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This paper investigates the Irish-language adscape through an analysis of the profile of two Irish-language newspapers, Foinse, published in the Republic of Ireland, and Lá, published in Northern Ireland. The advertising in both papers is analysed in terms of products and services advertised, advertisers represented and language used. Our results indicate that Irish-language advertising in these papers tends to be confined to traditional domains, and to be used by advertisers who are complying with language planning directives. Beyond this, advertising in Irish is used to identify with certain communities, and its use by private sector advertisers, in a context in which there is a weak communicative motivation for doing so, tends to be mainly symbolic. Our small study shows that the respective advertising profiles of these newspapers do little to challenge common sense assumptions about the language, its role and its status in the respective sociolinguistic environments of both publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores the extent of Irish language use in networked communications' and attitudes towards the language by 125 schoolchildren from three backgrounds in Ireland: (1) an Irish-speaking area (Gaeltacht) and Irish medium of instruction, (2) an English-speaking area and Irish medium of instruction, and (3) an English-speaking area and English medium of instruction, with Irish as a school subject. The questionnaire-based research found that token usage of Irish was high, but the lack of domains of language usage meant that children had little opportunity to use the language for real communication. It was also found that as the level of exposure to the language decreases, so too does the level of communicative usage. Respondents tended to employ networked communication through Irish, if Irish was the usual language of communication with the particular interlocutor, and those who used Irish in various domains of their lives also used it more in their networked communications. With regard to the participants' attitudes towards the language, English medium schoolchildren were found to have the most positive attitudes towards the language; however, Irish medium and Gaeltacht schoolchildren were more aware of the importance of bilingualism and its practical benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how Russian speakers in Ireland delimit and describe (their/the) Russian language in relation to representations of standard Russian. It is based on analysis of discussions conducted between speakers of Russian living in Ireland, facilitated by the Our Languages (2008–2011) research project, investigating multilingualism and sociolinguistic dispositions amid Ireland's Russian-speaking population. Three metalinguistic orientations are foregrounded: (1) participants affirm the naturally and normatively discrete identity of 'the' Russian language; (2) despite this unitary identity, participants distinguish between registers and levels of relative purity in Russian; (3) participants relate generalised linguistic form to a concept of community. The interplay of these orientations – toward an essentially unitary and unifying Russian language, away from 'improper' forms of that language, and into reflection on collective identity – reveals a model culture of standard language within the polyglossic context of Irish society, combining the routinely claimed characteristics of generality and authenticity. The article interprets the contradictory dynamic between these characteristics in relation to a Bakhtinian concept of monolingualism and a critical conceptualisation of language community. Participants configure Russian as one among 'our languages' through the iterative negotiation of a tension between ideological monolingualism and actual heteroglossia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]