Books by Diarmait Mac Giolla Chriost

This book argues that Brexit will wholly re-shape the legal framework and public policy norms relating to linguistic diversity that have dominated public life in the UK and the EU since the Treaty on European Union in 1993.

This research monograph is the first authoritative work on the office of the Welsh Language Commissioner and the associated Welsh language regulatory and statutory regime. In setting the Commissioner in context - in Wales, the UK and internationally - the work draws upon a rich variety of source material arising from fieldwork conducted in a number of jurisdictions. The research data includes, for example, an extensive series of documents obtained under a number of Freedom of Information applications, in-depth interviews with key actors from pertinent legislatures, governments, regulatory offices, interest groups and civic society. The linguistic coverage of source material includes English and Welsh, as well as, where relevant, Irish, German, Catalan, Spanish, French and Basque, in a publication which is multi-disciplinary in approach, engaging with the scholarly and professional literature in language policy and planning, socio-legal studies and the politics of language.

Welsh Writing, Political Action and Incarceration examines the prison literature of certain iconic Welsh authors whose political lives and creative writings are linked to ideas about Wales and the Welsh language, the nature of political activism, and the function of incarceration.

This book comprises a comparative study of relationships between language and ethnic identity in key regions of historical and contemporary ethnic conflict in Europe and Eurasia.

This book tells the dramatic and often surprising story of the learning of the Irish language by Irish Republican prisoners held in the infamous H-block cells during the bloody political conflict in Northern Ireland. Using research methods and techniques, the author closely analyses the emergence of the Irish language amongst republican prisoners and ex prisoners in Northern Ireland from the 1970s up until the present. This pioneering study shows how the language was used exclusively in parts of the prison, despite the efforts of the prison authorities to suppress the language, and the dramatic impact this had on Irish society. Drawing on interviews with the prisoners, and various other materials, Mac Giolla Chriost shows how these developments gave rise to the popular coinage of the term 'Jailtacht', a deformation of 'Gaeltacht' - the official Irish-speaking districts of the Republic of Ireland, to describe this unique linguistic phenomenon.

This monograph comprises the first complete treatment of the Irish language in social context throughout the whole of the island of Ireland, with a particular focus on contemporary society.

This book shows the effects of globalization on language in social context, identifying the city as the key site for the realization of these effects. It challenges assumptions that hold sustainable linguistic diversity to be inherently non-urban while regarding the city as an unproblematic site for understanding the social function of language.