2012, 2018, 2019, 2021) offers a theoretical orientation that is antithetical to higher education’s ‘disciplined’ view of the world. This decolonising framework goes well beyond resisting the linguistic conformity of English hegemony, and instead centres local, indigenous language as a site for action that can reinstate and sustain relations (Leonard 2018). Importantly, language reclamation is both a praxis and a theoretical orientation. It is something a person, institution or community can do, and it is an orientation that puts indigenous ontologies at the heart of knowledge construction.

There is growing enthusiasm around framing language access and visibility as a right. It is tied in with academic freedom for us as scholars and with the rights of the individual. McCarty et al. (2018, 161) write about the ‘inherent human right to learn, use, and transmit a language of heritage and birth’. Through a language reclamation approach, a discussion of ‘rights’ is less concerned with what we are entitled to as individuals and more concerned with how we might contribute to the collective. Indigenous language teaching is the start, shifting our thinking toward community and place. What if, instead of asking permission for individuals to use indigenous language in university spaces, we asked different questions of our institutions? How does the university understand the story of its relations with people in this place, its obligations to future generations? How might indigenous language reclamation serve as a potential technology of unmaking or remaking in education? The politicisation of Gaeilge is not representative of some feature inherent in the language itself, but is, rather, evidence of a long and complex struggle with coloniality in Northern Ireland. Relying on the presumed ‘neutrality’ of English for protecting diversity and producing knowledge can limit our vision of what is actually happening and what is actually possible. We do not yet know the full range of connections that can be built across disciplines in and with indigenous language. However, these connections represent a pathway for shifting from neutrality to decoloniality, and has the potential to reimagine university priorities to the benefit of an increasingly diverse student body, local communities, and environmental health in a shared place.

Finally, and in a highly significant move that marks Irish as a member of the community of living languages, and which should surely provoke fresh analysis on neutrality, whether in signage or in teaching and research, the language attained full working language status in the EU (European Union) on the 1st of January 2022. For the Irish President, Michael D Higgins, attainment to full status is recognition of ‘our specific identity as a people with a distinctive language of our own that we use alongside all the other languages we use and respect.’ This is now the time, the President stated, to place the language at the heart of not only European affairs, but also in the everyday lives of the Irish: ‘I gcroílár gnóthaí laethúla na hEorpa; i gcroílár an tsaoil sa Bhaile ‘ (Higgins 2020).