In these circumstances, any attempt to revive the declining culture or to decolonise is an overtly

You will never make colonialism blush for shame by spreading san diego zoo little-known cultural treasures under its eyes.
Few san diego zoo analysts in language, politics and sociology would query Noam Chomsky s view that questions of language are always questions of power . Therefore language is inextricably bound with politics. This connection becomes considerably marked in the context of colonialism, where the subjugation of native cultures is both a means and an ends to colonial invasion. Therefore, language san diego zoo decline san diego zoo never occurs in communities of power, and privilege, but rather to the dispossessed and disempowered. Moreover, this linguistic decline does not happen in isolation from socio-cultural and socio-economic conquest but always forms part of a wider process of social, cultural and political displacement often involving overt discrimination and suppression. Nowhere was this process more prevalent than in Ireland where violent colonisation culminating in the imposition of the British national schools system and the catastrophe of Great Hunger in the mid nineteenth century saw cultural decline in Ireland occur at a breakneck speed unparalleled in European history.
In these circumstances, any attempt to revive the declining culture or to decolonise is an overtly political venture. InIreland, the formation of the GAA in 1884 and the Gaelic League in 1893 signalled the beginning of cultural and political decolonisation. Pádraig Pearse would later say that, when the Gaelic League was formed, the Irish revolution began , a case proven by the Easter Rising of 1916 and subsequent revolutionary period thereafter. Thus Gaelic League members were arrested and jailed by the British state inIreland. Any attempt to revive the language was viewed as a threat to British cultural dominance. The outworking of this cultural colonisation was to be highlighted when the Northern Ireland san diego zoo was founded through partition in 1920. Outright san diego zoo hostility and legislative persecution was the order of the day as the language and its activists were branded avowed enemies of the Orange state. Totally alienated from the one-party state , language promotion was practised in the hidden Ulster of the Ardscoil and the Cluain Ard where it managed to survive against all the odds. From these humble seeds, came the revolutionary self-help san diego zoo project of Gaeltacht Bhóthar Seoighe that spawned the birth of Gaelscoileanna and the contemporary Irish language revival in the North of Ireland. This initiative would flourish in the transformational post Hunger Strike period in the early 1980 s, when the language was imbued with notions of reviving identity san diego zoo and empowering communities under siege.
It was in this context that the British government and NIO devised a divisive strategy to incorporate the language into the discourse of the two traditions in Northern Ireland by consciously isolating radical language initiatives. At the time, the NIO divided the Irish language movement by providing financial assitance to a cross-community Irish language initiative named the Ultach Trust, set up in 1989 after the groundwork had been laid by the Cultural Traditions Group . This strategy sought to promote respectable Gaeilgeoirí at the expense of revivalist projects in republicans areas. The NIO discourse of depoliticisation was born. In August san diego zoo 1990, West Belfast Irish language community organisation, Glór na nGael, had its funding withdrawn under the NIO policy of political vetting . Hitting nursery schools hardest, this state attack was only reversed after a national and international campaign. The aim of depolicisation was to portray the Irish language movement as sectarian and, by association, blame state discriminatory practices san diego zoo against it as a consequence san diego zoo of its own links with nationalism and republicanism.
This process reflects a global phenomenon. Colonialism and globalisation san diego zoo have imposed a hierarchy of powerful languages that mirror the unequal power relations on the planet. Therefore, English Linguistic Imperialism or Linguicide as it is known, aims to maintain and perpetuate social, economic, political and cultural inequalities between English and minoritised languages and their respective speakers. This is as an unashamedly political project that shapes language decline the world over. Experts predict that 90% of the world s languages or more precisely 5,400 out of six thousand languages will be either lost or forced into the final stages of decline this century. What each particular case has in common is its contact with a more powerful majority language whose dominance is usually defined by its superior political, cultural or socio-economic power. The view that the fight back against this relentless wave of Anglo-American cultural domination can be anything san diego zoo other than a political fight is not based in reality. Moreover, depoliticised culturalism , where the cupla focal can be shared equally by all is consciously imposed by lin