2. 外语
  3. After decades of exodus, the tide of Irish migration took a definitive turn in the late 1980s, when the Irish Diaspora started t

After decades of exodus, the tide of Irish migration took a definitive turn in the late 1980s, when the Irish Diaspora started t

admin2012-03-23  29
问题     After decades of exodus, the tide of Irish migration took a definitive turn in the late 1980s, when the Irish Diaspora started to come home. Maben Walsh was one of those who returned. The 49-year-old designer decided to move back to Dublin after years living in Arizona. Walsh says living abroad for so long caused her family to return "more aware of our background and our ’ Irish ness’. So when we came back in 1988 and had children, we wanted them to have our culture. "
    And so Walsh, like more and more Irish parents, sends her children to a school where all the lessons are taught in Irish—Ireland’s indigenous Celtic language. Over the past decade, gaelscoileanna, as the schools are called, have become one of the fastest-growing sectors in Irish education. And though they still only comprise 5% of Ireland’s schools, their number has tripled since the early 1990s.
    The explosion in gaelscoileanna is part of an Irish-language renaissance that’s been building over the past twenty years. Centuries of colonization left Ireland with a severely depleted population of Irish speakers by the time it gained independence from Britain in 1922. For decades after, the language was ghettoized in remote, rural pockets of the country and weighed down by associations with poverty or sectarian extremism. Today, between 5 and 10% of the 4. 2 million people living in Ireland speak Irish on a daily basis, and many of those are students who only speak it in school. Maire Nic Ghiolla Phddraig, senior lecturer of sociology at University College Dublin, witnessed the impact of the rise in gaelscoileanna on her university campus with more and more gaelgfirs, or Irish speakers, arriving each year. "I have seen the change during Fresher’s week," Nick Gila Paradigm says. "Hundreds of Irish speakers join the Cumann Gaeleach [Irish club] and wearing Gird don Galilee [I Heart Irish] stickers. It’s no longer regarded as ’uncoil’ to speak Irish. "
    But the rise of the old tongue has some worried about a potentially new conflict: that the increasing number of gaelscoileanna will pit Ireland’s constitutional vow to preserve its "native" language against the obligation as a modern country to integrate its increasing immigrant population. While Walsh and hundreds of thousands of other Irish were making their way home, other, newer migration paths were being cut from many other countries. Between the late 1980s and. : today, the percentage of foreign-born residents in Ireland grew from around 1% to almost 12%. "People choose gaelscoileanna for all kinds of reasons, but realistically it would rarely be the first choice for newly arrived immigrants," says Colette Cavanaugh, a principal at Esker Educate Together School in Lucian, a commuter town outside of Dublin.
    That disconnect, says Cavanaugh, could engender a defector segregation in the Irish school system— and a potentially unfair distribution of more resources to Irish schools. " These schools could unintentionally lead to a kind of white flight from English-language education," she says. At Cavanaugh’s English-speaking school, one of the most diverse in the country, 950//00 of the students are children of immigrants. At the nearest Irish-language school, only 5% of the student body is foreign-born.
    Sociologists say Ireland’s linguistic renaissance and the nation’s spike in immigration are both triggered in part by the "Celtic Tiger" —the growth phenomenon that has seen the Irish economy mushroom by over 150% since 1995. Years of EU infrastructural and educational support and a young and cheap labor force made Ireland a fertile ground for foreign investment in the domestic IT sector, among other industries, and the result has seen the average annual family income double to $ 93,000 in the past 10 years. Nic Ghiolla Phddraig says this new prosperity brought a sense of pride and self-assurance that prompted a rediscovery in Ireland’s "cultural assets"—Irish being one of them.
    As targets like these continue to be pursued nationwide, it may, in fact, be the new Ireland that helps this old language grow. Miehal Boleslav Mechura, a 33-year-old resident of Dublin who immigrated from the Czech Republic ten years ago, became fluent in Irish and finds it useful in his own integration process. "People don’t realize I’m not from here when I speak in Irish," Mechura says. "A lot of Irish people who speak Irish speak it as a second language and so we are all on the same footing. I fit in better in Irish. "
What’s the main idea of this passage?
选项 A、Ireland’s language renaissance.
B、Ireland’s language dilemma.
C、Irish educational system.
D、The boom of gaelscoileanna.
答案B
解析 主旨题。本题考查对文章内容的把握。综合全文可知，本文主要讲述了爱尔兰本土语言的复苏势在必行，与此同时有些人担心这可能会带来一系列的问题。最后，文章指出爱尔兰经济快速增长的背景有可能会帮助爱尔兰语实现复苏。综合本文大意，[B]“爱尔兰语言的两难境地”较为全面，因此为答案。[A]“爱尔兰语复苏”，原文不仅讲了爱尔兰语言复苏的现象，还讲述了可能存在的问题，故排除。[C]“爱尔兰的教育体系”，这在文中有所提及，但不是文章的重点，排除。[D]“爱尔兰本土语言学校的繁荣”，这也只是爱尔兰语复苏的一个外在表现．不能概括全文思想，排除。
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