The Irish language isn't dead and, indeed, is better off than many others. It's not an opinion that you hear too often in the doom and gloom of linguistic debate but, according to Prof James McCloskey, hope for its future still remains: "I hate to equivocate, but it depends on what you mean by `hopeful'. There are certain facts. The first fact is that Irish is in better shape than 80 or 90 per cent of the world's languages. It has a much better chance of surviving, in some form or other, maybe one that you or I wouldn't much like or approve of today, than those languages do.

"This is true only because of the effort that Irish people and the Irish State have made over the past 80 years. That's something to be pleased about and proud of. It's a unique achievement, as far as I know, and it's something that should be celebrated.

"But of course these very facts also give you some sense of how desperate the global situation is. If Irish is among the safest 10 per cent of languages, think about what that means for the future of linguistic diversity on the global scale. I think we should be terrified by that prospect."

A Derry man by birth, McCloskey lectured in Irish at UCD in the 1980s, but has lived in the US since 1989, where he is professor of linguistics and graduate director in the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz. In his bilingual book, Guthanna in Eag: an mairfidh an Ghaeilge beo?/Voices Silenced: has Irish a future? (Cois Life), he argues strongly that the language debate has been "parochial" and "narrowminded". Why? Have the Irish a "little England" approach to languages: why bother with other languages when everyone speaks English?

"To a large extent, I think this is right," he says, though he believes that Ireland, in this regard, isn't as extreme in its attitude as Britain or the US. "Ireland is obviously a part of the English-speaking world, which is a kind of trans-national cultural consortium. And the countries that belong to that consortium have all sorts of political and cultural links with one another and they share many aspects of their organising ideology. There are lots of differences as well of course . . . but the ideological commonalities run deep. One of those commonalities is a deep-rooted suspicion of multilingualism.

"This aversion to the use of other languages is a very weird cultural distortion in comparison with the way human beings have lived for most of their history, but the recent global dominance of English in finance and technology clearly facilitates and reinforces it. For now anyway."

McCloskey writes with concern about the ongoing destruction of languages throughout the world. Of the estimated 6,800 languages spoken at present, over half are thought to be "moribund", that is to say, used by a handful of old people and not being learnt by the young. It is thought that 90 per cent of languages will be dead within 100 years.

Given the strength of English as a global force, shouldn't Irish speakers just face the inevitable and accept that it is only a question of time until an Ghaeilge kicks the proverbial buicead?

"Well no, I don't they should. To begin with, there are moral issues. I think that it is both a fortune and a misfortune for any community to be lumbered with an endangered language - if I can put it that way. The situation is sort of like that of a farmer out beyond Finglas somewhere who is set to make a killing selling off his land to some giant property developer but who discovers then that the land is home to some rare and endangered species of bird or animal.

"This is all very inconvenient, of course, and the temptation is to go out and spray the land with some poison and then proceed with the money-making. But it's pretty clear, I think, what the moral responsibility is in a case like that.

"The two cases aren't exactly analogous, but there are enough similarities between them, I think, that the thought experiment comparing them is useful."

He is critical, too, of other European attitudes towards language, the French in particular, whose official language policy "is in many ways much worse than the informal, but very effective, methods of enforcement used in the English-speaking world. The policies that official France still pursues towards regional varieties and towards, say, Breton, are nothing short of murderous.

"And they've been very effective indeed in destroying linguistic diversity within the boundaries of France. But since French is also a language of global reach, those attitudes have penetrated deep into the consciousness of third world francophone communities."

THE struggle between a powerful global language and local intimate speech is a dilemma "typical of those faced by writers in many communities emerging from colonial domination by European powers, especially in Africa".

But why preserve languages? Do they really contain individual world views?

"The idea that different languages preserve and express different ways of understanding the world is one that refuses to die. It just keeps coming back in one form or another, and an awful lot of nonsense has been spoken and written about it - all the old guff about there supposedly being 50 words for `snow' in Eskimo and so on.

"The only honest assessment at present, it seems to me, is that we just don't know what the connections are between the forms of language and the categories of perception. There's some very recent work that revives the old idea in a more subtle way, and there's some intriguing new experimental data which suggests that there might be something right about it.

"I don't know how that whole debate is going to pan out, but what is not in doubt is that the current threat to linguistic diversity is an enormous threat to intellectual diversity. Just think of all the stories, all the poems, all the jokes, all the histories, all the philosophies, the histories that simply become inaccessible if the languages go."

Guthanna in Eag: an mairfidh an Ghaeilge beo?/Voices silenced: has Irish a future? will be published by Cois Life in April. It is available to order from www.coislife.ie