devilyoudont wrote:Sometimes revival efforts result in a new language which is not even a dialect of the traditional language. This appears to be the case in Hawaiian for example, where language learners both outnumber native speakers, and generally have limited interaction with native speakers while learning... The result of this is that proficient speakers of Neo-Hawaiian and traditional Hawaiian may hit mutual intelligibility issues when communicating. This is a problem which may have a solution so long as native speakers still exist, but in the case of a completely dead language (such as Cornish), my guess would be that it is completely impossible to know if you have revived a language or created a new one.
For me, I have a reluctance to get into these languages because I feel that it would be disrespectful for me to dabble in something like this and not be very serious about it, but I also know that I personally could not be very serious about studying a language unless I had some connections to a community which uses it.
This is a huge issue with Irish as well, with, sadly, the most vocal people (even academic linguists) siding against the natives and with the "new speakers". It's quite a shame. It's also really funny, as the "new speakers" decry English loan words, but have no problems using English sounds and grammatical structures; it's the exact opposite among natives, however. It's really a sad situation, as someone focused on a specific (sub)dialect of native Irish.
