Today’s post comes courtesy of Sophie Gahan, an Instructional Designer at MindLeaders ThirdForce
You know that technology is taking hold when a website used for selling Irish language books has a list of 24 ‘r-leabhair’ or ‘ríomhleabhar’ (pronounced ree-ivv-l-hour). Directly translated this means compute book – meaning an eBook - as you might have already guessed.
Seven of these are electronic versions of books written by Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé (Mike O Shay), a writer and musician who was born in the West Kerry Gaeltacht (an all Irish speaking region) in the 1940s and is now telling us his tales via eBooks. There’s definitely a big difference between huddling around the wireless to catch the all–Ireland and reading about the same things in an eBook many decades later! The range also includes translations of classic texts like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or in Irish Macbeit.
Irish isn’t the only minority language being included in the world of eBooks. The first ever Welsh language eBook Y Lolfa (The Path) was launched in 2009. Unfortunately I can’t provide a phonetic description for this as I’m not quite as multilingual as would be handy for this blog post.
In Scotland eBooks are used to safeguard a rich heritage. According to the Scottish Archive of eBooks: “In 2005 we decided that there was a need to digitise and preserve rare Scottish material for future generations”. They marketed their eBooks on CD-Rom in May 2008 and continue to use their software to “take work that is no longer in print and convert it into searchable pdf files”.
A minority language is labelled as such because of the small amount of people remaining who speak it. In college we studied how these languages are dying out and were taught that there’s little that can be done to prevent it. But as the article written on Y Lolfa describes, it looks like eBooks “can breath new life” into minority languages.
