Galician and Irish in the European context contributes to contemporary scholarship on attitudes towards minority languages and how these attitudes, along with language policy, impact language vitality in Ireland and the Spanish autonomous community of Galicia, the so-called seventh Celtic nation. The book draws from multiple disciplines in the social sciences (including sociology, psychology, and linguistics), which broadens the potential audience. This multifaceted approach is used to assess the current sociolinguistic situations, as well as review the histories, of these two seemingly dissimilar minority languages.

The first chapter begins to delineate the differences between language attitudes and language ideologies and outlines the methodological approaches and techniques employed in seminal language-attitude studies, sketching the benefits of direct and indirect methods of data collection and quantitative and qualitative data types. Ch. 2 retraces the sociolinguistic histories of Galician and Irish with special emphasis on recent efforts to reverse language shift in both language communities. Being on the periphery, both were subject to “internal colonization” and relatively late economic development. While the former marked the beginning of centuries of linguistic repression and gradual shift toward the language of the central state, the latter may have actually promoted the use of Galician and Irish by the masses. Ch. 3 addresses language policy and how it relates to language ideology and language planning. After a general discussion of language policy, the evolution from repressive to supportive language policies in Galicia and Ireland is examined. The question of corpus planning for both languages, particularly the internal debates surrounding standardization and unified orthographies, is also discussed.

The final two chapters focus exclusively on the Galician and Irish situations. Ch. 4 looks at the impact language policies can have on attitudes of members of particular language communities as well as those who only speak the national language. This chapter also reviews previous research focusing on the two minority languages and attitudes towards them. It concludes by discussing whether attitudes expressed by speakers of minority languages can effectively predict their use of the minority language. Ch. 5 highlights O'Rourke's primary research in Galicia and Ireland. This project focuses on university students in the largest metropolitan areas of each community. The respondent pool was chosen for their familiarity with academic studies and data collection techniques. They were also targeted since their attitudes towards and use of Galician and Irish are seen as critical for the two languages’ vitality in years to come. The data suggest that while participants feel language is an important element of their regional identity, neither cohort feels their language is essential in every aspect of modern life. Further data analysis reveals that both languages could be considered weak or strong depending on the definitions of these two qualifiers (e.g. number and average age of speakers, percentage of population who are speakers, national/regional recognition and legal status). While Galician and Irish may not initially be perceived as having many commonalities, O'Rourke shows that their histories are not as different as one might think.