La Gaeltacht : une communauté imaginée

Abstract

This article analyses the Gaeltacht category from existing literature on the subject and ethnographic sociolinguistic fieldwork in Irish courses. It points out that the Gaeltacht can not be apprehended solely through linguistic criteria, but must be considered as an « imagined community » (B. Anderson, 2006). This approach reveals the socio-economic stakes of the revitalization of Irish, and thus contributes more broadly to an understanding of linguistic revitalization movements as social movements that are not centrally about the language (M. Heller, 1999; J. Costa, 2016).

Keywords

• Gaeltacht
• imagined community
• language revitalization
• Irish (language)
• language tourism
• sociolinguistics