About the project

Overview

The premise of this Research Ireland-funded project lies in the assumption that languages are deeply tied to place. Through this lens, languages act as repositories of ecological knowledge, memory, and belonging. It follows that as languages vanish, so risk the stories that connect people to their landscapes. This project explores these connections through two endangered languages: Irish and Emilian - the former a language historically spoken in Emilia, northern Italy. Both have been marginalised by dominant national languages, but their revival efforts reveal new ways of imagining sustainable futures grounded in reciprocity with the land. Peatlands are central to this vision. Ireland holds over 20% of Europe’s remaining peatlands, making them crucial to the nation’s climate strategy. Once sites of extraction and labour, bogs are now being restored as living ecosystems and symbols of renewal. Corveen Bog in Donegal - close to Gaoth Dobhair, one of Ireland’s strongest Gaeltacht regions where Irish continues to be used in everyday interactions - embodies this transformation. Across the Tuscan–Emilian Apennines, the high-altitude peatlands of the Torbiera delle Maccherie share similar histories of marginality and resilience. Both landscapes preserve unique forms of ecological memory, mirrored in the languages spoken around them. Working with schools, archives, and community groups in both regions, I will co-create econarratives stories that weave human and natural worlds to express grief, solidarity, and revival. Through workshops, digital storytelling, and field exchanges, Irish and Emilian speakers will reflect on how their languages embody care for the more-than-human world and can inspire climate action. The project’s creative outputs - a bilingual children’s illustrated book and a set of “lost words” cards - will circulate in both communities, fostering dialogue between language and ecological restoration. By placing peatlands and endangered languages at the heart of cultural renewal, this project demonstrates that revitalisation is not merely about saving words or habitats, but about rekindling ways of speaking, feeling, and living that sustain both people and planet.

Project aims

Much of today’s peatland science treats bogs primarily as carbon sinks. That means that thet are valuable for what they store, rather than for what they hold. This project starts from a different premise: that peatlands are also linguistic-ecological reservoirs, holding vocabularies, place-names, and oral traditions that embody ways of relating to land now at risk of being lost alongside the languages that carry them. Taking Corveen Bog (Co. Donegal) and the peatlands of the Tuscan–Emilian Apennines as paired case studies, the project has four central aims: 1. Reimagine peatlands as linguistic-ecological reservoirs —> showing how local vocabularies, toponyms, and oral traditions embody knowledge that resists purely extractive, carbon-centric framings of land. 2. Explore grief as a catalyst for renewal —> examining how grief for linguistic and ecological loss has fuelled revival in the Irish context, and asking whether a similar narrative of grief could support Emilian, where no such story yet exists. 3. Develop an ecolinguistic framework that positions endangered languages as repositories of more-than-human knowledge, useful for imagining sustainable futures. 4. Foster transcultural solidarity by creating spaces where Irish and Emilian speakers can exchange stories, recognise shared histories of marginalisation, and build a common language of resilience. The research combines archival work at UCD’s UNESCO-inscribed National Folklore Collection, digital crowdsourcing with the language-activism collective De_Vulgare, and community co-creation in both peatland regions, culminating in a bilingual children’s book, a set of “lost words” cards, an open-access digital repository, and a monograph.

Irish

Irish is spoken as an everyday language in Gaoth Dobhair (Gweedore), in northwest Donegal, standing as one of Ireland’s strongest Gaeltacht regions. It is often described as a cradle of Irish culture. It is here, close to Corveen Bog, that this project roots its Irish case study. Ireland holds over 20% of Europe’s remaining peatlands, and bogs like Corveen — once sites of turf-cutting and labour — are increasingly recognised as living ecosystems central to the country’s climate strategy. What interests this project is how that ecological restoration sits alongside a long tradition of cultural and linguistic resilience in the surrounding Gaeltacht. Irish-language folklore, place-names, and oral narratives around bogs and wetlands offer a rich seam of econarratives: stories that connect people, language, and landscape. Fieldwork in Ireland centres on school-based workshops in the Gaoth Dobhair area, creative co-production of stories and illustrations, and a scholar–community symposium, alongside archival research into bog lore, plant names, and mythic motifs held at UCD’s National Folklore Collection. A pen-pal exchange will connect Irish-speaking pupils with their Emilian-speaking counterparts in Italy.

Typologically, Irish is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of Indo-European — closely related to Scottish Gaelic and Manx, and more distantly to the Brittonic languages (Welsh, Breton, Cornish). It has a number of features that set it apart from the Romance and Germanic languages more familiar to most European readers: verb-subject-object word order, a system of initial consonant mutations (where the beginning of a word changes depending on grammatical context), and two grammatical genders without the case-marking common in older Indo-European languages, though it retains vestiges of an earlier case system in pronouns and set phrases.

Historically, Irish was the dominant vernacular of the island for well over a millennium, with a continuous written tradition stretching back to Ogham inscriptions from around the 4th century CE and a rich body of medieval manuscript literature. Its decline began in earnest under British colonial administration, accelerating dramatically in the 19th century through the combined effects of the Great Famine — which devastated Irish-speaking areas disproportionately — the National School system’s promotion of English, and widespread emigration. By the early 20th century, Irish had retreated to scattered, mostly western coastal areas now known as the Gaeltacht.

Sociolinguistically, Irish occupies an unusual position: it is the constitutional first official language of the Republic of Ireland and compulsory in schools, giving it a level of institutional support most minoritised languages lack — yet this has not translated straightforwardly into everyday use. The 2022 census recorded that 40% of the population claim some ability in Irish, but only around 72,000 people nationally speak it daily outside the education system, with roughly 20,000 of those in the Gaeltacht itself. Gaoth Dobhair, near Corveen Bog, remains one of the strongest Irish-speaking communities in the country, though even there daily use has been gradually declining. This gap between symbolic status and everyday vitality is central to why this project treats Irish revival not as a solved case to hold up as a model, but as an active, ongoing negotiation — one this project can learn from and put into dialogue with Emilian.

Emilian

Emilian is a UNESCO-classified endangered Gallo-Romance language spoken in Emilia, northern Italy — including in the communities around the peatlands of the Tuscan–Emilian Apennines. Unlike Irish, Emilian has no official status and is used in comparatively few public domains; while it survives strongly in local, everyday settings, it has struggled to build the kind of institutional and community infrastructure that has supported Irish revival efforts. This project builds directly on my earlier doctoral research comparing Emilian with Esperanto, which found that strong positive attitudes, community pride, and opportunities for everyday use are essential for language maintenance — and that Emilian, unlike Esperanto’s globally networked community, often carries internalised stigma and limited collective mobilisation. Re-enchanting Peatlands asks whether a narrative of grief and revival, similar to the one animating Irish-language and peatland restoration in Donegal, could help Emilian speakers reframe their own relationship to language and land. Working with the language-activism collective De_Vulgare, the project will run digital crowdsourcing campaigns and school-based workshops in the Modena area, gathering stories, memories, and “lost words” connected to the region’s peatlands, and co-creating new econarratives of solidarity and renewal with Emilian-speaking communities.

Typologically, Emilian belongs to the Gallo-Romance branch: a family that also includes other regional languages of northern Italy, such as Lombard, Piedmontese, and Ligurian, and which occupies a linguistically ambiguous middle ground. While geographically spoken in Italy, it is structurally closer to - and creates a continuum with - Gallo-Romance languages like French and Occitan than to standard (Tuscan-based) Italian. This shows up in features such as the widespread loss of unstressed final vowels, vowel raising and diphthongisation, and syncope patterns that give Emilian words a noticeably more clipped, consonant-heavy shape than their Italian equivalents. Impressionistically, this is a family resemblance to French that is often noticed by Italian speakers when they encounter it.

Historically, Emilian has deep roots in the region’s old commune and duchy structures — Piacenza, Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena, and Bologna (the latter under the Papal State) each developed as distinct political centres for centuries before Italian unification, and this political fragmentation produced a seemingly fragmented linguistic landscape that leads people to see Emilian as a continuum of closely related varieties (Parmesan, Reggiano, Modenese, Bolognese, and others) rather than a single language. Some scholars have questioned whether a unifying “Emilian koiné” exists at all. Although several writing systems have been developed and promoted, Emilian has never had an official orthography, and speakers of different varieties have historically written it - and still write it - in their own ways.

Sociolinguistically, Emilian’s trajectory has been sharply different from Irish’s. It has no official status in Italy, no presence in schooling, and — unlike Irish — does not benefit from the symbolic weight of national identity; if anything, regional languages across northern Italy were long stigmatised as markers of rural backwardness against the prestige of standard Italian, a shift accelerated by post-war television, industrialisation, and internal migration. UNESCO classifies Emilian as definitely endangered, with an intergenerational transmission pattern typical of many minoritised European languages: fluent grandparents, middle-aged speakers with strong passive comprehension but limited active use, and grandchildren who may recognise words and phrases without being able to hold a conversation. Estimates suggest a few hundred thousand speakers remain, overwhelmingly older adults, concentrated in Emilia-Romagna but also present in migrant communities elsewhere.

It is this asymmetry — a language with no Irish-style institutional scaffolding, and no existing narrative of “revival” to draw on — that makes the comparative, dialogic model at the heart of this project matter: Emilian speakers are, in effect, being invited into a conversation about what revival could look like, rather than simply pointed toward following a template that assumes conditions (state recognition, compulsory schooling, a symbolic role in national identity) it does not have.