Multilingualism in Dublin: Home language use among primary school children, report on a pilot survey

Abstract

Travellers who arrive at Dublin airport from abroad easily receive the impression that they have arrived in a bilingual country. However, whilst both English and Irish appear on official signage, the languages they frequently hear are Russian and Polish. Mac Éinrí and White (2008: 153) suggest that ‘Ireland’s historical demographic and migration profile can fairly be described as unique, at least in European terms.’ Unlike its neighbours, large‐scale population diversity has been a recent phenomenon in Ireland. In the 1990s, the country’s economy began to prosper (referred to as the Celtic Tiger), and contributed to a reversal of the well‐trodden path of Irish emigration towards England, North America and beyond. A surge of immigrants arrived in Ireland from every continent. Newcomers – professionals, seasonal migrant workers, asylum seekers, refugees – along with returning Irish emigrants, created an entirely different demographic and linguistic profile in the space of a decade. Kallen (2010: 55) highlights how the ‘linguistic landscape in Dublin is undergoing a profound change’. This shifting city landscape is observable both in ‘“top‐down”, official signage’ (ibid: 42) in the civic domain – where state agencies now frequently provide information in Russian, Polish, Arabic and Mandarin Chinese in addition to English and Irish – through to prolific multilingual entrepreneurial signage, and even at the level of street detritus (ibid: 55).