Word: gaelscoileanna
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...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...
...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...
...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 China, Nigeria, Poland and 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...
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