ABSTRACT
Since the period of cultural and linguistic revival of the late 19th Century – itself a response to the advancing hegemony of English – the motivation for acquiring Irish has changed from one of social or economic necessity to a position of ideological commitment. Despite the weakening socioeconomic and linguistic position of Irish speakers over time, each stage of this sociolinguistic trajectory has been characterised by speakers who have acquired Irish either out of necessity or desire. Sociolinguists for revival and language planners had tended to draw on strategically essentialist notions of nativeness to justify the need for language revitalization. The folk concept of new speaker therefore provided interesting possibilities for a new analytical category that could in some way solve some of the terminological problems in the field of language revitalisation and the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistics more broadly. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
