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Google have recently launched a website to try and promote endangered languages, Irish amongst them. There is not a huge amount on the website with regards to the Irish language itself, but some of the recordings of native speakers might be of interest. Here’s the link: http://www.endangeredlanguages.com
Irish is severely endangered and Scots Gaelic is only endangered, did they mix that up or how to do they come to that conclusion?
Anyway all that is hard to know. It depends on whether the Irish-speaking children of the Gaeltachtaì will keep speaking Irish when adults and whether they’ll speak it with their children or not. Same thing in Scotland, but maybe there are less Gaelic-speaking children in Scotland.
Btw in Brittany the language is much more endangered than Irish and Sc. Gaelic, because only a handful of children speak it as their native language.
This [url=http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/assets/information_catalogue_endangered_languages.pdf]link[/url] on the site points to a pdf document that explains the methodology in greater detail, including some of the calculations used to come up with the level of endangerment. The authors give this caveat up front:
It is extremely important to understand that the Catalogue is a work in progress. At launch of
this website, the Catalogue is still in Phase I, which is based only on the information available in existing publications and
web resources about the individual endangered languages. Bringing in more recent and local information is critical to this
project, which is the focus of Phase II. The second phase will continue over the next two years. It involves an international
team of regional specialists (see above) reaching out to knowledgeable individuals and organizations to fill in the missing
information for languages in their areas, to check the accuracy of information, and to make needed corrections. For this
phase and long into the future, the goal is to modify, update, and improve the catalogue contents constantly, as new
information becomes available or as the situation for particular languages changes. If users of this website have particular
knowledge or information about specific languages, we encourage submission of comments and suggestions for
improvement of language entries. We are grateful for your help in improving the collective knowledge of the endangered
languages.The Language Endangerment Index and the Need for Documentation Index presented for each language are not meant to be
the final word about degree of endangerment or extent of documentation. The scores for individual languages will change as
more information becomes available. They are provided for practical purposes, to give a quick but rough visual indication of
a language’s endangerment status and documentation needs. The level of certainty accompanying each language shows the
degree of confidence in the score: a label of “uncertain” may indicate that the level is not yet known or the score has been
computed and further evaluation is needed.
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