> Do you want to have the language as a living language or as a fossilized relic?
I want to see it remain a living language. I don't want to see it becoming, as it is in idiom, sounds and grammar, "English in Irish drag" (quoting a prominent linguist on the matter). It's not Irish. It's people substituting Irish words into English grammar, using English sounds and idioms to do so. That's the death of Irish.
> It's long been a complaint of the gaelgoir crowd that Irish people do not use the Irish language and they're losing touch with the culture.
There's a huge difference between the 'gaelgoir' crowd and native speakers (none of whom would call themselves Gaeilgeoirí -- those are specifically the learners who come in with notebooks or to the summer schools).
> A consequence of the push for more widespread usage of the language that came from that is that a language in use evolves. Even English language media from 50 years ago is markedly different in the way the language is used.
There's a difference between language evolution and language death. There's also a difference between learners not learning properly and native speakers changing the language naturally (.i. not under conditions of language death)
> So I feel the influence of the Duolingo/meetup generation of Irish language speakers is both inevitable and arguably a sign of the increased uptake of the language - if such people were small in number compared to the traditional speakers, they could not have had this outsized influence.
The problem is the shitty level of Irish held by most school teachers, even those in the Gaelscoileanna. And their ignorance on proper Irish idiom, grammar and sounds that then gets passed on.
> Also in the case of Tá/Níl as Yes/No in particular, the roots of that probably also have something to do with bilingual government forms adopting it as a space saving measure, so these new speakers have a lifetime of seeing Tá/Yes and Níl/No options on professionally translated forms that may also have primed this development.
And those forms are purposefully translated so that Tá/Yes Níl/No is an answer to an "An bhfuil" question, following proper Irish grammar (usually "An bhfuil tú i bhfábhar ...").
But, natural language change is not what's happening with Irish. Instead, we're seeing a split between the traditional Gaeltacht raised native speakers and a pidgin/creole forming in the urban areas. Sadly, only one can survive and it's less and less likely it'll be traditional Irish. Instead, we'll be left with something that calls itself Irish, but is really no different from English in the way it expresses concepts, the sounds it uses to express those concepts and, outside perhaps the very basics, the grammar it uses to express those concepts. The only thing different is the words it uses. That's not Irish.
You'd never see this happening with any majority language -- French speakers would be rightfully up in arms if someone spoke French with English sounds, used English grammar and then claimed their French was just as authentic as the natives'. Sadly, we accept it -- praise it -- for Irish. At the expense of the traditional, rich native language and the Gaelic worldview (assuming linguistic relativity and/or cognitive metaphors shape the way we think; I lean towards the latter)