Language death and revival in the British Isles: two case-studies

! 1! Language Death and Revival in the British Isles: Two Case Studies Tesis doctoral presentada por Christopher Langmuir Thomson en el Departamento de Lengua Inglesa de la Universidad de Sevilla 2015 ! 2! Table of Contents 0.0 Introduction 0.1 Summary, objectives, methods 5 14 Chapter 1: Language Death 23 1. 0. Introduction 23 1. 1. Language death as a constant in history 23 1. 2. The world’s languages in jeopardy 27 1. 3. Typologies of language death 30 1. 4. Structural consequences of language death 33 1. 5. The Celtic languagesin jeopardy 37 1. 5. 1. Scottish Gaelic 38 Chapter 2: Language Revitalization 42 2. 1. Terminology 44 2 .2. Language vitality 45 2. 3. Domains of Use 51 2. 4. Two Celtic case studies 55 2. 4. 1. The Gaeltacht in The Republic of Ireland 55 2. 4. 2. Scottish Gaelic in a Lewis Community 62 Chapter 3: The Demise of The Cornish Language 68 3. 0. Introduction 68 3. 1. Early History 69 3. 2. The Expansion of Wessex 72 3. 3. Competing Chronologies of Retreat 76 3. 4. The Middle Cornish Period 78 3. 4. 1. Middle Cornish Literature 80 3. 5. The Tudor Period 83 3. 6. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 87 ! 3! Chapter 4: The Revival of The Cornish Language 4. 0. Introduction 92 4. 1. Henry Jenner and the Cornish Revival 92 4. 2. Problems of language revival in Cornwall. 97 4. 2. 1. Old Cornwall Societies and Gorseth Kernow 98 4. 2. 2. Tyr ha Tavas 101 4. 2. 3. Morton Nance and Unified Cornish 102 4. 2. 4. The debate over sources and orthography for revived Cornish 104 4. 2. 5. The Unified Spelling System 105 4. 2. 6. Common Cornish or Kernewek Kemmyn 108 4. 2. 7. The Role of Official Policy Documents 110 4. 2. 8. A Late Cornish Challenge. 111 4. 2. 9. The Unified System Revised 112 4. 2. 10. The Problem of Authenticity 113 4. 2. 11. Orthographic Authenticity 116 4. 2. 12 The divisive effects of revivalist antagonisms 117 4. 3. Standardization achieved: the Standard Written Form (2008) 118 Chapter 5: Language Death on the Isle of Man 124 5. 0. Introduction 124 5.1. The Norse Occupation 124 5. 2. Anglicisation 127 5. 3. The Eighteenth Century 129 5. 4. The Nineteenth Century: ‘an iceberg floating in southern latitudes’ 132 5. 5. The Twentieth Century: Nil by mouth 136 5. 6. Language Attitudes and Language Use 138 5. 7. Causes of Decline 141 ! 4! Chapter 6: The Revitalization of Manx 145 6. 0. Introduction 145 6. 1. The Nineteenth-Century Origins 145 6. 2. The Manx Language Society 147 6. 3. Recording the language 152 6. 4. Reawakening 153 6. 5. The vitality of Manx as a spoken language 155 6. 6. Official status of Manx 158 6. 7. 1. Bilingual Signage 162 6. 7. 2. Commercial exploitation of Manx 167 6. 7. 3. Media 169 6. 8. Manx in the education system 171 6. 8 .1. The Scope of Manx-medium education 176 6. 9. Attitudes to Manx 178 6. 10. Language change 175 6.11. Conclusion 184 Chapter 7: Overview and Reflection 183 7. 1. The Cornish Revival 186 7. 2. The Manx Revival 188 References 196 Appendices 209 ! 5! 0. 0. Introduction It is a widely acknowledged and sobering truth among linguists working in the field of endangerment that the last speakers of probably half the world’s languages are alive today. The unspoken corollary is that they will be dead tomorrow; inventories and estimates of vitality need constantly to be revised as age takes its toll on already decimated communities and the‘critically endangered’fade intothe category of ‘extinct’. In 2007, one of the leading scholars in the field, Suzanne Romaine, lamented that ‘only two fluent speakers remain of the Warrwa language traditionally spoken in the Derby region of West Kimberley in Western Australia … Marie Smith Jones is the last person who still speaks Eyak, one of Alaska’s 20 some native languages’(2007: 116). The eight years that have elapsed since the publication of her article, ‘Preserving Endangered Languages’,have witnessed the exequies of all three speakers and their languages. It is an alarmingly recurrent phenomenon.The Ethnologue estimates that there are 204 languages with fewer than 10 speakers, 344 languages with 10 to 99, and 548 languages with fewer than 99 speakers. There is a general consensus that most of the 6000 languages spoken in the world in 2015 will not survive until the end of the century.1 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1Ethnologue, founded by the missionary organization SIL International, is the most comprehensive source for speaker numbers of all known languages. According to its scale of endangerment (see Appendix 1), at the Threatened and Shifting levels, intergenerational transmission is in the process of being broken, but the childbearing generation can still use the language. This is the condition of 1,531 (or 22 percent) of the world’s 7,102 known living languages. In the case of Dying languages, the child-bearing generation is no longer able to transmit the language to the next generation, since the only fluent users (if any remain) are above that age. This is the condition of 916 languages (or 13 percent). Languages that have fallen completely out of (even symbolic) use, and are no longer associated with a sense of ethnic identity are Extinct. Since 1950, 367 such languages have been recorded (www.ethnologue.com, accessed 8 February 2015) ! 6! The phenomena of language shift, endangerment and loss have been subject of burgeoning academic interest in the last twenty to thirty years. 2 Concomitantly, there has been a growth in awareness and institutional support – from such bodies as UNESCO or the European Union – for the protection of endangered minority languages. Monographs directed at a non-specialist readership have been numerous. The apocalyptic spirit of the millenium was marked by the publication in the year 2000 of no fewer than three: Nettle and Romaine’s Vanishing Voices, David Crystal’s Language Death and Claude Hagège’s Halte à la mort des langues, followed two years later by Andrew Dalby’s Languages in Danger. The monitory tone continues in the title of David Harrison’s 2007 When languages die: the extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge, which also underscores the potential loss to linguistic science posed by such extinction and the urgency of documentation irrespective of revitalization. Linguistic salvage has been addressed by Lenore Grenoble and Lindsay Whaley in Saving Languages: an introduction to language revitalization (2006), while both endangerment and revitalization are the subject of Sarah Thomason’s Endangered Languages: An Introduction (2015). The inclusion of the latter in Cambridge University’s Linguistics textbooks series signals the maturity of the field. The drastic diminution of the world’s linguistic diversity has become a cause for widespread concern among linguists and anthropologists. In a seminal article (1992), Michael Krauss attempted to instill a certain amount of guilt in the profession, accusing it of neglecting the vitality of the subject !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2Language death as a field of academic research may be said to date from the publication of Ion Coteanu’s Cum dispare o limbă (istroromâna) (Bucharest, 1957). However, it was the extensive fieldwork carried out by Nancy Dorian in the 1980s on East Sutherland Gaelic which consolidated its status as a separate discipline within the broader field of language change. Similar investigations (such as Dressler 1982 and Campbell and Muntzel 1989) followed and demonstrated that linguistic change occurring during language death does not differ essentially from that taking place elsewhere, except in terms of rate, context, and amount of change. ! 7! matter of their own investigation: languages and the insights into linguistic structure they potentially embody. Less often are the people themselves who belong to a speech community in the process of language shift or who are directly affected by it the object of attention. The impending implosion of the world’s languages is not unconnected with a vertiginous rise in the world’s population during the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. The factors determining language death are typically nonlinguistic (Swadesh 1948: 235). These are extensively listed in Campbell (1994: 1963) but the most commonly cited are socioeconomic and sociopolitical. Socioeconomic factors include lack of economic opportunities, rapid economic transformations, ongoing industrialization, work patterns, migrant labour, the destruction of habitats and communities, emigration and displacement, and the omnipresence of dominant languages as unavoidable vehicles for economic emancipation, these diffused through the media, in particular what Kreuss (1992: 6) dubs an ‘incalculably lethal new weapon [the] “cultural nerve gas” of television’. As large language communities expand, others contract. Over the last 500 years, small languages nearly everywhere have come under severe threat, exacerbated in the past fifty years by globalization. Among the sociopolitical factors are official (assimilatory) language policies, discrimination, stigmatization, repression, and armed conflict. Official language policies can be and have been historically a particularly decisive factor in language death. Western colonialism has proved extremely efficient in this respect, as can be gathered from the use of the consumption metaphor encoded in “glottophagy”. Another incendiary term frequently encountered in this context is ‘linguicide’, a concept analogous to genocide. The classic example is the ‘English Only’ policy of the United States government during the 19th century, designed to force Native Americans to learn English at the expense of their native languages. Many modern parallels can be adduced, such as the repression of Kurdish in Turkey, or Aromanian in Greece. The official status of languages crossing borders may vary according to the statutory laws of the respective countries. Catalan and ! 8! Basque, for instance, have official language academies in Spain, but not in France. Another interconnected pattern is that represented by the threat to the world’s biological diversity. Urbanization, deforestation, desertification and the destruction of habitats are regularly cited as having deleterious effects on the natural world. Less attention, however, is devoted to the linguistic consequences of these same phenomena. Arguably, species diversity and linguistic diversity spring from similar evolutionary mechanisms – the action of replication, variation and selection working on hereditary material. Aside from the genetic relationships between languages, linguists too talk about about the ecology of a region or country. The threats to both sorts of ecology are interconnected, as can be inferred from the remarkable similarity in the global distribution of languages and species, with diversity highest in the tropics and declining toward the poles.3 The decline in linguistic diversity is normally a result of the process of language shift away from small indigenous languages toward larger, national or regional languages, a shift driven, as has already been mentioned, by social, political and economic factors including migration, urbanization, unification under the aegis of a single nation-state, colonization, and the globalization of trade and communications. Kreuss explicitly addresses the biological parallel. Of 4,400 mammal species, 326 (7.4 percent) are currently classified as either ‘endangered’ or ‘threatened’, that is to say, species which are in ‘imminent danger of extinction’ or ‘in the foreseeable future will be in imminent danger of extinction’ (1992: 7). The figure for birds is 231 out of 8,600 species (2.7 percent). The number of languages that are either moribund or in jeopardy makes this menace to the planet’s biological largesse seem almost !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 This is a pattern known as Rapaport’s rule. Higher biodiversity may be capable of supporting greater cultural diversity, but ‘the explanation seems to be that both biological and cultural diversity depend on the same environmental factors such as temperature and rainfall’ ! 9! insignificant. Jonathan Loh and David Harmon argue in a recent paper, for instance, that ‘the world’s languages, as a group, are more severely threatened than three vertebrate taxa: mammals, birds or reptiles. Languages, globally, are at least as endangered as the most highly threatened vertebrate taxon, the amphibians. Kreuss paints an alarming picture of his own field of specialization, the languages of Alaska. Of the twenty native languages only two are now viable, that is, being learned by children. Taken together with the north Russian minorities the figure is five out of twenty. Of the Native North American languages as a whole, 149 (80 percent) are moribund. In Australia, 90 percent of the 250 Aboriginal languages are near to extinction. It is probably no accident that the highest documented rates of destruction are to be found in the ‘English-speaking world’.4 The global picture is no less bleak. The extreme vulnerability of the majority of endangered languages is a consequence of the enormous disparities between the sizes of the populations speaking the world’s languages. If every language were of equal size, among a world population of 7 billion, each would have around 950,000 native speakers, yet 94 percent of humanity speaks only 347 languages, the remaining 6 percent accounting for 95 percent of languages. Eight languages in particular are dominant, spoken by 40 percent of the world’s population.5 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 Steiner points to ‘the detergent sovereignty of so-called major languages whose dynamic efficacy springs from the planetary spread of mass-marketing, technocracy, and the media.’ (1992: xiv). For a cogent indictment of English linguistic colonialism and its effects on indigenous languages, see Phillipson (1992). His argument, in so far as it applies to Nigeria, is challenged by Joseph Bisong (‘Language choice and cultural imperialism: a Nigerian perspective. BIT 49/2 April 1995, 122-132), who nevertheless fails to offer any data concerning the health or otherwise of Nigeria’s more than 400 indigenous languages. 5Mandarin Chinese (873,014,298 speakers), Spanish (322,299,171), English(309,352,280), Hindi (180,764,791), Portuguese (177,457,180), Bengali (171,070,202), Russian (145,031,551), and Arabic (136,411,737). ! 16! foreseeable future, had a neglible spoken presence in the everyday life of Cornish society. It is increasingly present, however, in the visual landscape as commerce and the tourist industry have awoken to its potential as a means to enhance Cornish mystique. Chapter Three is essentially a narrative of the decline and disappearance of theindigenous language of what had once been an independent kingdom, which ceded to the political dominance of Anglo-Saxon Wessex in the tenth century. English gradually expanded west into Cornwall, increasingly so after disastrous failed rebellions and subsequent repression in the Tudor period. As early as 1680, reasons were being offered for the decline of Cornish. English was used progressively in the administrative domain from the 10thcentury, and was only temporarily halted by the Norman invasion. The role of English in the religious domain is also judged to have been important. The principal instigator of the revival movement, Henry Jenner (1904:12), writes that ‘[t]he Reformation did much tokill Cornish’,and calls the ‘prime causeof the decline’ of Cornish. Another reason revolves around changing social networks. Previously, there had been significant trade and religious contacts with Brittany,where the closely related Breton was spoken. With the loss of Breton independence (1536) and political and religious differences between England and France, these contacts were lost in the first half of the sixteenth century. At the same time, contacts with Englishspeakersincreasedthrough immigration, and the employment of Cornishspeakers in the English military and merchant navy. Finally, Cornish lost its role in the people’s cultural lives. Most notably, the old tradition of Cornishlanguage mystery plays came to an end, partly on account of the disapproval of the Protestant Church. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the language was confined to small fishing communities on the far west coast and finally to lone relic individuals within those communities. The alleged last speaker died in 1777. Chapter Four traces the history of the Cornish revival from its origins in the late nineteenth century as a reflection of antiquarian interest in the county’s ! 17! early history. There were initially no pretensions to restoring the language to everyday use, or to utilizing it as a vehicle and justification of Cornish nationalism. The proselytization of Cornish as a cornerstone of the county’s heritage and identity and a living language to be learned and used developed later. Particular attention will be paid to the founding father of the movement, Henry Jenner, whose A Handbook of the Cornish Language (1904) was a crucial catalyst. Revivalist efforts culminated in the British Government’s decision in 2002 to recognize Cornish as falling under Part II (Article 7) of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The presence of Cornish in education and the media is also documented, as is the fraught history of its standardization. This has been a particularly divisive issue within the movement and has only recently been resolved with the ratification in 2008 of the Standard Written Form, subsequently revised as Kernowek Standard. This standard had been preceded by Unified Cornish (1929), Modern or Late Cornish (1980s), Kernewek Kemmyn (1986), and Unified Cornish Revised (1995), all of them reflecting in part varying ideological stances but also indicative of a rift between, on the one hand, amateur enthusiasts anxious to make the language as transparent and easily acquired as possible and, on the other, professional Celticists insistent on linguistic rigour. The fact that the Middle Cornish of the Mystery Plays is the most richly attested phase of the language and Late Cornish textually meagre as well as heavily anglicized meant that the language could not simply be picked up where it had left off, so disagreement concerning which Cornish to revive was perhaps inevitable. It is estimated that there are at present several hundred fluent speakers of the language and a number of families in which the children are being brought up bilingually with English. Chapter Five explores the history and decline of Manx Gaelic, a member of the Goidelic branch of the Insular Celtic languages developed from the Old Irish (Gaelic) and brought to the Isle of Man during the fourth and fifth centuries CE by missionaries and others from Ireland. The Isle of Man, equidistant between England and Ireland, is a British Crown Dependency and not part of either the United Kingdom or the European Union. The ! 18! Vikings began to raid the island in 800CE, eventually becoming assimilated into the local culture, and bilingual in Norse and Gaelic. After the death of the last King of Mann in 1265, the island came under the control of Scotland and over the following two centuries, passed through periods of Scottish and English control. Manx emerged as a distinct language during this period. The influence of English on Manx can be traced back at least as far as 1405, when tenure of the island was granted to Sir John Stanley by Henry IV. As a result the Manx people became isolated to some extent from the Gaelicspeaking people of Ireland of Scotland, contacts, trade with England increased, and the island acquired English-speaking administrators. Little is known, however, of the interaction between English and Gaelic on the Isle of Man prior to the Reformation. The first book to be published in Manx (in 1707), Coyrle Sodjey [The Principles and Duties of Christianity], reflected the project of evangelization at a time when over 60 percent of the population were monolingual speakers. Nevertheless, attitudes towards the Manx language were not universally favourable. The Anglican Church withdrew its support for Manx-medium instruction in schools, and by 1782 English had become the main language of instruction in all but five schools. English increasingly became the language of the towns. The burgeoning tourist industry in the following century also contributed greatly to the devaluation of Manx, which increasingly came to be associated,even by Manx speakers themselves,with poverty, backwardness and ignorance. Parents, determined to spare their children social stigma, began not to transmit the language to their offspring, so that by the last decades of the nineteenth century there ceased to be Manx-speaking communities on the island. Notwithstanding this, by quirks of longevity and acquisition from grandparents, numerous native speakers with a range of competence survived well into the twentieth century, many of them being recorded by visiting Celticists. The last of these speakers died in 1974. Chapter Six charts the history of the revival of Manx. Following the decline in the use of Manx during the nineteenth century, The Manx Language Society was founded in 1899. By the middle of the twentieth century only a ! 19! few elderly native speakers remained but recordings of their speech underpinned a scholarly revival and a few individuals started teaching the language in schools. In 1992 the Manx Language Unit was formed, consisting of three members and headed by Manx Language Officer, whose first incumbent, Dr Brian Stowell, can be said to be responsible almost single-handedly for the success of the movement (Broderick 1999). Manx is now firmly established in the school curriculum at primary level. In the 2011 census, 1,823 out of 80,398, or 2.27 percent of the population, claimed to have knowledge of Manx. It also enjoys the support of the Isle of Man government, whose propaganda interests it serves, and has a modest media and internet presence, as reported by the national press on several occasions in the course of 2015. This does not entail, however, that Manx has been restored as a living community language. Rather, for the community at large, it is a component in the construction of a Manx identity. Chapter Seven sets out on the one hand to identify similarities and contrasts between the Cornish and Manx revivals and on the other to describe a model of revitalization applicable to both. The model would acknowledge that restoration of the language to any widespread vernacular use is an improbable and almost certainly unattainable goal. The respective revivals have largely been confined to date to a numerically small and, in the case of Cornwall, geographically widely scattered and heterogeneous group of enthusiasts and activistsand this is likely to continue to be the case. These activists may serve to galvanize interest in the population at large and encourage authorities and local enterprises to adopt the two languages as emblems of a distinctive ethnic, non-English identity. The languages have a an albeit tenuous foothold in the state education system but recent fundingcuts in the case of the Isle of Man and the perennial pressures of the mainstream curriculum are threatening to curtail its expansion. Revernacularization, then, is a dim and distant prospect, as is institutionalization in all but token form, whereas ‘language reintroduction’ (Eastman 1979) involving the understanding of language as culture ‘to be integrated into an existing speech community where another language is, ! 20! and will remain dominant’ may be seen as a more realistic endeavour, one that still serves to enrich citizens’notions of what it means to be Cornish and Manx. Over the last twenty-five years, an increasing number of books and scholarly articles have addressed endangerment and revitalization. Nancy Dorian is the pioneer in both the linguistic and the sociolinguistic study of language obsolescence and death: her work has been extremely influential from her earliest publications, such as her 1973 article ‘Grammatical change in a dying dialect’ to her groundbreaking Language death: the life cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect (1981) and important later collectionSmall- Language Fates and Prospects: Lessons of Persistence and Change from Endangered Languages: Collected Essays (2014). She also edited a book that has claims to be the most widely cited work in the field of language endangerment:lnvestigating obsolescence: studies in language contraction and death(1989). At least one handbook on endangered languages has also appeared, The Cambridge handbook of endangered languages(2011), edited by Peter Austin and Julia Sallabank. UNESCO’s Atlas of the world’s languages in danger is one of a number of regularly updated web sources that chart the fortunes of such languages. Other important websites are Ethnologue and the Endangered Languages Project, ‘an online resource to record access and share samples of and research on endangered languages as well as to share advice and best practices for those working to document or strengthen languages under threat’. Of especial importance for the sphere of the Celtic languages is the publication in 2015 of a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language on the emergence of “new speakers” in the context of some of Europe’s minority languages, Basque, Gallician and Catalan among as well as Irish, Breton and Manx. The “new speaker” label is used to describe individuals with little or no home or community exposure to a minority language but who instead acquire it through immersion or bilingual educational programmes, revitalization projects or as adult language ! 21! learners. Their emergence draws attention to the ways in which minority linguistic communities are changingon account of globalizationand the new profiles of speakers that this new social order is creating. As the numbers of speakers of Celtic languages in the traditional heartlands of Ireland, Scotland and Brittany decline inexorably, so they are being replaced by speakers of neo-versions of the respective varieties, who are expected in the future to acquire greater legitimacy and authority. This phenomenon has implications for speakers of neo-Manx and neo-Cornish too, who though not not in thrall to or competing with any traditional communities nonetheless experience anxieties concerning the authenticity of their revised forms. What kind of phenomenon then is represented by these revitalization projects and are they comparable with the sorts of measures applied to living endangered minority languages? Can they be judged successful or are they fundamentally an irrelevance? The methodology followed in this study is predominantly metahistoriographical. Considerations of a mainly practical nature have precluded the possibility ofdirect ethnographic fieldwork in Cornwall or the Isle of Man, although I did benefit from a visit to the Institute of Cornish Studies in Exeter in 2013 and have maintained regular contact with some of those directly involved in the revitalization movement. If this study has any application, it is as a contribution to refining the notion of revitalization in a sophisticated Western societywhich is now at a considerable remove from the social contexts of the dying versions of the respective languages. No study to date, as far as the author is aware, has compared and contrasted the Cornish and Manx revivals.It may be that the Reversing Language Shift model applied to such endangered languages is inappropriate once it is acknowledged that revernacularization is not a viable goal. Revitalization is often publicized and fomented by activists through whose prism of utopianoptimism it is not always possible to discern the underlying reality. Progress and achievements are not infrequently overestimated. Hence, a counterbalance, even counterblast, may be usefully supplied by the more ! 22! clinical gaze of the disinterested outsider. ! 23! Chapter 1 .Language Death 1.0 Introduction 1.1. Language death as a constant in history Language death is far from a solely contemporary phenomenon. Mufwene (2002: 2) exhorts linguists to embed language death in a historical perspective longer than European colonization of the past hundred years, in order to highlight the competition and selection that has characterised the coexistence of languages since probably the beginnings of agriculture (Nettle and Romaine 2000), and thus also to shed more light than hitherto on natural trends of language shift and loss. Such an approach, according to Mufwene, would make the linguistic enterprise comparable to that of environmentalists concerned with endangered species, who have first sought to understand the conditions that sustain or affect biodiversity in the same econiche. The Stammbaums of genetic linguistics, which illustrate language diversification and proliferation are apt to mask the concomitant loss of indgienous languages. The dispersal of Indo-European languages involved the near-complete disappearance of their competitors (Basque and Finnish being notable exceptions). Clackson (2015) charts the shifting ecology of the Mediterranean basin in the course of a single millenium, roughly 500 BCE to 500 CE: ! 24! Figure 2: Languages around the Mediterranean c. 500 BCE (Clackson, 2015) To take just a single region in the ancient world, Asia Minor, practically all of its indigenous languages became extinct under the pressure of Hellenization: Hatti, Hurrian, Hittite and the other Anatolian languages, Phrygian, Galatian, Gothic, and a number of other languages known by name only such as Mysian, Lycaonian, Cataonian, Cilician, Bagtiaonian and Cappadocian (Janse 2002: 347-359). The prestige of a politically and culturally superior lingua franca such as Greek was such that it was later exploited by the Romans to impose their own authority in Asia Minor. Language death did not immediately result from the imposition of Greek in the East and Latin in the West. Mostof the indigenous languages went through an intermediate stage of bilingualism (Adams, Janse & Swain 2002). The historian Thucydides speaks of a stock figure, the “Kàr díglottos [bilingual Carian]”(Histories 8. 85). Bilingualism leads to borrowing and language death is an extreme ease ‘where an entire language is borrowed at the expense of another’ (Campbell 1994: l960).9 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 There are, however, cases where the bilingual stage does not stricto sensu lead to language death, but where the subordinate language is maintained and subjected to heavy borrowing, leading to the emergence of a contact language, defined as ‘any new language that arises in a contact situation identifiable by the fact that its lexicon and grammatical structures cannot all be traced back ! 25! Figure 3: : Languages around the Mediterranean c. 400 CE (Clackson, 2015) This presumed scenario can be surmised for a wide range of ancient languages: Akkadian, Ugaritic, Sumerian, Phoenician, Pahlavi, Sogdian, Thracian and Dacian, Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Etruscan, some of which are known from written testimony, others only whose names are known and probably many more that became extinct in total anonymity. The Celtic languages have been major casualties, but principally on account of Christian evangelism. Latin had become the marker of the universal church, membership of which entailed embracing its language. As Brown (2013: 232) writes, Latin won its final triumph as the spoken language of most of the former territories of the Roman empire in the very last, more desperate centuries of Roman rule. Had the empire fallen when the ‘Roman peace’ was at its height, in the second century AD, Latin would have vanished along with the empire in much of western Europe. Celtic would have re-emerged as the dominant language in Gaul and much of Spain. France and Spain might well have !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! primarily to the same source language’ (Thomason 2001: 158). Strictly speaking, the original language has not died, but has been transformed into a new language. ! 32! what ‘ilka dint’ and ‘raukle tongue’ meant.13 Much of the discussion of language endangerment, for both academic and general audiences, has been vitiated by uncritical revivalist enthusiasm rather than reflection or evidence-based discussion (Cameron 2007). In ‘language murder’ the two systems involved are often unrelated typologically and there need not be any interference from the newcomer. The lower prestige language is ousted as the higher prestige variety extends across domains. These terms have won a measure of approval in the literature (e.g. Edwards 1994, McMahon 1994), but are nevertheless still problematic. The criteria for distinguishing the two types have not been clearly established. It would seem that both forms of decline are ultimately suicidal inasmuch as a new variety is adopted. Human beings generally resist their own murder. Language murder, however, is often aided and abetted by the speakers of the recessive language themselves. As Denison writes: ‘... it is as though a culture, in the sense of the totality of structured activity of the speech community, sometimes “decides”, for reasons of functional economy, to suppress a part of itself in the process of onward transmission’ (1977: 21). Terms that involve neatly differentiated victim and oppressor (‘us and them’), with all the moral opprobrium which is attached to the latter, may be convenient ideologically, but fail to do justice to the complexity of the relationships and attitudes involved in most language death situations. More attention needs to be paid to factors that have favoured particular languages at the expense of others, factors which lie in the changing socio-economic conditions to which speakers respond adaptively for their survival. Linguists have typically lamented the loss of ancestral languages and cultures especially among populations colonised by Europeans, arguing that relevant languages and cultures must be revitalised or preserved by all means. Absent from the same literature are assessments of the costs and benefits that the affected populations have derived from !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 13 For an outsider’s (sceptical) perspective on the survival of Scots, see Manfred Görlach (2002): A Textual History of Scots (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. ! 33! language shift in their particular socio-economic ecologies (Mufwene 2002: 4). 1.4. Structural consequences of language death. Despite a seminal article by Swadesh (1948), the study of language death has emerged as a field in its own right only in the last few decades. MacMahon (1994: 284) designates Dorian (1981) as the ‘first major study’. Nonetheless, there is already a sizeable bibliography with over sixty language death situations discussed. Gorlach’s statement (1986: 530) that findings are limited in number and spotty in terms of the languages and the aspects of grammar that have been studied’ is no longer accurate. That said, consensus, even about some of the terminology, is still a distant prospect.The brief of the sociolinguist is to identify the sets of conditions that cause people to give up one language in favour of another, but the typical changes undergone by abandoned languages is another primary object of study. It is widely assumed that language death has linguistic consequences for the dying language, and that reduction in use entails a reduction in structure. There is also agreement that obsolescing languages are just as subject to normal changes as fully viable ones, but that, as is the case with Manx, it is not easy to distinguish between normal changes and those attributable to obsolescence. Language death is also said toinvolve ‘normal’ linguistic changes (that is to say, language-internal developments and the sorts of ordinary contact-induced change found in ‘healthy’ languages), but these occur at an accelerated rate and in great numbers (Dorian 1981, Gal 1989, MacMahon 1994, Thomason 2015). The following is an brief outline of changes commonly observed in obsolescing languages. Whether any are an essential part of all language death situations has not yet been established. Morphological reduction is common, in particular, the loss of case systems and a tendency towards a more rigid grammatical word order (Campbell and Muntzel 1989, Dorian 1981): syntactic simplification, with loss of complex constructions (e.g. ! 34! subordinate clauses), deriving often from stylistic shrinkage and defective childhood acquisition. It is taken as axiomatic that a semi-speaker will use a smaller number of syntactic devices than a fully competent speaker of the same language (Andersen 1982). A preference for analytic constructions over synthetic ones, as in the almost exclusive use in Breton of the analytic as against the synthetic present, and the replacement in East Sutherland Gaelic of synthetic conjugated prepositions by free-standing prepositions and pronouns (Dressler 1988, Dorian 1981), is a normal change, but the equally normal reverse process has not been observed. Lexical changes tend to involve interference and convergence: extensive borrowing, calquing, semantic shifts determined by the dominant language) and cessation of native word-formationprocesses, are all reported. As far as phonology is concerned, Andersen (1982: 95) advances three hypotheses to which subsequent research has tended to lend support: (1) the bilingual speaker of a threatened language will make fewer phonological distinctions than would a fully competent speaker of the same language. (2) Nevertheless, he or she will preserve distinctions shared by both his or her languages even while making fewer of the distinctions found only in the threatened language. (3) Distinctions with a high functional load will survive longer in the speaker’s use of his or her weaker language than distinctions which have a low functional load. For example, speakersof American Finnish merge contrastive long vowels with their short counterparts. Long and short consonants are not distinguished in Channel Islands French, and the trilled and flapped /r/ are merged in varieties of dying Spanish (Campbell and Muntzel 1989). Other findings are the development of variability where obligatory rules fail to apply or are applied optionally and the overgeneralisation and undergeneralisation of rules. While multiple causation is always available as a back-stop, it cannot be proven which of these tendencies are specific to the ! 35! language death process and which the consequences of other kinds of languagecontact. A mechanism towards language shift is the adoption of code-switching or borrowing where the mother tongue co-exists and is used in conjunction with certain words or phrases from another language to aid understanding, maintain fluency, indicate social standing, or when there is no natural alternative. Myers-Scotten suggests that ‘… in a living community the borrowing is asymmetrical: the [language] flow is mainly from the sociolinguistically dominant language to the other one’ (1992:34). Most languages adopt these phenomena and in an age of global interaction, population and trade migration, the idea of a ‘pure’ language is increasingly improbable. Another stage within the gradual process of shift may be the development of a ‘hybrid’ language using morphology from the dominant language and lexicon from the mother language which is more easily retained due to its relative saliency. Trudgill (1977) regards this as part of the process of language ‘simplification’ or ‘reduction’. The adoption of an official lingua franca (often at the expense of the ethnic language) as the modern inter-ethnic means of communication is a definitive, often political, institutional stance on language. Language shift can also generate degrees of bi- or multilingualism where two or more languages are used side-by-side depending on the situation, the interlocutors and the social domain. This is an additive procedure, where two or more languages coexist. A subtractive procedure of language shift results in the linguistic space beingoccupied by a more dominant tongue. This is language death. There are many other questions to which no obvious answers are at present available: to what extent is it possible to generalize and theorize concerning language death? Given the vastly varying circumstances that may lead to language death, Hamp (1989:7), (perhaps echoing Guilleron’s famous dictum in dialect geography –‘chaque mot a son histoire’) urges caution and reticence - ‘every case is special … idiosyncratic’. What, for instance, is the relationship between pidginization and languages in the terminal stages of ! 36! decline? Are the kinds of changes dying languages undergo predictive of language death? Do features of language death represent a reversal of the processes of language acquisition, what is learned later by the child being lost earlier, or never mastered, by the semi-speaker? As cases of language death are in anything but short supply and the field is burgeoning, it is likely that these questions may soon be clarified. 1.5. The Celtic languagesin jeopardy Among the world’s endangered languages, the Celtic family are collectively facing an uncertain future, having been in continuous retreat for over 1500 years. The Celts were one of the great barbarian ethnoi of the Ancient World, dominating Western and Central Europe, making incursions into Italy and Greece, colonizing central Anatolia, and even fighting as mercenaries in Egypt. Their linguistic unity was occasionally remarked on: Tacitus notes the similarity of the Gaulish and British languages, and St Jerome states that Galatian reminded him of the Gaulish dialect of the Treveriinthe Rhineland (Clackson 2015: 68). The Celts spread their language and culture rapidly and just as rapidly retreated. It is the misfortune of the Celtic family to have come into close contact with two voracious imperial languages, first Latin and then English.14 The Celticspeaking populations of Spain, Gaul and northern Italy came under the sway of Rome before the fall of the Republic and eventually assimilated to Latin, although pockets survived, Galatian and Brythonic and its offshoots being cases in point. Irish, Manx and Scots Gaelic remained vital and viable languages throughout the millenium following Roman collapse, decline only setting in with the advent of the centralized state and capitalism. Celtic is now, in terms of numbers of speakers at least, a minor branch on the Indo- European tree, confined largely to the Atlantic margins of the British Isles and with no more than a precarious foothold in Brittany. Only certain quirks !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14The fate of the Celtic languages have been discussed at length by authors such as Durkacz (1983), who deals predominantly with education and religion, Abalain (1989), in French only, and Fishman (1991). ! 37! of geography seem tohave prevented or postponed total encroachment. In the era of satellitetelevision, islands and uplands offer precarious asylum. Speakers of Celtic languages have consistently failed to develop any corporate resistance to the erosion of their languages. As Greene remarks: ‘The Celtic languages are not dead, since at least two million people speak one or other of them as their native tongue, but since none of them has succeeded in dominating a state, the vast majority of their speakers are perforce bilingual, andbilingualism under those conditions must inevitably lead to the loss of the less important language.’ (Greene 1964: 33) Sixty years later, Celtic speakers continue to dwindle, in spite of much (albeit passive) goodwill and institutional support. There are few if any monolinguals, and not only have the Celtic languages failed to dominate a state, they have failed to dominate a single urban centre of more than about 10,000 inhabitants (Carnarvon in Wales). The population (c.12,000) of Stornoway in Lewis, one of the largest and westernmost of the Hebridean islands and traditionally the stronghold of Scottish Gaeldom, is almost wholly anglophone. French official policy of linguicide towards Breton, a language which within living memory could boast over a million speakers and learnt today by perhaps only a few thousand children, looks certain to be successful. In Ireland, a Celtic language has for the first time been statesponsored, yet the country’s legislative attempts to stem the tide by protecting and fostering Irish-speaking areas and introducing Gaelic as a compulsory subject in schools, have been a failure. Gaulish, Galatian, Lepontic, Hispano-Celtic, Cumbric and British, are all extinct. Welsh,Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Breton may follow them in this century.15 Their advocates may aspire to a societal and functionally differentiated diglossia, or permanent bilingualism, but this would depend on a continuance of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 15 Already there have appeared tentative obituaries, as the titles of Adler (1977) and Hindley suggest: Welsh and other dying languages in Europe and The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary. ! 38! domains for each variety. This condition is not met in any of the countries in which Celtic languages are spoken. As Greene (1981: 8) gloomily observes, ‘the whole history of the Neo-Celtic languages suggests that to choose bilingualism is to choose the road to decay and extinction.’16 This study focuses on the best recorded of the defunct languages, Manx and Cornish and the attempts made to revive them. In many ways they may be said to be harbingers of the fate awaiting the remaining members of the family. The conditions of and pressures towards language contraction are substantially the same. By way of illustration, a sketch of one of these is offered in the following section. In part this is a descriptive narrative of language shift over space and time but it also addresses some of the causal factors involved in language death. 1.5.1.Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic is spoken by less than 58,000 people, according to the 2011 census (National Records of Scotland 2013), 1.2 percent fewer than in 2001. The language was once spoken over most of what is modern-day Scotland, but its fortunes began to decline in the eleventh century with the arrival of English refugees at the Scottish court and in the following century with the adoption of Norman French as a High language; language shift was further precipitated by an emerging divide between the more urbanised, largely Anglophone Lowlands and the mountainous Gaelic-speaking Highlands. Since the fourteenth century, Gaelic has been primarily associated with the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 16 It may be retorted that there is often no choice involved: language shift may be gradual, unconscious and involuntary. Where there is choice, it is usually to the individual’s advantage to choose bilingualism. Not to do so, in the case of the Celtic languages, is to tolerate self-segregation. Greene himself reports that language activists find themselves in much the same situation as the earnest ecologist who asks the people of some area of natural beauty not to permit development there, and is met with the reply: ‘you can’t eat the view’ (1981: 5). As will be argued later, in the context of language revival, there is often a primitivist nostalgia at work which would have native speakers spurn the twentieth century, hoarding their spiritual riches whilst disregarding material well-being. ! 39! Highlands and has not played any significant role in the affairs of the Lowland south. The heartland of present-day Gaeldom lies in the Hebrides.Gaelic speakers were actively repressed by governments in Edinburgh and in London in the wake of the Jacobite Rebellions, and during the Highland Clearances in Scotland (1792–1886) whole communities of Gaelic speakers in the Highlands were forcibly removed from their homes and driven to emigrate. In the mid-eighteenth century the population of Scotland was around 1.25 million, consisting of about 300,000 Gaelic speakers, and nearly one million English speakers, concentrated in the Lowlands. Poverty and underdevelopment in the Highlands, and especially in the Hebrides accelerated emigration from Gaelic-speaking communities. Those who stayed in the Highlands were affected by the emergence of English as the language of the economy; the young were encouraged to learn English so as to have the option of emigrating later in order to find work. Gaelic also suffered as a result of education policy. The Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge sought to provide education for Highlanders, whose native tongue was often Gaelic. The SSPCK gradually started teaching an increasing number of lessons in English. The 1872 Education Act made no provision for Gaelic and its use was actively discouraged within the education system; even as late as the 1930s children could be physically punished in school for speaking the language (MacKinnon 1974: 55). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the percentage of Gaelic speakers was a little more than five percent; over the course of the century, this number fell to a little more than one percent of the population. Active suppression and a long-standing association with poverty and backwardness had combined to undermine the prestige of the language in the Gaelic-speaking heartlands to the extent that in the period 1950 to1970, Gaelic was rapidly being replaced by English at the community and family levels in the Western Isles and Skye. ! 40! Figure 5: Percentages of Gaelic speakers (mono- and bilingual) in Scotland in successive census years, 1891–2001 (Kandler et al. 2010) By the end of the twentieth century, significant revitalization efforts were underway, predominantly in terms of the H(igh) functions of language use. In 2005, the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act was passed. This act was modelled on the Welsh Language Act of 1993 and for the first time made Gaelic an official language of Scotland and also invested theBòrd na Gàidhlig [the Gaelic language board] with responsibilities for coordinating the promotion of Gaelic culture, language and education in Scotland. Speakers of English onlyGaelic speakers (mono and bi-lingual) Figure 6: The demographic decline of Scottish Gaelic ! 41! The establishment of the national Gaelic radio station, BBC Radio nan Gaidheal, in 1985, and the establishment of limited national digital Gaelic television station, BBC Alba, in 2008 secured the language’s presence in mass media. Notwithstanding these advances, however, the vitality of the language remains dubious at the family and community levels. Mac an Tàilleir, Rothach and Armstrong’s (2010) study of the core Gaelic-speaking community of Shawbost on the Isle of Lewis (see chapter 2), found that intergenerational transmission of the language had all but ceased and that community use of the language was weak and declining. These are prodromal symptoms. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Scottish Gaelic is being nudged inexorably towards the precipice that Dorian (1981) identified as ‘tipping point’. ! 48! unconcentrated adults’ (Fishman 1991: 88). This stage implies that the task of RLS is to document the threatened language by collecting material such as folk tales, jokes, proverbs greetings, blessings, etc., and recording them in audio and written format in order later to attempt to restore the vocabulary and grammar of the language. As an RLS remedial measure at this stage Fishman suggests the introduction of language courses for the adult members of the Xish community. Stage 7 on the GIDS scale: ‘most users of Xish are a socially integrated and ethnolinguistically active population but they are beyond child-bearing age’ (Fishman 1991: 89). The children and grandchildren of these Xish-speaking people have alreadyabandoned their traditional language and are Yishspeaking. At this stage, it is possible to teach the threatened language and culture to the younger speakers, including adults of child-bearing age, and encourage them to speak in this language to their children. The goal of the RLS efforts is to re-establish the intergenerational transmission of Xish. Thus all RLS activities that do not support this goal must be considered as a failure from the point of view of the revival movement. The minority community should engage in establishing young people’s associations, young parent groups and residential communities or neighbourhoods that use Xish (Fishman 1991: 92). At the next stage, Stage 6, Xish is used in informal communication among all three generations of the minority community, even though the majority language prevails in the formal domains. Stage 6 is ‘the attainment of intergenerational informal oralcy and its demographic concentration and institutional reinforcement’. This be achieved through the establishment of Stage 7 institutions in neighbourhoods with higher numbers of Xish speakers or ‘at least, frequently scheduled, and cognitively/emotionallygripping, briefer concentrations for outings and vacations’ (Fishman1991: 92).In the absence of any demographic concentration of Xish speakers, Fishman suggests scheduled visits, the use of regular telephone conferences, amateur or local radios, the exchange of ! 49! various language learning material such as games, songs, stories, letters and the establishment of parents associations (Fishman 1991: 94-95). In order to facilitate RLS-activities, families raising their children in Xish should be supported by RLS family centres. (Fishman 1991: 94). Stage 6 is crucial in language revitalisation since the threat of immediate language death is dispelled when its prerequisites are fulfilled. According to Fishman, most of the intergenerationally transmitted languages in the world are precisely at this stage, and therefore, it is essential that it should be properly secured by as further success at advanced stages depends on it. The primary focus of the next stage, Stage 5, is ‘Xish literacy in home, school and community, but without taking on extra-communal reinforcement of such literacy’ (Fishman 1991: 95). Literacy leads to the wideneing of the already achieved functional domains of Xish through usage in newspapers, magazines, books, brochures, etc. It enhances the prestige of the minority language through visibility and connectsgeographically distant families through aiding interpersonal and intercommunalcommunication liberated from reliance on the majority language. Together Stages 8 to 5 constitute the minimum basis of reversing language shift.Stage 4 on the GIDS scale envisages partial control of the primary level of education on the part of the minority language community. Two types of school are distinguished (Fishman 1991: 99-101) at this phase. Type 4a schools follow the Yish authority’s requirements as to what is adequate and expected in education, but are mainly under Xish control and facilitate children’s integration into the Xish culture and society, while type 4b schools are funded entirely out of the general tax funds and the Yish authorities exercise their own control over the requirements of education and allow some of the subjects to be taught in Xish. Stage 3 on the GIDS scale: ‘use of Xish in the lower work sphere (outside of the Xish neighbourhood /community) involving interaction between ! 50! Xmen and Ymen’ (Fishman 1991: 103). Xish is already present at workplaces situated within the minority community at earlier stages, but at this stage it leaves the protective ethnocultural and ethnolinguistic boundaries of the minority group and is introduced into the work environment in two situations. Companies of type 3a are mainly Xish controlled and staffed and seek to fulfil the needs of the Yish market, while 3b companies are the converse, oriented towards Xish clients and providing services in the Xish language. Given the dominance of Yish in the work sphere, this stage of RLS may be difficult to achieve and require the thorough consolidation of the presence of Xish at Stages 6-4.Stage 2represents an advanced stage in language revitalization.: Xish is present in ‘in lower governmental services and mass media but not in the higher spheres of either’ (Fishman 1991: 105). For this stage to be attained, the Xish community must have sufficient authority to participate in decision-making on the governmental level and exercise some control over the mass media, so that programmes are broadcast or dubbed in Xish. Governement services are offered in both Xish and Yish and bilingual forms available in their offices (Fishman1991: 106). Stage 1 on the GIDS scale envisages ‘Xish in higher level educational, occupational, governmental and media efforts’ (Fishman 1991: 107). Languages that have reached the final stage, Stage 1, are well representedin higher level education and mass media and are widely used bysocial and governmental organizations, as well as in other services and occupations but the additional safety provided by political independence is absent. At this stage the Xish community has the power to monitor the usage of Xish and enjoys cultural autonomy. However, arrival at Stage 1 does not signal the end of RLS. Given the political nature ofthis stage, the Xish community must closely follow every action thatinfluences the well-being of Xish. Fishman enjoins “eternalwatchfulness” as the price that must be paid at Stage 1 (Fishman 1991: 108). ! 51! Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) Figure 7 Figure 8. 2.3. Domains of Use A fundamental concept in the GIDS scale is that of domain. In cases of ! 52! language attrition, a language is used in fewer and fewer settings with fewer and fewer functions (and, usually, by fewer and fewer speakers). As this suggests, the relationship between language and domains is a dynamic one for many local languages, and thus the trends of change are relevant. If a language is used in increasingly fewer domains, as was the case in Cornish and Manx, it is a sign of atrophy and diminishing vitality. Conversely, an increasing number of domains betokens renewed vitality. New domains are often created in the modern world with the emergence of new technologies and media. This usually requires extension of the lexicon through borrowing or neologism. Local languages have been used in radio broadcasts around the world, far fewer in television broadcasts, and virtually none at all in major films. Radio and television broadcasting in dominant languages has been described as contributing to language shift away from lesser-used or minority languages (Grenoble and Whaley 1998: 53). While the Internet might potentially supply a creative way to increase local language use (indeed, many revitalization efforts see it in exactly this way), the fact remains that the Internet, thus far, is overwhelmingly dominated by a small number of languages. Therefore, it is a often difficult matter to establish it as a domain for local languages. Even if some web-sites are created which employ a local language, speakers of the local language will tend to make greater use of the Internet in a non-local language. Thus, the presence of a language in any given domain does not itself guarantee vitality. Recent work, however, on minority langauge broadcasting has stressed the potentially beneficial effects of using electronic mediation for the maintenance and renewal of such languages.17 Speakers are not only presented with opportunities to hear and maintain skills in the language, but when language is thus viewed as part of the contemporary world and relevant for the future, its value is enhanced. Digital technology has an obvious application too in the phase of documentation of an obsolescent !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 17 The Irish revival has been supported since the 1970s by radio and television services in the Irish language. Raidio na Gaeltachta and Teilifis na Gaeilge (now TG4) broadcasts can be seen and heard nationally. ! 53! language, providing ‘richer and multidimensional records especially in the fields of phonology and prosdy, as well as in performative and interactional contexts of use as compaed to print media’ ( Eisenlohr 2004:23). A critical though not uncontroversial domain for language usage is of course education. In regions where a nationally (or regionally) administered education system exists, the languages of education become a key determinant of language use in other domains. ‘When mandatory schooling occurs exclusively in a national language, the use of local languages almost inevitably declines’(Grenoble and Whaley, 2006: 10). Acceptance in schools confers a clear symbolic value on many endangered languages and is therefore often a stated goal in revitalization campaigns. It is also perceived as a means of enhancing status, prestige and perceived utility, as well as of fostering favourable educational outcomes among indigenous peoples. Many schools which purport to have local language education teach the language as a secondary subject, and the curriculum as a whole is taught in a language of wider communication, yet ‘Education in the language is essential for language vitality’ (UNESCO Report ‘Language Vitality and Endangerment’, 2003: 12). In the case of Manx, very modest amounts of extra-curricular teaching led gradually to incorporation into the mainstream curriculum. The Breton-immersion schools, the Diwan (‘seed’ in Breton), inspired by the inspired by the Irish Gaelscoileanna and Basque Ikastolak movements, started as community-run playschemes with nativespeaker helpers, to enable transmission to skip a generation. These ‘language nests’ are seen as a particularly successful dimension of language revitalization. Formal schooling requires literacy in the local language, and so the extent of literacy is a further marker of language vitality. A corollary is standardization, and where a high level of local variation is present, standardization may entail the loss of dialect diversity. A divergence and even hostility may develop between younger speakers who have learnt a unified, possibly puristic, literary version of an endangered language ! 54! through education, and older native speakers of ‘authentic’ or traditional varieties (Grenoble and Whaley, 2006). Ideally, for sustaining vitality in a local language, all subject matter needs to be taught in that language, and pedagogical materials must be available to teachers and students. This in turn requires the developement of disciplinespecific materials and technical terminology in the lexicon of the language. A wide range of written materials may already exist in the language, such as literature, religious texts, newspapers, textbooks, dictionaries, and so on. On the other hand, there may a lack of literacy, no orthography, and indeed no written language at all. Assessment of language vitality needs to take into account a complex set of interrelated factors: the size of the speaker community, intergenerational transmission, domains of language use, and attitudes on a variety of levels. Of the four, the one factor that tends to be paramount is intergenerational transmission: once the children stop learning a language, its fate is sealed. In cases of rapid or accelerated language shift, disrupted transmission to children can propel a vital language to near extinction in the course of a single generation. The time of life when people are able to transmit a language to their children may also be the period when they are turning their backs on the old culture, or preoccupied in perfecting their skills in the dominant language for economic or educational reasons. Realization of imminent collapse often takes place too late to raise children speaking the ancestral language. The immediate task for revitalization programmes is to identify and stabilize languages under threat so that they can be transmitted to the next generation in as many of their functions as possible. The sooner such programmes are implemented, the easier it is to reverse the shift. The following two examples illustrate the hazards of late intervention. ! 55! 2.4. Two Celtic case studies 2.4. .1. The Gaeltacht in The Republic of Ireland Sanskrit is among the twenty-two Scheduled languages of India. In the Indian census of 2001, 14,135 people reported Sanskrit as their native language. Similarly, the Irish language is the first official language of the Republic of Ireland, with English recognized as the second official language. Results of the 2011 Census show that 41.4 percent of the population reported an ability to speak Irish. Given, however, that much of the efforts to revitalize the Irish language have centred on the education system, it would be unsurprising if it was confined mainly to this context. Daily use of Irish outside of the education system is limited to just 1.8 percent of the population; just 2.6 percent reported using Irish on a weekly basis. In spite of widespread theoretical support for the language actual use remains low. By the early twentieth century, Irish was already on the wane, spoken by less than a fifth of the population and its heartland, confined almost entirely to a western periphery, populated by agricultural smallholders and fishing families, comprising an economically depressed and vulnerable community subject to heavy emigration. This is the unpromising situation which the Gaelic League and then the newly formed Irish state inherited and sought to remedy throughout the twentieth century. The Gaelic League, established under Douglas Hyde in 1892, infused the language revival with a political dimension. Influenced by German Romanticism, in which the ethnic identity arising from an organic association of a language with a particular place and people was central, the League emphasized Ireland’s unique cultural identity vis-a-vis that of England, providing the rationale for why Irish should be restored, a rationale that has come under scrutiny only recently.18 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 18‘If Ireland really is to become a multicultural society, then the Irish language can no longer function as a badge of identity for just one section of the community, those who claim descent from from putative Gaelic ancestors’ (Doyle 2015: 267). ! 56! One of the enduring legacies of the Gaelic League is the Gaeltacht (plural, Gaeltachtaímeaning roughly ‘Gaeldom’), conceived originally as an linguistic equivalent of a nature reserve, an area of rugged countryside, untouched by the forces of modern industrialization, where Irish speakers could eke out a frugal existence untroubled by the language of the Gall (foreigners). The natives, however, were not always either compliant or grateful. One commentator, Hindley (1990: 212) is scathing in his appraisal: I sense that by 1922 (and probably by 1893) Irish had become the key distinguishing feature of a Gaeltacht subculture which was also the anticulture of an underclass in relation to anglicized Irish middle-class society. In this it resembles broad Cockney in east London. Its speakers still do not regard it as ‘respectable’ but it shows their independence of middle-class values and ‘high’ culture, bringing a sense of integrity and collective privacy which ‘Gaeltacht chauvinism’ reflects. …This is not incompatible with a sense of shame about it … but the language is their ovm possession, it ispart of themselves, and there is a deep psychological ‘class-war’ element in their resentment of and resistance to its appropriation by (to them) ‘upper-class’ outsiders … . What has happened in the course of the attempted revival is that a section of the anglicized upper class … has adopted the lower class patois. The lower-class reaction is exactly what would have been expected in London if the West End ‘toffs’ of the 1920s had presumed to combine with their ‘slumming’ improving lectures on the virtues and desirability of maintaining Cockney English, and then went on to try and talk it, finally offering instruction to the Cockneys on how they should talk it ‘correctly’. As is commonly the case with the Celtic revivals, a breach was created between the middle-class intellectuals who opted for Irish as an extension of their nationalist personae and the illiterate peasantry to whom they preached the gospel of cultural and linguistic renewal. In the present day, it is not uncommonn to encounter resentment on the part of Irish speakers to outsider language revivalists and linguists, who are viewed with suspicion ! 57! since, in a sense, it is not their (Irish’s) battle. The mutual incomprehension was not merely ideological. Irish still lacks a standard language which is accepted and used by the majority of the population in public and formal communication (Doyle 2015:222). There is a government-defined official standard (the Caighdeán). The fragmented Gaeltacht regions each have their respective dialectsbut the standard does not really approximate to any of them, so native speakers tend to avoid it as “artificial”. The Gaeltachtaí are fairly widely spaced from one another, so there is little inter-Gaeltacht interaction and no one dialect enjoys prestige over others. Doyle (2015:222) comments that ‘by and large the Irish of the Gaelic Leaguers tended to be bookish, and their pronunciation left a lot to be desired; native speakers generally lacked the patience and flexibility that would have enabled them to to speak in such a way that the learners might have understood. This meant that one of the ideological planks of the Revival, namely that the Gaeltacht was to function as a source for the reinstatment of Irish as the national tongue, presented considerable practical challenges to all but the most linguistically talented’. Successive Irish governments have relied on the maintenance of the native speaker heartlands to save Irish. But there has been drastic contraction, leaving only three main Gaeltacht areas in Donegal, Connemara, and West Kerry, all relatively remote communities on the Atlantic seaboard. Their viability had been jeopardized by poverty and emigration, so that financial incentives (the deontas) were provided to induce the Irish speakers to stay. The government was also committed to promoting rural industry. Responsibility for the economic, social and cultural development of the Gaeltacht passed to Údarás na Gaeltachta in 1980. ! 64! • Although 66 percent of adult residents are fluent Gaelic speakers, only one parent in five speaks mainly or only Gaelic to their children. • 34 out of the 39 children (87 percent) in the sample speak mainly or only English to theirsiblings. Five children (13 percent) use Gaelic and English equally with siblings, but no child uses mainly or only Gaelic with siblings. • Approximately half of all grandparents speak to their grandchildren mainly or only in English, even though their generation is the most fluent and able to support the child to learn Gaelic. • Despite bilingual education being available in Shawbost, more than half of the parents chose English Medium Education for their school-age children. It is clear from the above that inter-generational transmission in Shawbost has broken down, whether irremediably or not remains to be seen. The authors of the report purport to contribute to a sincere dialogue between Shawbost residents and development agencies about the future of Gaelic and to that end quote Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer (2011: 63) in calling for ‘an honest assessment of the state of the language and how people really feel about using and preserving it, replacing wishful thinking and denial of reality with an honest evaluation leading to realistic recommendations’. The authors could, however, be accused of wishful thinking and denial of reality themselves intheir conclusions. To the question ‘Can anything be done?’ the answer is emphatically YES: “So, the effort will have to be huge [...] like it was in Israel when it was a new country [...] It has happened before, and it can be done” (Shawbost resident) No language is lost or beyond hope. Even a dead language can be revived. In 1880, there were no native speakers of Hebrew, ! 65! but through the 20th century, Jews worked to revive their language, and now there are five million native speakers of Hebrew in Israel and nine million speakers globally. Gaelic in Shawbost is definitely alive. But having a high percentage of fluent speakers and positive attitudes towards Gaelic in Shawbost are not enough: Gaelic needs to be spoken in the family home and in the community, if it is to continue. The language development initiatives designed to forestall the endpoint of language shift are: • introducing bilingual education for all children • giving support to all parents in achieving bilingual households • introducing greater opportunities to learn or relearn Gaelic • encouraging Gaelic in the workplace through training opportunities and the valuing of Gaelic language skills in the workplace. All of these rely on a their coming into being a collective will on the part of a community to change settled habits. Universal bilingual education cannot be imposed and parental choices are likely to depend on factors other than language acquisition. Althugh Informal Intergenerationational Oracy is rightly at the centre of language revitalization programmes, it is clear that once interrupted it is very difficult to restore. A more recent programme in Wales, Twf (‘growth’)21, recommended by the Shawbost report, encourages families to bring children up bilingually, and is promoted by midwives and health workers (Edwards and Newcombe 2005). Bilingual education had produced a generation with proficiency in academic Welsh, but without the type of language (and the motivation) needed for childrearing. Welsh revitalization has set itself ambitious goals, yet here too the project may be faltering. In !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 21 Rationale and resources may be accessed here: http://twfcymru.com/?lang=en ! 66! 2003 the then Welsh government set a target to increase the proportion of Welsh speakers, encouraged by the 2001 Census, which showed the size of the Welsh-speaking population had increased for the first time in 100 years. Data from the 2011 Census revealed that it had not only missed its target, but that the proportion of Welsh speakers actually shrank. Instead of the five-point increase that ministers wanted, the proportion of Welsh speakers fell from 21 percent in 2001 to 19 percent. Welsh appears to have gone into reverse in a period when Welsh-medium education has increased and work has been done to cement the official status of the Welsh language.22 The introduction of a Irish and Gaelic into the school curriculum might have seduced the authorities into believing that interrupted family transmission was no longer a problem since the schools were ensuring transmission. One of the miscalculations of the revival movement has been to place the burden on the educational system, rather than in promoting the usefulness of the language in everyday life; Irish is not used as a full, living language in the workplace in most of Ireland (thusfailing the criteria for GIDS Stage 3).Research in Wales has found that although bilingual education had successfully increased the number of young people who could speak Welsh, it did not lead to renewal of inter-generational transmission: young people simply stopped speaking Welsh once they left school (Edwards and Newcombe, 2005: 137). In places where endangered languages are promoted through education, traditional domains may paradoxically be reversed: the greater the official endorsement increases, the weaker the use in informal contexts. The case of Irish embodies the ambiguities involved in assessing language revitalization and restoration. Some would see it see as evidence that language-support movements are large futile and others see as evidence that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 22 Further information on the shock felt at the census setback can be obtained from ‘2011 Census: Theories on the decline in Welsh language’http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-politics-20701119; accessed 22 June 2014. ! 67! they can achieve a great deal. For Romainne, the revival is ‘hardly failure’ whatever the shortcomings (2008:24). Doubts about the effectiveness of language-support movements or the value of RLS efforts are most commonly expressed when ‘success’ is taken to mean that a receding language has been restored to full daily use and is now transmitted to ethnicgroup children in the home. In spite of the proliferation of language-support movements, and in spite of improved language-rights legislation in a good many countries, this remains an obstinately rare outcome. As Doyle remarks (2015: 264),‘If the touchstone of its success is whether 100 per cent of the population of Ireland is speaking Irish, then we have to say it is a spectucalar failure …After all, anybody who sets himself an impossible task is bound to fail.’ ! 68! Chapter 3: The Demise of The Cornish Language 3.0 Introduction Cases of ethno-linguistic extinction have, according to Krejci and Velimsky, been ‘extremely rare during the past thousand years’. They tend to follow ‘a pattern of three phases: a) shattering blow, b) lingering-on for several centuries, and c) late regrets among survivors’ (1981: 248). Outside of the late Soviet Union, there are four ethnic groups alleged to conform to this pattern: the Dalmatians, the Polabian Slavs (extinct, linguistically at least, in the eighteenth century), the Pruz or Baltic Prussians, and lastly the Cornish. In the case of the Cornish, the ‘shattering blow’ is identified as their defeat at the hands of Athelstan, King of Wessex in 936.23 Whilst the use of the dramatic expression ‘shattering blow’ may be historically inaccurate and misleading, this account follows the three phases in narrating a military, or at least political, conquest which precipitates widespread and progressive language loss. It also subjects to critical examination the peculiar Cornish manifestation of ‘late regrets among survivors’. The county of Cornwall occupies a peninsula 120 kilometres long and 72 kilometres broad at its widest point.24 It is separated from the neighbouring !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 23 Krejci and Velimsky appear to derive their information from Stephans (1976: 202): ‘It was not until 936, however, that Athelstan, King of Wessex, drove the Cornish [sic] out of Exeter and defeated Hywel, the last independent king of Cornwall.’ According to Wakelin, however, this Hywel (“Huwal West Wala cyning” in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to be identified with Hywel Dda, King of Dyfed in south-west Wales (1975: 59; see also Pearce 1978: 169). There is no evidence of any military campaign undertaken by Athlestan in Cornwall. 24Cornwall may have been a pagus, or separate administrative division, within the Civitas Dumnoniorum . The tribal name Cornovii is first documented in the 7th/8th century Ravenna Cosmography and by 700 their territory was known as Cornubia (ibid.: 203). The element cornhorn’ may refer to the Cornovii as dwellers in promonory forts or, equally plausibly, inhabitants of a horn-like peninsula. Todd ! 69! county of Devon by the river Tamar. Cornish is the Brythonic Celtic language last spoken natively in the westernmost villages in the eighteenth century. Arguably, it is solely its geographical remoteness that accounts for its longevity as a Celtic language in England. In this it is analogous to Cumbric, also a Brythonic Celtic language not finally extinct (in upland Cumbria) until the early twelfth century (Jackson 1963: 73). However, whereas the remains of Cumbric amount to no more than three words and a few personal names, Cornish is preserved in a corpus of ‘a little less than 100,000 words, or the length of one modern novel’ (Price 1984: 139). It is this body of work that has made possible what is generally known as ‘the Cornish revival’, described by Combellack as ‘perhaps the only example in linguistic history of wholly defunct vernacular being successfully resuscitated’ (1978: 45). Gregor (1980: 73) concurs: ‘[The revival of Cornish] is a bold step, without parallel in the history of linguistic revivals’. Stephans quotes the Hebrew scholar Chaim Rabin: ‘The rebirth of Cornish is the only case that can reasonably be considered as a parallel to that of Hebrew’ (1976: 218). These are ambitious claims which invite serious consideration. 3.1.Early History On the eve of the Claudian invasion of 43 CE the inhabitants of Britain south of the Clyde-Forth valley were linguistically homogeneous, speakers of a Celtic language not far removed from the Gaulish spoken on the continent. Unlike Gaulish, however, and in fact uniquely in the history of the Celtic languages, British (or Brittonic) survived intact four centuries of Roman occupation. The extent to which Latin displaced Celtic as a spoken language in the province is widely disputed (Jackson 1959: 61, Lockwood 1975: 55, Leith 1983: 15, Price 1984: 159, Frere 1987: 362-4). After a survey of Latin loan-words in British, Green (1968: 76) posits a ‘vigorous Latin speech, both Classical and vulgar, and massive bilingualism on the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (1983: 217) identifies a horned deity of fertility, cognate with the Gaulish Cernunnus, as a more probable origin. ! 70! part of speakers of British.’ According to Dillon and Chadwick, however, Latin ‘never gained wide currency in Britain’ (1972: 34). Hunter Blair too describes Latin as spoken only by some elements of the population, notably the governing classes, those concerned with trade, the army and administration, and the better educated town-dwellers, but ‘there can be no doubt that the population as a whole was not Latin-speaking’ (1975: 43). It is safe to assume that British remained as a ‘low language’ spoken predominantly by the rural population. As the higher domains disintegrated and the garrisons retreated in the fourth and fifth centuries, so British reemerged as the only viable community language. As far as the south-west peninsula is concerned, literary sources are nonexistent and the archaeological remains scant. In fact, Romanization there was never more than partial and ‘Rome’s hand lay light’ (Thomas 1993: 352). The largest settlement was Exeter (Isca Dumnoniorum), founded around 50-55 CE as a social and administrative centre.25 Further west, no mosaics, no theatres, no baths have been found (Payton 1994:51), leading some commentators to suggest that the Romans failed to conquer Cornwall at all (Todd 1987: 216). The Iron Age tribe, the Dumnonii, whose territory comprised modern Devon and Cornwall, the western parts of Somerset and fringes of Dorset, were largely undisturbed by military campaigns and their mode of life remained unchanged (Fox 1964: 148, Wakelin 1975: 48, Cunliffe 1997: 260). There was a gain, however, in political cohesion but this was lost once Roman rule broke down at the beginning of the fifth century. There ensued a era of fragmentation and instability, of petty kings and independent local dynasties, each at war with each other (Fox 1964: 169). Fleming reports the reoccupation of ancient abandoned hillforts by settlers who were culturally Romano-British but had only an ‘impoverished, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 25 Only one Roman fort has been identified, that of Nanstallon south of Kelly, dating from 55-65 AD. Frere (1987: 279) reports renewed Roman interest in Cornwall in the mid-third and early fourth centuries as a consequence of the new industry of pewter manufacture. Cornish tin mines had been famous since before Roman occupation. ! 71! residual version of the fourth-century material culture’ (Fleming 2010: 32- 3). There is evidence for a number of Irish settlements in northern Cornwall, but these do not appear to have lasted. Ironically, it precisely to this period, with the peninsula liberated from the Roman Empire and not yet under the “Saxon yoke”, that the Celtic nationalists of Cornwall assign their lost Eden of independence.26 It is a further irony that Cornish owes both its genesis as a separate language and more remotely, its extinction, to the same historical event, the westward expansion of the kingdom of Wessex. The traditional date of the first large-scale incursions into Britain by Germanic settlers is the winter of 449. The older histories posit waves of British-speaking refugees driven inexorably westward into the two western peninsulas, triggering a pattern of emigration from Britain to Armorica (present-day Brittany), Asturia and Galicia, which reached their climax in the middle and second half of the sixth century, as the emergent kingdom of Wessex expanded towards the Bristol Channel (following the battle of Old Sarum in 552). Figure 10: Anglo-Saxon Advance and Settlement (Wakelyn 1975) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 26 Thomas (1973: 12) allows a broader time-span: ‘All its [Cornwall’s] subsequent separatism and idiosyncracies, whether remarked upon externally or boasted about internally, derive from the status and development of the peninsula, in the millenium from 100 BC to AD 900.’ ! 72! According to Todd (1987: 239), however, ‘it is hard to believe that the English advance westward was capable of dislodging large numbers of people in the later fifth century’ nor can Irish raids and settlements be invoked as a threat of major proportions to the security of western Britons. The character of the movement plausibly varied in the decades in which it occurred, with adventurous spirits initially looking outward in the hope of gain and advancement, followed in the sixth-century phase by larger-scale migration in search of land for settlement and exploitation. The language of Brittany, or Little Britain—Breten Vyhan—in contrast with the Great Britain, was at first identical with that of Cornwall. Until the eighth century, they were ‘truly a single language’ (Todd 1987: 240) and in fact ‘no clear and accurately dateable differentiations took place … between Cornish and Breton until the tenth and eleventh centuries (Jackson 1953: 24, 1959: 68). West British, on the other hand, the ancestor of both Welsh and Cornish, was already diverging into two dialects as early as the first century CE. The decisive break may be said to have come when the two British regions were effectively cut off from each other by land through Saxon settlement of the Severn valley following the battle of Dyrum (near Bath) in 557. By roughly 600 CE, the period when we can speak of a common British language is at an end (Jackson 1953: 25). 3. 2. Expansion of Wessex By the middle of the seventh century the Saxons were threatening the Dumnonian boundary, located by Stenton along the rivers Parrett and Axe. The settlement of east Devon must have been complete by 670, when there is evidence to suggest that a Saxon abbey was founded at Exeter. It was here that Wynfrith (St Boniface), born at or near Crediton, received his early education c. 680-690. According to Stenton, the Saxon conquest of Devon was followed by an extensive movement of population westward from regions already settled. ! 73! The place names of Devon are essentially English, varied in character, and pointing to a rapid occupation of new territory both by aristocrats and their followers. Although Celtic placenames survived the conquest in considerable numbers, they remain as exceptions, distributed over the county in a way that shows that the English settlement was equally thorough in its eastern and western portions’ (1971:64). Wakelin interprets the same evidence but from a British perspective: Celtic place-names, though infrequent, are to be found throughout Devon, probably indicating groups of British, e.g. Walreddon (perhaps < OE weala-roeden‘community of Britons’).The implications are clearly that, not only in Exeter, but throughout old Dumnonia, groups of British were allowed to live in accordance with their own ancient laws and customs (1975: 61). This notion accords with more recent evidence provided by Fleming (2010) of an albeit attenuated continuity at the expense of a mass migration narrative. The new sense of Englishness that emerges in the sixth century is the result primarily not of conquest or colonization but rather of settlement, accommodation and acculturation.27 Nevertheless, references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Annales Cambriae do show the West Saxon kings fighting sporadic battles against the shrinking kingdom of Dumnonia, and making inroads into what is now Cornwall from the early eighth century onwards. By the middle of that century Devon was fully organized as one of the shires of Wessex and the border with Dumnonia was extended beyond the Tamar as far as the Ottery- Lynher boundary. North-east Cornwall was already heavily settled, as may !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 27Ferdinand (2013: 199) perpetuates a less nuanced, older school of historiography by referring anachronistically to the advance of ‘Saxon hordes’. ! 80! Tin-mining also led to the growth of towns, especially after the introduction of shaft-mining in the second half of the fifteenth century. The centre of the industry steadily shifted from east to west and this in turn must have entailed the in-migration of skilled labour (Rowse 1941: 54-55). Inmigration, albeit of a more temporary nature, was also a consequence of the medieval pilgrimages. As Wakelin writes, the most important towns would be those on the main roads, and ‘... especially during the Middle Ages, those on route to St. Michael’s Mount, and pilgrims from beyond the Tamar journeying to this venerable shrine no doubt helped to disseminate English throughout the whole length of the county’ (1975: 98). 3. 4. 1. Middle Cornish Literature The history of Cornish is generally divided into three phases, Old (10th-12th centuries), Middle (13th-16th) and late (17th and 18th centuries). The Old and Late phases are poorly represented in the surviving corpus. George (1986) has calculated that Late Cornish comprises only 14 percent of the recorded literature, while the contribution of Old Cornish is almost negligible. Middle Cornish, on the other hand, from which our knowledge of the language largely derives, comprises about 75 percent of the corpus (George 2009: 488) and is transmitted in the following (summarized from Jenner 1904 and Price 1984): - A poem of 41 lines discovered by Jenner in 1877 on the back of a charter in the British Museum and dated by him to c. 1400. - Poem of Mount Calvary or The Passion. Over 2,000 heptasyllabic lines composed in the late fourteenth century. - The Life of St. Meriasek. A dramatized life of the patron saint of Cambourne in 4,568 lines. Single manuscript dates from 1504. - The Ordinalia: a dramatic trilogy consisting of Origo Mundi, Passio Domini and Resurrectio Domini. Length (8,734 lines) and literary quality make this the one major item in Cornishliterature. ! 81! - The Tregear Homilies. A translation from English of thirteen homilies by John Tregear, written between 1555 and 1558. Unpublished and ‘of no literary interest’ (Price 1984: 139). There is much that can be inferred from this corpus about the relationship between Cornish and English. Firstly, with the exception of the Vocabularium Cornicum, whose place of origin is unknown, what remains of Cornish literature was almost certainly all composed in west Cornwall (Wakelin 1975: 86). The Ordinalia in particular can be narrowed (1975: 98) down to the Penryn area where it was probably composed by a local cleric (Bakere 1980: 28). Secondly, it is all of a popular nature, comprising saints’ lives, miracle plays and liturgical material. There are no legal or official documents of any kind. Thirdly, the considerable infiltration of Englishinto the language, particularly of the Ordinalia, is such as to suggest either widespread bilingualism and code-switching. Although it is impossible to determine the extent to which the language of the plays is a faithful reflection of the contemporary spoken language, the influence of English is considerable. The almost macaronic quality of some of the verse, with whole lines and couplets in English, and, according to Bakere (1980: 5) ‘an average of three English words in every two lines’ would imply that even monolingual Cornish speakers (and there are known to be some as late as 1549) were acquainted with English to some degree. The following excerpt may serve as an example (loanwords italicized): Benneth Maghom re’th fo prest rak certan lell os ha trest he stedfast y’th anbosow tormentourys wythow[t] rest comyth hedyr lest and mest lemyn yn ol ovthommow The blessing of Mahound be on thee For certainly thou art loyal and always trusty and steadfast in thy agreements Tormentors without rest come hither, least and most now in all needs. (PD 947-52: quoted by Fowler 1961: 112) ! 82! We have evidence of the popularity of the Cornish mystery plays in a near contemporary account by Richard Carew in 1594: For representing it, they raise an earthen amphitheatre in some open field, having the diameter of the enclosed plain some forty or fifty foot. The country people flock from all sides, many miles off, to hear and see it, for they have therein devils and devices to delight the eye as well as the ear (quoted after Bakere 1980: 12- 13). These amphitheatres, known as Rounds or plen-an-gwary (‘playing places’) were widely distributed in west Cornwall but are not found in the east. The plays themselves, and Cornish literature in general, are closely linked to the doctrines of the Church. Sermons were preached in the language and according to Carew again ‘The Lord’s prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Ten Commandments have been much used in Cornish beyond all remembrance’ (quoted after Wakelin 1975: 98). Rowse speculates that the plays ‘may be taken as some evidence of the concession the Catholic Church made to popular feeling, and may account for that devotion of the people to the old faith which led them to rise in rebellion against the Prayer Book in 1549 (1941: 148). Just as attachment to the language must have contributed to Cornwall’s well-known religious conservatism, so the religious domain must have reinforced language loyalties. To sum up, it is possible to conjecture the following: in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, English was spoken throughout east Cornwall and very little, if any Cornish. This sub-period, from 1497, the year of the Cornish Rebellion against the English Monarchy, until 1575 marks the decline of the language, with an estimated sixty percent of Cornish speakers residing in the country, most of them living west of Bodmin (Kent 2006:489). ! 83! In the west, the upper and middle classes, particularly the town-dwellers, and including the well-beneficed clergy, would have been English speakers, although some of them may have understood Cornish. Some of the rural population spoke Cornish only, many more were probably bilingual, among them the lower clergy, or to use Rowse’s term, the ‘clerical proletariat’ (1941: 136). However, this is no more than plausible speculation. What is beyond doubt is that throughout the Middle Ages, English was spreading both geographically west across the peninsula and metaphorically down the social hierarchy. The lack of an urban concentration of Cornish speakers, itself symptomatic of the failure of Cornish to compete with English as a language of progress and commerce, reinforced its association with poverty and ignorance. Edwards’ assertion that ‘before the Reformation, Cornish was still in wide use’ (1985: 66) may well be true, inasmuch as there are no demographic data to disprove it, but the future of the language arguably depended less on how many spoke it than on who spoke it and what for. By the end of the Middle Ages, Cornish is in restricted and declining use. With the Reformation, it enters its terminal phase. 3.5. The Tudor Period The Dissolution of the English monasteries was effectedat the instigationof Henry VIII between 1538 and 1541. The monastic colleges of Glasneynear Penryn and Cranstock, which had been the main centres of Cornish literature, were suppressed and their buildings, including the scriptoria, looted and sold off in 1548. Thus the formal scholarship that had upheld Cornish cultural identity came to an end. Mills (2010), in a tellingly entitled article ‘Genocide and Ethnocide: The Suppression of the Cornish Language’ attributes to this vandalism a major role in engendering resistance to the imminent reformation. When the first English Book of Common Prayer was ordered to be used throughout the county, on 9 June 1554, it provoked a rebellion. A petition was presented to Edward VI, a paragraph of which reads: ! 84! We will not receive the new service, because it is but like a Christmas game. We will have our old service of Matins, Mass, Evensong and Procession as it was before; and we, the Cornish,whereof certain of us understand no English, do utterly refuse the new service (after Jenner 1904: 13). The implicit argument that the new service was unacceptable in part because some Cornishmen understood no English loses its force when it is considered that even fewer would have understood the Latin of the Mass. However, the relationship between language loyalties and religious practice is a complex one and in the absence of other evidence, we must abstain from speculation about exactly what role Cornish played in creating the unrest. The uprising failed, but Cornwall did not easily embrace the new faith. If the Reformation was the salvation of Welsh the same cannot be said of Cornish. The Bible and the Prayer-Book were not translated, presumably because the language was already considered obviously moribund, though Jenner quotes Bishop Gibson’s continuation of Camden to the effect that the upper classes were against it (1904: 13). In a book religion such as Puritanism, the absence of mother-tongue literacy entailed further pressure towards anglicization and cultural uniformity. The Reformation also put paid to the mystery plays, although they seemed to have survived in some form until the end of the century. In Wales, the language emerged undefiled by jacobitism, popery, barbarity and rebellion. Cornish, however, like Scottish Gaelic and Irish, had become tainted with the stigma of sedition and a backward Catholicism. Contemporary references to the state of the language are meagre. In 1532, in reply to a request from Henry VIII’s adviser, Thomas Cromwell, for two Cornish wrestlers, Sir William Godolfin sent two of his household servants, ‘the best for that feat’, but ‘their English is not perfect. The time is too short to make a further search.’ Six years later Godolfin sends Cromwell some ! 85! tinners, remarking ‘you may call Herry to interpret these men’s language, for their English is very bad’ (Rowse 1941: 23). There were still many Cornishmen without any English at all, according to Andrew Boyle (1547): ‘In Cornwall is two speeches: the one is naughty Englyshe, and the other is Cornyshe. And there be many men and women thewhich cannot speake one word of Englyshe but all Cornyshe.’ (F. J. Purnivall (ed.) The First Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge. EEIS, ES 10 (1870); 125) Fifty years later, the balance appears to have shifted. Carew writes: But the principal love and knowledge of this language lived in Dr. Kennall the civilian, and with him lieth buried, for the English speeche doth still encroach upon it and hath driven the same into the uttermost skirts of the shire. Most of the inhabitants can speak no word of Cornish, but very few are ignorant of the English. (my italics) (after Halliday 1953: 127) Assuming the accuracy of these observations, we can posit a substantial diminution in the number of monolingual speakers (‘many men and women’ to ‘very few’) in the second half of the sixteenth century. This would coincide with the high-water mark of English nationalisnm. Among the characteristics of state nationalism thought to be detrimental to minority languages are the acculturation and de-ethnicization that follow from centralization and increased social integration (Dressler 1982). From having been in the Middle Ages a promontory at the edge of the known world, Cornwall became in the period from 1569-1603 pivotal to English offensive and defensive policy vis-à-vis Spain. As Elizabeth I’s reign progressed, West-country harbours became the jumping-off point for innumerable sea-enterprises across the outer ocean; in the ! 86! twenty years’ naval warfare with which the epoch closed, Cornwall was in the most exposed position. Its isolation was ended; the process of the absorption into the life of the Englishpeople was in motion (Rowse 1941: 23-24). Naval developments enhanced the importance of the ports as opposed to the inland towns and promoted the increase of commerce and mobility. Unless they also had English, Cornish speakers were debarred from participation in these developments. At the close of the Elizabethan era we find the language excluded from the religious domain and functionally confined to the rural poor. Literature in the language was insufficient to sustain language loyalties. With the discontinuance of the mystery plays it effectively came to an end. It could not be read because it was never published, and in any case it may be safely assumed that the vast majority of those attended the mystery plays were illiterate. Apart from the sporadic word or phrase, Cornish did not appear in print until 1707, with the appearance of Lhuyd’s Archaeologica Britannica, which recorded a folk-tale of some 1500 words entitled ‘The Story of John of Chy-an-Hur’. The title of Lhuyd’s volume eloquently testifies to how the language had already become the preserve of the antiquarian. All this is in marked contrast to the situation in Wales. The first Welsh book was published in 1546 and by 1620 the complete Bible was in its second edition. In Scotland the failure to produce a Scots translation of the Bible in the 1550s is generally recognized as having been calamitous for the future of the language. Might the same not be said of Cornish? Would a Cornish translation of the Bible have significantly retarded language shift and averted the tipping point? Probably not. It is difficult in the first place to imagine how the feat could have been achieved, as the number of educated speakers must have been extremely small, and Biblical translation is a vastundertaking. Secondly, the language itself would have lacked the necessary resources both lexically and in register. The Welsh translators, on the other hand, had at their disposal the traditional poetry as maintained by the bardic schools (Price 1984: 99). Thirdly, the status of Cornish, like that of Manx in the eighteenth century, was too severely weakened and the ! 87! decline too far advanced for any translation to have made a significant impact. In contrast, it is significant that sixteenth century Wales was 95 percent monolingual and that in Scotland too, the vast majority of lowland Scots of all classes spoke Scots. Thus failure to translate the Bible and other religious books into Cornish should be regarded as a consequence of language decline rather than a cause. 3.6. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries The 1572 depositions of the Bishop’s Consistory Court at Exeter reports a defamation case, whereby a local wife, during a service at Lelant church, is said to have ‘called Agnes Davy “whore and whore bitch” in English and not in Comowok’ (Henderson MSS, cited in Rowse, 1941: 23). Again, in 1595, a similar case is recorded at St. Ewe, with a girl reporting overhearing two women ‘talking together both in Cornish and English’ (ibid.). Cornish could still be heard, then, near St. Austell, in the east, at this late date (ibid.). Perhaps one of the most renowned and widely citedsources on Cornwall and the language is Richard Carew’s The Survey of Cornwall of 1602. It should be noted, though, that Carew was a member of the gentry classes, lived well, in the south east of Cornwall (Carew, [1602] 1953: 15), and spoke for the dominant families of the local society, who were, in general, in favour of the decline of Cornish (Stoyle, 2002: 182). He also published, in 1674, a work entitled, The Excellencie of The English Tongue (reproduced in Carew, [1602] 1953: 302). It is believed that Rowse’s work, Tudor Cornwall, was heavily influenced by Carew and his opinions (Stoyle 2002: 182). Carew’s Survey provides information on the state of the language in seventeenth century Cornwall. He describes how, ‘the English speech doth still encroach upon it [the language] and hath driven the same into the uttermost skirts of the shire. Most of the inhabitants can speak no word of Cornish, but very few are ignorant of the English’ (Carew, [1602] 1953: 127). He goes on to describe their English as, ‘good and Pure’ (ibid.; see ! 88! also Scawen 1680, cited in Wakelin 1975: 91). This last observation, suggesting their language was ‘less dialectal’, and more akin to ‘Standard English’, may indicate that, rather than intergenerational transmission of English, they had acquired it through the gentry and education system (Wakelin 1975: 100). This would help substantiate the evidence that English was acquired far earlier in the east, by contact and fusion with neighbouring English monoglots, whereas the process was far later in the west. John Norden’s Speculi Britanniae Pars: a Topographical and Historical Description of Cornwall was published in 1610 although the visit to the county on which it is based probably took place before the turn of the century. His observations on the ebbing of spoken Cornish are among the most detailed available: [...] But of late the Cornishe men have muche conformed themselves to the use of the Englyshe tongue; and their Englyshe is equally to the beste, especially in the eastern partes, ‘even from Truro eastwards it is a manner wholly Englyshe. In the weste parte of the countrye as in the hundreds of Penwith and Kerrier, the Cornishe tongue is moste in use amongste the inhabitants. And yet (which is to be marveyled) though the husband and the wife, parents and children, masters and servants do naturally communicate in their native language; yet there is none of them in a manner, but is able to converse with a stranger in the Englyshe tongue, unless it be some obscure people who seldom confer with the better sort … . But it seemeth, however, that in a few years the Cornishe Language will be litle and litle abandoned (Norden, 1610, cited inJenner 1904: 14-15). The low prestige value of the language is clearly alludedto by Norden. There still remained some ‘obscure people’ seventy years later: William Scawen, seen by Stoyle (2002: 134) as a ‘[s]eventeenth-century Cornish [p]atriot’, was an antiquarian, who, in later life, applied himself to the study ! 89! of the dying language and wrote his work, Antiquities Cornu-Brittanic, in c.1680. In this work, he describes the state of Cornish, as he perceives it, and the likely causes of the ‘decay’. He came from the gentry classes in the south east of Cornwall and consequently was brought up as an English monoglot, but taught himself the language in middle age (ibid.: 144). Whilst fighting in the Civil War, Scawen attests that Cornish could still be spoken then. He recalls how the Cornish speaking soldiers would use the language and how this aroused suspicion in the ‘enemy’ (Scawen, c.1680, cited in Stoyle 2002: 142). This use of minority language, as a form of ‘war-time secret code’, would appear to emphasize the extent to which the language had indeed retreated by this time. He notes elsewhere, ‘we have some among these few [old folks] that do speak Cornish, who do not understand a word of English, ...and those may be many in some of the western parts’ (Scawen, c.1680, cited in Wakelin 1975: 91). This latter reference may be exaggerated, as it is thought that one of the last few monoglots, Cheston Marchant, died in 1676. However, given that it was said she was l64 (Ellis 1974: 80), the authenticity of these reports may be equally questionable. It may be reasonably inferred that very few monolingual Cornish speakers survived into the eighteenth century. In the 1695 edition of Camden’s Brittania, Cornish is described as ‘almost quite driven out of the peninsula, being spoken only in two or three Parishes by the vulgar at the Lands end; and they too understand the English in all likelihood, a short time will destroy the small remains that are left of it’ (quoted after Wakelin 1975: 92). One of the final points of reference lies in I707, with the arrival of Edward Lhuyd. He was a Welshman, and was to become the first professor of Celtic studies at Oxford. He was the first ‘qualified’ person to make a serious study of the Cornish language, as part of his undertaking to travel through the Celtic countries, studying their philology and history, which he published in 1707, as Archaeologia Britannica (Ellis 1974: 102). It was Lhuyd who made the distinction between Brythonic and Goidelic, or as he termed them, P Celtic and Q Celtic. Much of the information he gleaned on the language ! 96! simple. Because they are Cornishmen … Every Cornishman knows well enough, proud as he may be of belonging to the British Empire, that he is no more an Englishman than a Caithness man is, that he has as much right to a separate local patriotism, to his little Motherland, which rightly understood is no bar, but rather an advantage to the greater British patriotism, as has a Scotsman, a Welshman, or even a Colonial; and that he is as much a Celt and as little an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ as any Gael, Cymro, Manxman or Breton (Jenner 1904: xi-xii). The flurry of activity that heralded the cultural revival reveals themes which characterize the movement to the present day: the centrality of the language question and the importance of Celtic alterity or non-Englishness to Cornwall’s revived identity. These emphases were consciously modelled after existing Celtic movements, especially the Irish. The similarity of Cornwall’s early cultural revival to those in other Celtic areas prompted this observation by Ellis: But whereas, in the other Celtic countries, the great cultural revival movements became the spring-board of movements for political and economic independence, which were quite strong at this time, in Cornwall such ideas of political independence were not to manifest themselves in any concrete form until the 1950s (Ellis 1979:151). The activities of the language movement did eventuallybecome a catalyst for anti-English activism. The proposition framed by Ellis, that language revival is the first step to political action, shaped the movement for much of the twentieth century. Initially, however, cultural nostalgiawas sufficient to assuage anypolitical grievances. ! 97! 4. 2. The character of language revival in Cornwall. Circumstances in Cornwall, both political and linguistic, were not as conducive to politicizing the language movement as they were in other Celtic areas. Cornwall was a fully integratedEnglish county that lacked the structural distinctiveness which would reinforce a sense of separateness. The Cornish elite were highly anglicized, being educated and usually employed outside the county (Cornwall still lacks its own university).By the late nineteenth century too, Cornwall had lost her ablest working population to emigration (Payton 2004: 224). Moreover, the county had neither Ireland’s long history of exploitation nor Scotland’s and Wales’ former national status to drive political protest. Cornwall was still recovering from the blow of its mine closures. But even if forces had favoured a political movement, converting the revival of a dead minority language into a instrument of political dissatisfaction was problematic. By 1600 Cornish was spoken only in the westernmost corner of the peninsula, and while smatterings of Cornish may have persisted even after Dolly Pentreath’s death in 1777, the language had been effectively dead long before then. Cornish was not the language of Methodist fervour or industrial ingenuity; Cornwall’s period of prosperity was Anglophone, in spite of attempts within the later language movement to remedy this symbolic shortcoming by reconstructing Cornish from the scanty fragments extant in the late seventeenth century. Cornish’s historic distance could also be seen as divisive. Whereas Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh could be naturally acquired as first languages, Cornish was remote and abstruse, available only to those with the intellect and leisure to invest in it. Middle class exclusivity reinforced the conservatism inherent in such a backwardlooking endeavour. Like the other language revivals, the Cornish revival was initiated by people who had few grievances against the powers that be. Their scholarly outlook led them to conceive of their project principally as an antiquarian or even mystical quest, wholly consistent with their status as model British citizens. In Cornwall there were no native speakers to ! 98! democratize the movement and in practical terms, the prerequisite of language acquisition practically precluded all beneath the comfortable middle class, whose conservatism and romanticism ther revival could indulge. 4. 2. 1. Old Cornwall Societies and Gorseth Kernow Jenner’s attempt in 1907 to establish a Cornish Gorseth, modelled after the Welsh Gorsedd which had been meeting annually for almost a hundred years, failed for want of a sufficient number of Cornish speakers, and Cowethas Kelto-Kernuac dissolved soon afterward. Jenner and a few other individuals carried on, gathering fragments of traditional Cornish and composing short works in the language, but there was no further organized language movement until after the First World War. By the end of the war both Jenner and Morton Nance, a language enthusiast born in Wales of Cornish parents, had returned to west Cornwall to live. In 1920 they formed in St. Ives the first Old Cornwall Society, an organization devoted to preserving Cornwall’s Celtic past, especially the language. Four years later there were enough branches in the county to organize a Federation of Old Cornwall Societies and in 1925 the Federation undertook the publication of its semi-annual journal,Old Cornwall. Contacts with Gorsedds in Brittany and Wales had been maintained by Jenner and Nance since late the previous century, and in 1928, under the auspices of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, the Welsh Archdruid inaugurated ten Cornish citizens as the first bards in the Cornish Gorsedd, termed in Cornish Gorseth Kernow. Like the Welsh Gorseddon which it was patterned, the Gorseth Kemow was an unabashedly nostalgic body, which attempted to recreate the theatre of Druidic bardolatry and poetry by exotic dress (and beards), by employing colourful regalia and archaic speech (both English and Cornish), and by holding their annual meetings at what were then believed to be Druidic monuments (stone circles and menhirs now ! 99! dated tothe late Neolithic and early Bronze Age). The Gorseth’s goal was to restore Cornwall’s sense of Celtic identity and accordingly, admission to bardship was made by an assessment of ‘manifestations of the Celtic spirit’, the principal evidence of which was demonstrable competence in the Cornish language. To advance Cornwall’s Celtic spirit the Gorseth sponsored literary and musical competitions (in Cornish and English on Cornish themes) at its annual meetings. The difference between the two institutions lay principally in recruitment (the Gorseth honorary, the Old Cornwall Society open anyone interested) and trappings (the Gorseth having a marked ceremonial and sartorial predilection for the Arthurian period, the Old Cornwall contemporary in procedure and dress). Yet they shared the same goal, broadly conceived as the salvation of Cornwall’s Celtic heritage and service to the Duchy. Both considered themselves custodians of the Cornish language, contemporary dialect, ‘druidic’ antiquities, old customs and pastimes, and Cornwall’s scenic beauty. Both sought to draw ordinary Cornish adults and children into their activities, the Gorseth through sponsoring competitions, the Old Cornwall Society through open membership. Neither was political. The Old Cornwall Society’s negatively phrased statement of purpose reveals how assiduously they sought not to court controversy,wishing to avoid causing offence to either potential members or existing organizations. [A]n Old Cornwall Society is not an antiquarian society nor a county folk-lore society, nor a learned society of any sort neither is it an anti- English Celtic society, nor even a Cornish social club. It is a society in which lovers of Old Cornwall meet as informally as possible to learn more about the traditions of Cornwall.... Ours is thus, if no more, at least the first step towards a conscious revival of Cornish nationality. We make this step without any political object, unless it is ‘political’ to claim that Cornwall may possess a Celtic nationality white remaining a county of England (Federation of Old Cornwall Societies n.d.:3). ! 100! It is well to pause and recall that these efforts to recapture the poetical gatherings of Druids or record a remnant of agricultural ritual took place against a background of continued economic decline. Although the 1920s were a moderately prosperous time for England as a whole, with population and standards of living continuing to rise (although at a lesser rate than in the late nineteenth century), in Cornwall the effects of the mining collapse were still felt. Emigration had resulted in population decline every decade except one since 1861, with modest growth in the china clay mining districts in central Cornwall more than offset by departures from ailing mining and agricultural areas. The remnants of the tin mining industry had suffered further from the infusion of Bolivian tin after 1895. Sporadic recovery during the war years, aided by the demand for wolfram and high tin prices, had been short-lived. and by 1920 the collapse of prices, coinciding with the withdrawal of war-time smelting installations. brought mining populations to near starvation. Rumblings of union activity at the end of the war had been silenced by closures (Payton 2004: 214). Apart from the mining of china clay, Cornwall’s principal sources of employment were agriculture and tourism, occupations whose low pay-scale and unreliability accounted for the county’s high unemployment and underemployment in this period. The disjuncture between Cornwall’s social problems and the ‘sentimental, and not in the least practical’ activities of the Old Cornwall Societies and the Gorseth may account for the latter’s failure to gain a widespread following in the county. Alongside the language, the revivalists attempted to acquire, revive or invent as many symbols of nationality as possible. A black kilt was introduced and the black and white banner of St Piron revived as a national flag (Payton 2004: 262). By the 1930s, although annual ceremonies proceeded with undiminished splendour and 140 bards had been inducted, debates among the bards revealed dissatisfaction regarding the group’s direction. Prodded perhaps by social concerns of the depression period, some argued that the Gorsethwas disconnected from ordinary Cornish people by its lack of constructive activity on their behalf, appearing to them simply as irrelevant pageantry. Questioning the practice of basing election to bardship narrowly on interest in Cornwall’s remote history and ! 101! language, one wrote sarcastically, ‘If Trevithick,Humphrey Davy and John Opie [eminent Cornishmen of the eighteenth century] were alive today, would they be merely successful, ambitious, and perhaps selfish men, and not eligible for bardship?’ In 1937, the editor of the Penzance Cornishman concluded, ‘If we are quite truthful we have to admit that the revival of the Gorsedd has hardly touched the lives of the common people of Cornwall’. The social disquiet of the thirties did not seriously disrupt the agenda of cultural revival laid down by Jenner. The Gorseth’s function remained essentially unchanged; arguments for social relevance were staunchly resisted. The thirties did, however, witness important advances on the linguistic front and a ‘one short-lived and ill-conceived attempt to interject politics into the agenda’ (Korey 1991: 210). 4.2. 2. Tyr ha Tavas. The depression years were promising times for protest political movements of all kinds, which saw opportunities in the weaknesses of national governments still adjusting to the upheaval of the First World War and now additionally destabilized by economic crisis of the depression years. In these years the SNP was born from the union of the Scottish Party and the National Party, while the nationalist Plaid Cymruwas launched in Wales. Responding to the climate of national uncertainty and to activities in Scotland and Wales, a small group of youthful Cornish political activists, mostly middle class students and professionals (about half of them Londonbased), in 1933 foundedTyr ha Tavas (‘Land and Language’) (Ellis 1974:165-67). The exact goals and priorities of this small, short-lived group are obscure, and there is debate within the present movement regarding its commitment to nationalistic goals. Its ideological position appears to have been close to that of the contemporaneous Plaid Cymru, but in transforming those goals to fit the Cornish situation,Tyr ha Tavas’spolitical aspects were largely obscured. Before Cornish culture could be preserved by nationhood, it needed instantiation and this began with language preservation. Preservation of the language began by establishing a core group of ! 102! proficient speakers. With this project in hand, Tyr ha Tavas constituted themselves as a correspondence circle and set up an all-Cornish language journal King! edited by A. S. D. Smith. The Cornish format, intended to display Cornish as a vehicle for contemporary issues, in effect limited circulation to a few dozen subscribers (less than half of whom lived in Cornwall), thereby reinforcing the exclusivity of their efforts. Their reputation as Cornwall’s first political ethnic organization rests on their activities as a pressure group lobbying of London MPs. Ellis detects in Tyr ha Tavas an embryo of Cornish political activism, and it is significant that it was the first group whose agenda did not look backward to history or Celticism to build national sentiment (Ellis 1974: 165-169). So long as a restored language was considered a prerequisite for nationalistic activity, Tyr he Tavas continued under a different guise the isolating linguistic strategy outlined by Jenner, a “political” group in prospect only(Korey 1991: 210-12). 4. 2. 3. Morton Nance and Unified Cornish Responding in part to the same populist currents that moved Tyr ha Tavas, the established language movement in the inter-war years expanded its efforts to advocate the use of Cornish as a written and spoken language in as many contexts as possible as well as attempting a full-scale reconstruction.In 1938, Morton Nance published his self-described ‘life’s work, an extensive Cornish-English dictionary derived from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, using Breton grammar as a comparative model. To simplify and regularize a late medieval language which was highly variable (as was late medieval English), he rationalized variant spellings to produce a new orthography he termed ‘Unified Cornish’ (Ellis 1974:165-170). For nearly half a century, Nance’s Unified Cornish was the standard form in which Cornish was written and taught. Nance’s work was supplemented by that of the peripatetic A. S. D. Smith, a language teacher from Sussex who with Nance edited a small Cornish-English dictionary in 1934 and who in 1939 brought out a textbook, ‘Cornish Simplified’. Although he lived in ! 103! Cornwall only from 1933 until 1936, when he returned to Sussex, it was he more than any other who communicated Nance’s work to the public. Smith initiated Cornish instruction for school children and evening classes for adults, continuing until his death in 1950 to prepare teaching materials and compose contemporary Cornish literature. Led by the efforts of Nance and Smith, the language movement in the thirties expanded, albeit modestly, from its organizational base into the lives of ordinary citizens. Jenner died in 1934 at the age of 86, having shaped the Cornish revival and watched it develop according to his intentions. The goals he set – the revival of the Cornish language as a living language and the preservation of the fragments of Cornish culture for future generations – remained unmodified by his followers in the inter-war period. The movement remained (and in fact remains still) solidly middle class, comprising scholars, clergymen, teachers and professionals. Their activities were principally literary, producing manuals, dictionaries, plays, stories, articles, and poems in Cornish and translating into Cornish hymns, prayers, Biblical passages, and local tales and folklore. Revival activities were noted periodically and favouraby by The Times, as well as by local newspapers (Ellis 1974: 156-171). While cultural preservation was seen by contemporaries as patriotic, it was not political, and modern activists have censured the earlier revivalists for theirpolitical quietism and elitist disengagement from everyday life. As Deacon writes, Given the ideological form of the Revival; its non-populist, even patronizing stance, the absence of many of its leaders from Cornwall, its refusal to connect up with the form of Cornish identity lived by the people – a form that owed more to the nineteenth century than to the mists of Celtic Cornwall – cultural nationalism was bound to be perceived as irrelevant, a plaything for elements of the Cornish elite (Deacon 1996:26). Deacon’s judgment is probably harsher than that of contemporaries. While there was genuine debate within the Gorseth about its social responsibilities, ! 104! and while local editors aired grievances, the assessment of the general population is likely to have been more sympathetic, if still ambivalent. Thousands turned out to witness the first induction of bards into the Gorseth (Ellis 1974: 161) and Cornish men and women may well have viewed the cultural revival with the same mixture of pride in the culture being revived and resentment toward the class of the revivers they display toward much of the modern movement. 4. 2. 4. The debate over sources and orthography for revived Cornish As has been stated above, the foundational text of the Cornish revival, Jenner’s Handbook of the Cornish Language is thought to have been used as a primer by Morton Nance (Price 1984: 141), who after Jenner was to become the second most influential architect of the twentieth century revival. After the inevitable disruption of World War I, despite their friendship and long collaboration, Nance and Jenner harboured a fundamental difference of opinion with respect to the actual basis on which Cornish should be reconstructed. While Jenner was keen to promote the language from the point of its last use, Nance wasadamant that the Cornish of the Middle phase was more appropriate, if only on the pragmatic grounds that this was the period in which the majority of the written documentation stemmed (George 2002: 646). Although this division of opinion is now widely acknowledged in the revival narrative, it should be noted that Jenner did not dismiss Middle Cornish out of hand. In the Preface to his Handbook, he reflects that, ‘[a]s for grammatical forms, it will be seen that the writer is of the opinion that the difference between Middle and Modern Cornish was more apparent than real’ (Jenner 1904: x). Jenner’s spelling system was somewhat contrived or ‘adapted’, as he termed it (Jenner, 1904: ix), but this was unavoidable, he goes on to explain, because of the universal tendency for writers to spell ‘according to their own taste and fancy’. The situation was further complicated by the tendency to ‘represent the same word in different ways even in the same page’ (Jenner, ! 105! 1904: ix). He rejected the description of phonetic for his system, although he recognizes the influence of Lhuyd, who is known to have used a phonetic basis for his spelling. Jenner claims to have compared extant spellings, considered the fragments he himself had collected thirty years previously, and combined this with knowledge of contemporary pronunciation of names and his knowledge of Breton (Jenner, 1904: x). His diktat that ‘this form of spelling should be generally adopted by Cornish students’ was not to be meekly followed by his successors. 4. 2. 5. The Unified Spelling System In 1938 Nance published his extensive Cornish-English dictionary, the orthography of which was explicitly based on Middle Cornish, more specifically on those forms found in the Ordinalia and the Passion Poem. If alternative spellings were discovered, then the most common variant was selected (George 2002: 646). Inevitably, the language was not attested in its entirety in these works and many gaps remained, which Nance supplemented by internal analogy, using forms found in later periods and cognates from Breton and Welsh. These processes, it has been suggested, must be accepted as unavoidable when religious verse, with its partial syntax and lexicon, is takenas a basis for a conversational language (George 1986b: 12). Unified Cornish brought together the orthography of the Middle Cornish phase, as standardized by Nance, with his deduced phonology of the Late phase, supplemented by a number of discretionary patches. Given that the pronunciation of a dead language can never be reconstructed with any certainty, Nance maintained the conviction that The link between the phonology and intonation of the English spoken inthe vowel sounds of Cornish as last spoken can still be heard from the inhabitants of West Cornwall. the far west of Cornwall, as an approximation for Late Cornish forms, has been an enduring myth amongst language commentators and activists alike, not only Nance. Jenner, in the Handbook, comments that, ‘The modern Cornish intonation of English is probably a fair guide to the ! 112! west of Cornwall was suggestive of Late Cornish sounds, despite the dialectologists’ evidenceto the contrary (see above). The premise would seem to be that in a sense Cornish never really died and that the generation of ‘remembers’ that followed that of the alleged last speakers ensured an apostolic succession reflected in a heavily Cornish-inflected English. In essence, this another attempt to affirm continuities, attenuate the rupture represented by language death, and avoid the diachronic messiness of reconstruction (Carkeek 2009: 111). TheCussel an Tavas Kernuak (Cornish Language Council) was established in 1988, to further the cause of Gendall’s Modern Cornish, producing its own magazine, An Garrack. Nevertheless, Mackinnon reported estimates of users of Modern Cornish to be no more than twenty-five, compared with approximately two hundredKemmyn speakers (Makinnon 2000). Modern Cornish is thus a peripheral group within the movement and it would seem that most Unified speakers ultimately embraced Kemmyn, if only on account of greater exposure to it. 4. 2. 9. The Unified System Revised Unified Cornish was, in Payton’s words, to find ‘an eleventh-hour academic champion in the form of Nicholas Williams’ (Payton, 2000: 117), a professional Celticist from University College, Dublin who had learnt Cornish as an Essex schoolboy and, as mentioned above, was hostile to George’s Kernewek Kemmyn. Williams’ chosen nomenclature was ‘Unified Cornish Revised’ (Williams, 1996b: 84), which usesBeunans Meriasek, the Tregear Homilies and Creation of the World, as the basis for the new system. His arguments were initially published in the book Cornish Today in 1995, in which he listed 25 points of linguistic departure he had with the phonology and orthography of Kernewek Kemmyn. Williams is unambiguous in his belief that, ‘Unified is by far the least unsatisfactoryform of the language and Kernewek Kemmyn is so mistaken that it should be abandoned’ (Williams 1996a). He is thus in complete ! 113! agreement with archaeologist Charles Thomas, the first director of the Institute of Cornish Studies, who explicitly concluded, ‘the Language Board has taken an unjustifiably wrong turn’ in adopting George’s system (quoted in Payton and Deacon 1993: 284). Modern Cornish is similarly treated, having in Williams’ view ‘little to recommend it’ (Williams, 1996a). These comments, and many similar examples of ill-disguised contempt, were delivered in a talk given by Williams in 1996, in which he appeals for a return to Unified Cornish. The overall tone, however, is dismissive: ‘Kernewek Kemmyn looks wrong because it is wrong ... If you use Kernewek Kemmyn, please give it up as soon as you can. If you are thinking of learning it, don’t ... Only when Kernewek Kemmyn is abandoned, will Cornish speakers find peace of mind’ (ibid.: 6). In the same year, Williams published a slightly more measured appraisal in the journal Cornish Studies. One of Williams’ main concerns is that the spelling in Kemmyn is a re-writing of Middle Cornish, whereas Unified forms are attested in the Middle Cornish texts (Williams 1996b: 65). George has pointed out, however, that ‘Cornish has little or no historical spelling tradition of its own; since the fourteenth century, it has almost always been written using contemporary English orthography’ (George, 1986b: 32). Williams would seem to dispute this assertion (Williams, l996b: 83). The evidence from Wakelin’s analysis of the Cornish texts, however, shows that Anglo-Saxon letters were being used even in the very early Bodmin Manumissions c.1000 CE (Wakelin 1975: 67). 4. 2. 10. The Problem of Authenticity The ‘Holy Grail’ of authenticity has haunted the minds and writings of the Cornish language revivalists.31 It has been a constant battle ground of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 31Arguably, one of the reasons the notion holds such a powerful sway is that the Celtic identity itself is understood as being a return to an authentic ethnic selfhood grounded in lost community values. For an exploration of twentieth century versions of authenticity, see Charles Cuignon (2004), On Being Authentic (London: Routledge). ! 114! three main contenders for primacy in the choice of which form of the language to reviveand has exercised their critics even more so (see Price, 1984). This is in marked contrast to the wider revival movement, where an inauthentic and kitchy tradition has been embraced without embarrasment. Glanville Price, in his The Languages of Britain opened his chapter on Cornish with the declaration: ‘The old Celtic speech of Cornwall died out two centuries ago. It is still dead, and will ever more remain so’ (Price, 1984: 134). Readers are left in no doubt as to Price’s disdain for the ‘type of language’ then being revived in Cornwall. In the first paragraph he makes three references to its lack of authenticity or genuineness and is dismissive enough of the ‘language’ to deny it the name Cornish – ‘I shall reserve the term for genuine Cornish and shall refer to pseudo-Cornish as “Cornic”’ (Price, 1984: 134). For Price, revived Cornish is a chimera created by ‘ill-informed journalists [who] sometimes give the impression that Cornish is now once more a living language’ (Price, 1984: 141). Cornic is, in Price’s judgement, a twentith century invention in all respects. He condemns the extent to which much of the vocabulary is invented, echoing Charles Thomas, who refers to the ‘high proportion of words invented by the comparative method’ (quoted in Ellis, 1974: 194) and attacks the revivalist, Nance, for not consistently identifying his neologisms and the confusion this engenderswhen one wishes to separate the ‘genuine’ from the ‘invented’ (Price, 1984: 143). In response to this criticism, Wella Brown, a Gorsedd bard, teacher and author of the principal Kemmyn grammar, calculated that a mere 8 percent of the words in Nance’s 1955 dictionary lacked textual authority. In recognition that not all words are used in equal quantities, he went on to analyse a copy of the Cornish language periodical, An Lef Kernewek to discover that only 1.6 percent of the words here were not directly attested (in George, 1986b: 37). Interestingly, in Price’s follow-up edited volume of 2000, entitled Languages in Britain and Ireland, the chapter on Cornish is written not by Price himself, but by Philip Payton, the Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies, who offers a notably more sympathetic appraisal of the revival. The ! 115! precedence of Modern Cornish over Unified and Kemmyn, centres on the premise that, ‘authenticity should be the ruling factor in the language’, that is, ‘in all aspects of the language’, a quality he implies is absent from the competing forms (ibid: 102). The concern with authenticity continued, alongside the competing bases for revival, spawning, what Deacon has labelled, a postmodern ‘plurality of authenticities’ (Deacon 1996: 100). Indeed, ‘authenticity’became a battlefield on which there were no victors. In 1967, with the advent of the CLB, the need toassuage the concerns ofboth the academics and the language planners began to be acknowledged. The founding Policy Statement was clear in its acceptance of Unified Cornish but equally it ‘recognized that Unified Cornish has little significance for more advanced linguistic studies’ (Ellis 1974: 200). This revival-focused attitude was to be ephemeral. The 1997 Policy Statement explicitly asserts the necessity of ‘academic soundness of the language’ (CLB 1997: 16) and justified the lock, stock, and barrel adoption of Kernewek Kemmyn, on the basis that it represents ‘an academically correct form of the language’ (CLB 1997:18). Williams believes that the CLB was so eager to fend off the academic criticisms that it over-hastily embraced Kemmyn, in the erroneous belief thatGeorge had shown it to be more authentic (Williams, 1996a). Deacon (1996: 101) interprets this fixation as being symptomatic of the mandatory scientific discourse of classic modernity. The quest for authenticity is a ‘modernist problem’, whilst the emergence of competing ‘authenticities’, from the mid 1980s, illustrates a transition towards postmodernity, where certainties dissolve and thus the search for them becomes ever more frantic but concomitantly more meaningless (Deacon 1996: 101). George at times appears to advocate that authenticity should cede preeminence in the revival process, but never truly escapes its lure, as is demonstrated by a concluding paragraph in The Pronunciation and Spelling of Revived Cornish: I can therefore state with confidence that Revived Cornish, as exemplified by the phonological base described in this chapter, is closer to Cornish of 1500 than were either Old C[ornish] or ! 116! Late C[ornish]. What is more, it is closer to the Cornish of 1500 than is, say, the “Geordie” dialect to standard English (George 1986b: 91). Williams, in praise of his Unified Cornish Revised (UCR), is equally insistent on the notion that the revenant be as close as possible in appearance the deceased. He states that, ‘It is the job of those reconstructing Cornish to render the reconstruction as authentic as possible. Authenticity is the overriding criterion - indeed it ought to be the sole criterion’ (Williams, 1996a). Indeed, the reforms advocated in UCR are deliberately motivated to ‘render Unified more authentic’ (Williams 1996b: 83), at the expense of Kemmyn, which ‘bears little resemblance in sounds or spelling tothe traditional language of Cornwall at any period in its history’ (ibid.: 82) and ‘[i]f it can be shown that Kernewek Kemmyn is far less authentic than Unified, as it can, then Kernewek Kemmyn loses any raison d’être it may have had’ (Williams 1996a). Within the rhetoric of ‘genuine or not’, George himself is accused of being personally inauthentic, lacking the required technical credentials, as he is ‘not a professional linguist, let alone a professional Celticist’ 32 (Williams 1996a), an attack reminiscent of Professor C. L. Wrenn’s acerbic comment on Nance’s dictionary, that it ‘displays that scarcely scientific revivalist local patriotism which is still so commonly associated with Cornish studies’ (Ellis 1974: 195). 4. 2. 11. Orthographic Authenticity The issue of how Cornish was actually spelled has been a consistent theme in the discourse on authenticity. Kemmyn especially, has been portrayed as a rewriting of the spelling of Middle Cornish, producing a ‘bizarre and exotic spelling’ (Williams, l996a), and having a ‘somewhat sinister appearance, as if the language had somehow been taken over by robots and reduced to the status of a code’ (cited in Williams 1996b: 78). Kemmyn is, thus, by !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 32George was by profession an oceanographer but also a speaker of Breton, which influenced his vision of the form a revived Cornish should take. ! 117! implication, invented and can make no legitimate claims to authenticity. As a predominantly oral medium of communication, Cornish had no developed orthography of its own. Cornish. No legal or administrative documents of any sort have ever been found that were written in Cornish (Wakelin 1975: 80). The literature in the language was predominantly intended for oral presentation. What seems to be obscured is that ‘Cornish was written down by native speakers for other native speakers’ (Grant 1998: 197), people that knew the phonological rules of the language. When writing was unavoidable, it followed the conventions mainly of English spelling, but also of French and Latin at times (ibid). It seems that the protagonists in thisdebate are trapped within contemporary conventions, constrained by an ethnocentric primacy of standardization – a standardization that may be meaningless diachronically (Carkeek 2009: 117). 4. 2. 12. The divisive effects of revivalist antagonisms The rift within the language community has evidently painful and very personal. Since the late 1980s, claims and counterclaims have centred on all conceivable linguistic points of divergence and disagreement, and often degenerating into personal attacks and vitriol. One potentially positive outcome of the ‘debate’ has been to place the language in the public domain and stimulate interest beyond the inner circle of language learners. For some the factional image may have deterred them from learning the language or even taking it seriously. Learners, moreover, have been chary of online communication lest they be seen to be nailing their colours to an orthographic mast and alienating other learners. The Cornish Language Board has maintained a neutral and conciliatory approach. Developments in 2008, however, explicitly addressed this issue. Authenticity in language revival is a frequently articulated demand, as we have seen. However, as Dorian points out, this may not be necessary or even desirable. ‘Purity need not be a requirement for persistence, and compromise need not be the death knell, for small languages any more than ! 118! for larger ones’. In fact, ‘it may prove the wiser course to accept considerable compromise rather than make a determined stand for intactness’ (Dorian, 1994: 492). The obsession with authenticity that has plagued the revival movement in Cornwall, has significantly damaged the cause and created rifts amongst the already numerically small and scattered language-learner community. Dorian herself reflects this in her allusion (1994: 488) to the ‘unhappy situation of Cornish’. She quotes the editor of Bro Nevez, the newsletter of the US branch of the International Committee for the Defence of the Breton Language, ‘If some of the tremendous energy Celts have used to belittle each other’s ideas of “the truth” was directed towards working for more resources to support research, teaching, and media use ... people would not need to talk so much about survival’ (Dorian, 1994: 488-9). Energies squandered in acrimonious factional bickering are a direct consequence of inadequate documentation in the Late Cornish Period, itself a result of declining usage and literacy in the language. The Cornish Language Board’s endorsement ofKernewek Kemmyn sought to accommodate the dimension of learnability while at the same time upholding the legitimacy of the revived form. 4. 3. Standardization achieved: the Standard Written Form (2008) The multiple orthographies used by different Cornish language groups have been an impediment to official recognition and development of the language, most notably within the education and public spheres. Consequently, the Cornish Language Partnership, the body established to implement the Cornish Language Development Strategy, commissioned a group of internal language activists and international, language planning experts, in 2006, to propose a Standard Written Form (SWF). In October 2007 a consensus approach was recommended, rather than promoting any of th extant forms. This SWF was ratified by the Partnership in May 2008, with the agreement of all language groups. On 17 June 2009, the bards of the Gorseth Kernow chose by an overwhelming majority to adopt the SWF ! 119! for their ceremonies and correspondence. From its inception Unified Cornish had been used for the Gorseth ceremony. Kernowek Standard (Standard Cornish) is a proposed set of revisions to the SWF, based on the initial proposal (called Kernowak Standard and now designated KS1) for the SWF, developed by a group called UdnFormScrefys.After the publication of the SWF, members of this group established a new group, Spellyans, to identify shortcomings in the SWF and propose solutions for consideration when the SWF was to be reviewed in 2013. The orthography resulting from the application of these revisions, KernowekStandard, has been used in a number of books, including an edition of the Bible and a comprehensive manual, Nicholas Williams’ Desky Kernowek (2012)33. It may not be premature to affirm that the long and tortuous road to standardization has at last reached reached its destination. In 2014, the Cornish people were recognised by the United Kingdom Government as a national minority under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. The FCNM provides certain rights and protections to a national minority with regard to their minority language. Whether such recognition would have been granted in the absence of an internally reconciled Cornish revival movement is not known. The use of Cornish may be growing but remains marginal, spoken by a tiny minority of mostly educated people many of non-cornish extraction and not resident in the Dutchy. In 2000 there were only about 300 fluent speakers of Cornish and perhaps ten times that number able to conduct a simple conversation in the revived language (MacKinnon 2000: 20). Eleven years later, the UK Census 2011 reported 600 people in England and Wales whose main language is Cornish, 500 of them in Cornwall, that is to say, only one person out of 1,000 inhabitants of the Duchy (Office for National !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 33Williams’ long time adversary appears to have retired from the fray, his Wikipedia entry signing off ‘George took early retirement in 2006, and has recently been learning Japanese.’ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_George>, accessed 10 September 2015. ! 120! Statistics 2013: 7). Through bilingual signage, and promotional use of Cornish, most of the population of Cornwall are nevertheless aware of the existence of the language, with 92 percent of the sample polled claiming knowledge of its renewed presence and 5.7 percent claiming detailed knowledge (PFA Research 2007, quoted into Ferdinand 2013: 216). In the same poll, 31.8 percent of the participants showed themselves favourable to the promotion of Cornish while 9.9 percent of the total strongly support it. The group opposed to the promotion of Cornish is also considerable, at about 20 percent, although the majority of the population expressed indifference to the issue of the language. Efforts to promote the language began to show some progress when on 2 March 2000, the United Kingdom signed the Council of Europe Charter on Regional and Minority Languages, which aims to protect and promote the regional and minority languages of Europe for the contribution they make to Europe’s cultural diversity and historical traditions and to avoid as far as possible their extinction. On 5 November 2002 the British Government announced its decision to recognise Cornish as falling under Part II (Article 7) of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. This recognition involved a degree of official status for the language for the first time in history, although it does not mean that Cornish is by any means an official language in Cornwall. This has partially solved the problem of financing, allowing larger sums of money to be made available for the preservation and promotion of the language than formerly. This fund is channelled through the Cornwall Council. The new status for the Cornish language opened the way in 2004 to the development of a Strategy for the Cornish Language designed by government entities and by some language and cultural organizations The objectives of the strategy included appointing a dedicated officer to develop the detailed implementation plans and the setting-up of a group to oversee the production of the strategy document to monitor progress and compliance with the Charter. The tangible result was the setting up in 2005 of Maga Kernow, the Cornish Language Partnership, which acts as a referee official institution in all matters related to the promotion and preservation of ! 121! the Cornish language. In November 2009, the Cornwall Council adopted a new language policy, implementing the process that began at the beginning of the new millennium. With that decision, the Council recognized the Cornish language as a unique cultural asset and accepted responsibility for safeguarding and promoting it in accordance with the principles laid down in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. This recognition takes the following forms: 1) implementing a system of bilingual signage for street and place names and providing new and replacement signs; 2) including the language in all future Council publications and promotional literature, such as the Council website; 3) ensuring the availability of Cornish language material to the public; and 4) considering additional ways to incorporate Cornish in the different departments of the entity. Recognition of Cornish as a minority language has also been symbolically present in the British Parliament, when four of the MPs for Cornwall swore their Oaths of Allegiance in Cornish in May 2010 (Ferdinand 2013: 217). Cornish has no official status to date within the education system and has yet to secure a place in the curriculum. If the final objective of the language movement is to restore Cornish as the vernacular of the Cornish people, that goal remains a distant one. As George conceded, ‘This long-term objective is unlikely to be achieved in the foreseeable future, though it would be brought nearer if Cornish were to be made available as a proper subject to all schoolchildren in Cornwall’ (George and Broderick 2008:759). Acccording to Renkó-Michelsén (2013: 194-5), Revived Cornish has passed the four lower stages of Fishman’s GIDS scale discussed in chapter 2. It has fulfilled the core requirements of Stages 8, 7, 6 and 5, while the criteria of the further stages have not or have only partly been achieved. She encourages revivalists to channel most their resources into aiding informal ! 128! Although we have no direct knowledge of Manx before the sixteenth century, we can assume a largely monoglot and illiterate population living in feudal subordination. The language would have been universal among the general population but not shared by the highest social stratum, whose own language enjoyed greater prestige. The island was virtually sealed from contact with the outside world and tenants were forbidden to leave it without special permission. Constant watch was kept against incursions from Scotland. The effect on the language was to isolate it from the dialects of the rest of Gaeldom. Whereas the Island had been on the circuit of peripatetic bards and singers, bearers of the old culture common to the whole of Gaeldom, Man now lost contact with its neighbours to the west and north as they ceased to find patrons on the Island. (Stephans 1976: 109) As far as the gentry are concerned, anglicizing influences were at work throughout the seventeenth century. In Speed’s Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain of 1627, we read The wealthier sort, and such as hold the fairest possessions doe imitate the people of Lancashire, both in their honest carriage and good house-keeping. Howbeit the common sort of people both in their language and in their habits come nighest unto the Irish. (after Harrison 1871: 37-38) James, the Seventh Earl of Derby and Lord of Mann (1627 to 1643), encouraged young Manxmen to attend university in England. Plans to establish a university on the island itself were frustrated by the English Civil War (Stowell 2005: 387). English-medium schools were set up in each parish by Isaac Barrow, the bishop and governor of Man (1663 -1671) and church ministers obliged to teach in them. For those aspiring to higher education, a grammer school was set up in Castleton in 1676. The prevailing belief was ! 129! that use of Manx in churches hindered the appreciation and understanding of the scriptures, although church ministers were nevertheless expected to be able to use it, given that at that time over sixty percent of the population of the island knew no other language. The first book to be published in Manx (in 1707), a translation of The Principles and Duties of Christianity, known in Manx as Coyrle Sodjey [Further Advice], undertaken by Thomas Wilson (1698-1755), who became Bishop of Mann in 1698, arguably evinces a certain tolerance and pragmatism towards the language. It was nevertheless Wilson’s policy to enjoin all Manx parents under penalty of fines to send their children to school to learn English. The 1695 edition of Camden’s Britannia conceivably describes a situation of transitional bilingualism in which the gentry are beginning to dissociate themselves from the vernacular: Their Gentry are very courteous and affable, and are more willing to discourse with one in English than in their own language. (Harrison 1871: 18) 5. 3. The Eighteenth Century The incipient language shift evident in the seventeenth century was retarded in the following century by a number of factors, among them economic stagnation, poor communications and a limited degree of recognition granted to the language by the clergy. In 1726 town-dwellers numbered only 2,530, or 17 percent of the Island’s population. The rural poor still lived in primitive turf-built cottages and engaged in subsistence farming. Religious services outside the towns continued to be held almost entirely in Manx, despite the lack of a Manx translation of the Bible until 1763, and education as an overtly anglicising medium was largely ineffectual. Bishop Wilson’s History, written early in the eighteenth century, reports that ‘English is not understood by two-thirds at least of the Island, though there is an ! 130! English school in every parish, so hard is it to change the language of a whole country’ (emphasis added) (Harrison 1871: 111). The presupposition of this last observation is that the eradication of Manx was a desirable though not easily achieved outcome. Wilson’s successor as Bishop of Sodor and Man, Bishop Hildesley (1755-72) was more sympathetic and it was during his episcopate that Manx for the first time became a medium of instruction in schools. This in part stemmed from the recognition that it was nonsensical for children to be taught in a language few of them could understand. Thus teaching materials were provided and the clergy were actively encouraged to cultivate the language. Hildesley asks in a letter concerning a young curate: Has he made a Manx sermon yet? If he has not ‘tis fit he should; unless he is one of those geniuses of the South, who think the cultivation of that language unnecessary. This, I believe, is the only country in the world, that is ashamed of, and even inclined to extirpate, if it could, its own native tongue (quoted in Thomson 1969: 208). In 1757 only three parishes were using Manx as a medium of instruction. By 1766 the Catechism and prayers were taught through the medium of Manx in all the parishes in the island exccept one (Broderick 1999:17). The publication of the full Bible translated into Manx (1763-73), which was Hildesley’s project, was less an index of the buoyancy and standing of the language than a product of individual enthusiasm and initiative.39 What might retrospectively be described as an attitude of enlightened accommodation was short-lived. Following Hildesley’s death in 1772, Anglican support for Manxmedium instruction in schools was withdrawn, and by 1782 English had become the main language of instruction in all but five schools on the island. There was to be a brief reintroduction of Manx in Sunday Schools in the 1820s but in 1825 the main supplier of Manx language religious material, the SPCK (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) was informed by a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 39 Much as was later to be the case with William Lorimer’s ‘New Testament in Scots’, published postumously in 1983. ! 131! hostile Bishop Murray there was no longer any need for such material and indeed that the teaching of Manx had been prohibited by an Act of Westminster, a assertion that was no less effective for being false (Broderick 1999). The advent of Methodism into Man during the 1770s saw a reappraisal of the language as a potential medium of conversion. Several religious tracts were published in Manx towards the end of the century under the aegis of the Methodists, including a hymn-book and a mass of religious verse called carvals40 or carols, but again the motivation was strictly pragmatic. John Wesley himself, who visited the Island in 1777 and 1783, approved of the Manx, noting in his journal that ‘a more loving simple-hearted people than this I never saw. And no wonder; for there are but six papists and no dissenters in the Island’. He was less than kindly disposed to the language: ‘I exceedingly disapprove of your publishing anything in the Manx language. On the contrary, we should do everything in our power to abolish it from the earth’ he wrote to one of his Manx preachers in 1789 (quoted in Gregor 1980: 296). Despite this personal antipathy, Wesley’s call to arms went unheeded but a number of impersonal agencies were already working towards the desired demise. During the early 18th century a trade in wine, tea, tobacco and other commodities had grown up between the Isle of Man and England, Scotland and Ireland. The Manx traders obtained these goods abroad and sold them on the mainland, having paid a lower rate of duty. A practice the British government regarded as smuggling, the Manx saw as legitimate trade. It attracted increasing numbers of merchants to the Isle of Man, which in turn led to the growth of the towns, especially Douglas, and greater use of English. The suppression of this lucrative trade by means of the Act of Revestment, known as Yn Chialg Vooar [The Great Deception], which transferred !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 40These comprise an extensive corpus of some 20-25,000 lines of original Manx verse, mostly on religious themes and arranged in a series of songs averaging around 35 stanzas each. They were sung in parish churches initially , then in the Methodist chapels on Christmas Eve. ! 132! sovereignty of the island from the Duke of Atholl to the British Crown, depressed the Manx economy and provoked large-scale emigration (over 1000 in 1765 alone)41. Recovery at the end of the century had the social concomitant of Irish and English in-migration. The decline of Manx results not so much from rigorous action against it from within, but from a set circumstances emanating from without. Until the mid-eighteenth century Man had little contact with the outside world. Given its small population and resources external trade and contact can hardly have been all that great anyway, and English was therefore unnecessary to people outside the small towns, where it was spoken alongside Manx without displacing it. There was little incentive or reason for outsiders to come to Man, and so everyday contact between town and country areas was important and Manx would need to be used. The impetus in the direction of English came ca. early/mid-18th century, largely as a result of the ‘running trade’ from which many Manx people profited (Broderick 1999: 23). 5.4. The Nineteenth Century: ‘an iceberg floating in southern latitudes’. The nineteenth century was one of accelerating language shift. Industrialization (of the mining sector) and mass tourism (from 1829 onwards, and particularly after 1833 when a regular ferry service was !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 41 Of the Manx people who emigrated to America, a significant number settled in Ohio. Many continued to speak Manx as their everyday language and some even acquired their Manx in America. Approximately 30,000 of the present-day residents of Cleveland are of Manx origin, and that Manx was used as a community language in Ohio and parts of Pensylvania until the early twentieth century. Other destinations for emigration were Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand (Ager 2009: 18). ! 133! established) together with progressive urbanization and emigration, all contributed to the weakening and recession of Manx. Demographic shifts and their psycho-social corollary cannot be unrelated to O Murchu’s calculation (1985: 165) that ‘children born in the1850s were, with very few exceptions, the last to acquire Manx naturally’. There is considerable evidence in contemporary observations to support a marked shift away from Manx in this period. Cregeen, in his preface to his Manx dictionary of 1835, writes of the state of the language as ‘despised and neglected’ (Cregeen 1835: iii). In 1848 ‘the Manx is spoken generally in the mountain districts of the Isle of Man, and in the north-westem parishes. There are, however, few persons (perhaps none of the young) who know no English’ (Cumming 1848: 325). The following year Rosser quotes the note of a parish clergyman: ‘The language is getting rapidly into disuse. The rising generation will not speak it’ (Rosser 1849: 17). Most telling of all is Gill’s preface to Kelly’s Manx Grammar of 1859: The decline of the spoken Manx, within the memory of the present generation, has been marked. The language is no longer heard in our courts of law, either from the bench or the bar, and seldom from the witness box [...]. ln our churches the language was used by many of the present generation of clergy three Sundays in every month. It was afterwards restricted to every other Sunday; and is now entirely discontinued in most of the churches. In the schools throughout the Island the Manx has ceased to be taught; and the introduction of the government system of education has done much to displace the language. It is rarely now heard in conversation, except among the peasantry. It is a doomed language, an iceberg floating in southern latitudes. (Gill 1859: v) It is remarkable, given these premonitions of imminent extinction, that the language was to survive another hundred and fifteen years. Its protracted end, ! 134! however, owes less to stubborn language loyalties than to quirks of longevity and upbringing. Ned Madrell, the last native Manx-speaker, was brought up largely by a member of his grandparents’ generation and outlived his own non-Manx-speaking generation by twenty years, dying at the age ninetyseven. Moreover, language is primarily a social phenomenon and as such dies with the demise of a linguistic community. Whatever their purely linguistic value as informants, isolated last speakers are, in a sense, a sociolinguistically irrelevant nachleben of the language. The last Manx-speaking community, that of Creagneash, on the southern tip of the Island, disintegrated in the 1920s, seventy years or one lifetime after 1850. There is therefore good reason to locate the final collapse of Manx Gaelic, not in the period 1901-21 (Price 1984: 81), but in the two decades from 1840 to 1860 when it virtually ceased to be transmitted to the next generation. Biological metaphors once again come to mind. If the last surviving pair of an animal species fail to reproduce, then the species is doomed, although the individuals may live out their natural lives. That the Manx Education Act of 1872 made no provision for the language is in a sense an irrelevance and not to be connected causally with the decline of the language. Had provision been made, it would have been in the context of (a then probably highly unpopular) language revival. The first survey to give a detailed assessment of the numbers of Manx speakers was carried out by Henry Jenner in 1875. 42 Jenner sent a questionnaire to the clergy of each parish with the aim of discovering whether Manx or English was the prevailing language of the parish and how many people spoke Manx as a ‘mother tongue’. The results of Jenner’s survey (which excludes the Island’s capital Douglas) give a total of 12,340 Manx speakers out of a population of 41,084 (30 percent), of whom 109 Manx were monolingual, 0.5 percent of the population excluding Douglas. However, Jenner added a note of caution with regard to the number of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 42 http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/history/manks/jenner.htm ! 135! speakers recorded: Of course these statistics can hardly be taken to represent a perfect linguistic census of the Island, and it would be very difficult to obtain such a thing by answers from different people, as each man (as regards my second question at any rate) would have his own standards to judge by and I am very sure that the standards vary considerably. Still I think they may be said to give a fair approximate view of the philological state of the Isle of Man in the year 1875 (Jenner 1875:14). The second question asked how many people spoke Manx as a ‘mother tongue’; the tabulated answers listed the number of people who ‘speak Manx habitually’ (presumably as a mother tongue though not stated as such). The question was worded ‘How many persons speak Manx as their mother tongue?’, therefore the number of Manx speakers must be presumed to refer to individuals not households. The figures given refer to those collected by the clergy and not the individuals to whom Jenner may or may not have spoken to when he visited the Island some months later – these are not included in his statistics. No distinction is made regarding gender, but there is a question relating to ‘language spoken by children’but without any numerical information merely ‘English only’, ‘English and Manx’, and ‘English and a little Manx’. Jenner divided the Island into the North and South Districts, with eight and nine parishes respectiveley. In four out of the eight North District parishes the children were described as speaking ‘English and a little Manx’, and in one parish ‘English and Manx’. In the South District English and Manx were spoken in one out of the nine parishes. Children in the remaining parishes of both North and South Districts were recorded as speaking English only. Jenner’s survey results also included comments by the local clergy. The following comment was made by the Rector of Kirk Andreas: ‘Children pick up a little Manx when they leave school. Old people, so to speak, “dream in Manx.” Servants like to keep it up as a class language not understood by their ! 136! masters.’ And from the Vicar of St. George’s, Douglas: ‘In the country parishes one finds three generations in one cottage. The old speaking Manx only, the middle Manx and English, and the children English only.’ 5. 5. The Twentieth Century: Nil by mouth This classic pattern presages the decline in speakers that became apparent in the 1901 census,by which time the number of Manx speakers had fallen to 4,419. It is evident that Manx had lost its domain as the main language of the home and family by the turn of the century. The older generation of Manx speakers was not being replaced by younger speakers. From 1901 onwards the decline in speakers continued, dropping to its lowest point in 1946 with a total of 20 Manx speakers. In Jenner’s view, Manx was: now almost exactly in the same state that Cornish was in at the time at which Edward Lhuyd wrote his Archaeologia Britannica (1709), and though that survived in a sort of way for another century, for all purposes of conversation it was dead in less than half that time. The only public or official recognitions of Manx at present are the solitary monthly service at Kirk Arbory; the promulgation of the “Acts of Tynwald” in Manx and English, without which they do not become law; and the carol singing of “Oie’l Vorrey.” How long these will last it is hard to say; but there is a decided feeling on the part of the people, especially among the Manx speakers themselves, that the language is only an obstruction, and that the sooner it is removed the better. ! 137! Figure 12: Census and other evidence for Manx Gaelic decline. Census returns for 1901 (with the town-dwelling population discounted), when plotted against Jenner’s survey and the 1921 census, reveal a linear decline in the percentage of Manx speakers as the last generation died off. In the urban centres, 6.5 percent spoke Manx in 1901, 1.3 percent in 1921. A careful survey just after the Second World war showed that only a score of native speakers were then left, all elderly people who had used Manx in their childhoods with parents or grandparents, but had scarcely ever spoken it since. These were in all probability ‘semi-speakers’.43 When the Celtic scholar, Kenneth Jackson, visited the Island in 1950, there were only ten !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 43The term ‘native speaker’ enjoys semi-technical status in linguistics to refer to speakers whose intuitions about a particular language are most to be relied on because they had acquired that language naturally during childhood. The term ‘last native-speaker’ is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is not at all certain that these speakers reach a level of competence that can be designated ‘native’. In the terminal stages of transitional bilingualism, the dominant language is acquired natively whereas with the obsolescent language it is questionable whether it is fully acquired at all. Secondly, the speech community itself may not agree on who belongs to it. Watson prefaces his essay on Scottish and Irish Gaelic with a warning to the researcher about speaker self-identification: ‘[S]ome people may may claim speaker status when others would not accept them as such; some may say they are not speakers when others would include them as speakers.’ (1989: 41) ! 144! of Manx, this scenario was played out in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. ! 145! Chapter 6: The Revitalization of Manx 6.0. Introduction The outline of Manx has been likened to an hourglass. For some, the last of the sand slid through the neck of the glass in 1974 and is beyond recall. For others the shape of the glass itself suggests attenuation from the richness of Classical Manx, through to the constriction of ‘Late Manx’ (with its slenderest point reached at the death of Ned Maddrell), then gradually widening out again in the revival. As with twentieth and twenty first century Cornish, the revival is controversial and raises questions of authenticity and continuity from earlier forms. This chapter addresses the history and present state of the revived language. 6.1. The Nineteenth-Century Origins In the course of nineteenth century a number of dictionaries, grammars and other Manx language material were published, not ostensibly in order to ward off language death but rather to wind up the deceased’s estate with some overdue codification. The Reverend John Kelly (1750-1809) in the introduction to his Manx-English dictionary (written in 1805 but not published until in 1866) seems not to find anything inherently undesirable about the loss of the Celtic languages:48 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 48Kelly was born in Baldwin, Isle of Man and educated at Douglas Grammar School and subsequently at Cambridge University. Before he was seventeen, he undertook the task of writing a grammar of Manx, on the basis of his observation of native speech and the gospel of St Matthew published by Bishop Thomas Wilson in 1748 (published in 1804). In light of his comments above, it is unsurprising that the grammar is vitiated by his treatment of Manx inflection as though it were Latin. Kelly was also engaged by Hildesley to assist with the task of producing a Manx version of the Bible. While transporting the finished manuscript of much of the Old Testament to the printers in Whitehaven, Kelly was shipwrecked and is said to have saved the manuscpript by holding it above the water until he and it were rescued from the sinking ship. An unluckier fate awaited Kelly’s intented magnum opus, the triglot dictionary of the three Gaelic languages, with the meanings given in English, largely compiled in the years 1779-90 and proposed for publication in 1805 while ! 146! It is true that in process of time this cultivation of the Gaelic language will destroy the language itself, as a living language; but it will have produced the knowledge of a better [language], and will descend to posterity by means of the press in a more perfect state, than if it should have been found only in the conversation of unlettered individuals. There would be no cause for regret, then, that it was not a living language, than there is at present, that the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin are no longer such. In addition, the extension of Gaelic literacy was seen, perhaps counterintuitively, to favour the eradication of political and religious dissent: ‘And when there shall be one national language [sc. English], then only will be the union of the empire be completely established’ (quoted after Broderick 1999). This should be seen in the context of 1798 rebellion in Ireland which challenged English rule and Protestant ascendancy in that country and sought to establish a republic. The rising was led by the United Irishmen, a society which subscribed to the same ideals of fraternity and equality that had brought about the American and French revolutions. Once the rising was repressed, the Act of Union was passed (Doyle 2015: 108). In the nineteenth century, those who wrote Manx language material commonly felt the need to justify their work and to make it clear that their intention was to preserve the language for academic study rather than prolong its life (Broderick 1999). In the introduction to his 1835 English-Manx dictionary, for example, Archibald Cregeen (1835: v) notes that: I am well aware that the utility of the following work will be variously appreciated by my brother Manksmen. Some will be disposed to deride the endeavour to restore vigour to a decaying language. Those who reckon the extirpation of the Manks a necessary step towards that general extension of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Kelly was vicar of Copford in Essex. A fire in the printer’s shop destroyed the first impression and the project fell into abeyance. Under the aegis of the Manx Society, the Manx-English portion was published together with an English-Manx section in 1866 by the Revd William Gill, vicar of Malew. ! 147! the English, which they deem essential to the interest of the Isle of Man, will condemn every effort which seems likely to retard its extinction. But those will think otherwise who consider that there are thousands of the natives of the Island that can at present receive no useful knowledge whatever, except through the medium of the Manks language; they will judge from experience, as well as from the nature of the case, that no work of this description will hinder the progress of the English, but in fact have the contrary effect. (Cregeen 1835: v) This may be no more than a rhetorical acknowledgement of the ambivalence felt by much of the educated population of the Island towards Manx. As a captatio its effect depends on the publication being interpreted (paradoxically) as a vehicle for the eventual dissemination and advancement of purely English literacy. Cregeen is much less nuanced however in his preface, declaring that it is much to be lamented that ‘a language so venerable for its antiquity’ should be so generally neglected and urging the natives of Mona not to regard it ‘with disgraceful apathy and heartless indifference’. 6.2. The Manx Language Society The revival as an organized and institutional movement may be said to date from 22March, 1899 with the founding of Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh (The Manx Language Society, hereafter YCG), under the presidency of the Speaker of the House of Keys, Arthur W. Moore (1836-1909). Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh is on the one hand a reflection of the Celtic renaissance, a wideranging cultural exercise in retrieval, invention, and assertion that was a feature of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and on the other, a reaction to the marked retreat that Manx had recently sustained, as documented by Henry Jenner. It is also a reaction against the increasingly ! 148! invasive popular culture of the mainland and an affirmation of “little Manx” nationhood:49 The local establishment, disdainful of working-class holiday makers or "cotton balls" from Lancashire, rediscovered a Celtic ethnicity, defined against the latest commercial popular culture offered in local pleasure palaces and dance halls, the biggest in Europe. However, there was a pragmatic and realistic approach to Gaelic revival, a recognition that the bulk of the Manx population, wise to economic opportunity, had abandoned the language all but irretrievably (Belcham 2000: 228). Its inception lay in a notice published in 1897 in the local paper in Peel inviting people with an interest in the Manx language to a meeting in the Primitive Old Chapel. There it was decided to hold Manx language classes and to form the Peel Manx Language Association. As well as learning the language, people would familiarize themselves with Manx songs and history. Similar classes were started in a number of other towns, including Douglas and Lonan and thus the idea of an island-wide society germinated. The stated aims of the Society were ample in scope: to encourage interest in the Manx language, history, music, songs, folklore and place names, to cultivate a national spirit, and especially to preserve and collect Manx literature.50 Its model was not only the Welsh Eisteddfod but the Gaelic !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 49 ‘The Little Manx Nation’ (1891) was the title of a popular history of the Island by Manx novelist, Hall Caine [Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine] (1853-1931) 50 Moore in his presidential address, November 18, 1899, is careful to qualify the implications of the name of the society: ‘Though called the Manx Language Society, it should, I think, by no means confine its energies to the promotion of an interest in the language, but extend them to the study of Manx history, the collection of Manx music, ballads, carols, folklore, proverbs, place-names, including the old field names which are rapidly dying out - in a word, to the preservation of everything that IS distinctively Manx, and, above all, to the cultivation of a national spirit. Let us co-operate cordially with the Guild in its admirable work of encouraging Manx industry, music, and art; with the Antiquarian Society, and the Trustees of Ancient Monuments in their care for the relies of the past, while devoting ourselves more especially to the tasks of preserving and collecting our literature and song. We shall thus form part of an organisation which, ! 149! League in Ireland, founded six years previously by a group of enthusiasts in Dublin. One contrast, however, is instructive. In a speech delivered in New York in 1891, the most prominent founder of the League, Douglas Hyde, made a radical call to arms: Now, Ladies and Gentlemen, if you want to keep Irish alive in your midst there is no way or method to do that but to speak it all the time–all the time, I say, among yourselves. Follow my example, I beseech you. As they said in Old Irish, I’m under injunction, under injunction or under oath, not to speak a single word of English ever, except when I will not be understood in Irish (quoted after Doyle 2015: 177). It appears that measures of language maintenance were not thought appropriate or feasible in the case of Manx.51 An account of the Manx Language Society’s first general annual meeting published in the Gaelic League’s journal An Claidheamh Soluis reports a prominent member of the society arguing enthusiastically for the preservation of Manx but objecting strongly to Manx speakers passing the language on to their children (Stowell 2005: 400). The president himself is reported to have acquiesced in the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I trust will in time accomplish for the Isle of Man what the Eisteddfod has done for Wales.’ (‘The Origin of the Manx Language Society’. Reprinted from the Isle of Man Examiner of January 3, 1914 http://www.isle-of- man.com/manxnotebook/publshrs/yncg.htm; accessed March 4, 2013). 51Pan-Celticists were inclined to concur. A leading article in Celtia averred: ‘The present nucleus of Manx speakers is small, the percentage being one third or onefourth of what it is in Ireland. The spelling is uncouth, and out of all relation to the spirit of the language and the larger mass of cognate Gaelic literature. [...] He must be a brave man indeed who would face such odds, with Lancashire sending over its shiploads of objectionable tourists every summer to scour the island, and corrupt the language and manners of the islanders, and laugh away their “old gibberish” of anative tongue!’ Celtia 1, no. 3 (March 1901): 33-34 (quoted after Belcham 2000: 132-3). Manx delegates, headed by Moore, had been invited to the first Pan-Celtic Congress held in Dublin in 1901. ! 150! disappearance of the language while at the same time regretting the necessity of preferring ‘the practical to the sentimental’ (Broderick 1991: 174).52 Preservation, not revernacularization, was to be the primary objective. The decisive linguistic issue was not the revival of Gaelic, but protection of the distinctive Anglo-Manx dialect, the insular vernacular. There were however dissident voices among the membership and some at least argued for the promotion of the spoken language.53 As a result of the YCG’s initiatives, a leading Manx newspaper, The Manx Examiner, ran a column in and about Manx (1899-1902) and from 1913 published biannually its own journal Manin, dedicated principally to folklore, music and song, until the premature death of its editor in 1917.54 Interest in Manx traditional music, songs and !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 52This attitude is not untypical of an establishment figure with political responsibilties who approaches the language from a scholarly antiquarian perspective. Moore had been educated at Rugby School and Trinity College, Cambridge and learned Manx in adult life. His contribution to Manx cultural and intellectual interests can be appreciated from his extensive publications, which include The Surnames and Place-Names of the Isle of Man (1890), Folk-Lore of the Isle of Man (1891), Manx Carols (1891), The Diocese of Sodor and Man (1893), Manx Ballads and Music (1896), Manx Worthies (1901), Bishop Hildesley’s Letters (1904), Douglas 100 Years Ago (1904), and Extracts from the Records of the Isle of Man (1905). (Harrison, A. M. ‘Arthur William Moore’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004). For Maddrell (2002: 220), Moore is ‘an onlooker, a collator, rather than an active fieldworker … by no means an integrated member of the community he was studying.’ 53One of the speakers at the 22 March inaugural meeting, William Quayle, drew attention to an already incipient revival independent of the society: ‘I am delighted to find that within the past few months considerable efforts have been made in many districts throughout the Island with a view to the revival of the language, and that several classes have been formed. Amongst others, I may mention the following:- Douglas, with 25 students; Lonan, 25 students; Peel, 75 students; and Andreas, 20 students. Classes are also about to be formed in Foxdale and Rushen, and other places. I am told that several gentlemen in these localities have been patriotic enough to offer their services gratuitously as teachers.’ (‘The Origin of the Manx Language Society’ Reprinted from the Isle of Man Examiner of 3 January, 1914. http://www.isle-of-man.com/manxnotebook/publshrs/yncg.htm), accessed 12 july, 2015. 54For a comprehensive overview of Manin and its editor, Sophia Morrison, see Maddrell (2002), who lists the subject areas or disciplines covered in the journal by order of frequency: ! 151! lore runs concomitant with, and is latterly generative of, an interest in the Manx language. As manifestations of the native production they were infused with the cultural nationalism of the period. The Revival was a corrective to genteel, romanticized popularizations as exemplified by W. H. Gill’s Manx National Songs, with English Words (1896), which appealed to audiences who would prefer their Island’s songs not to be ‘in a language most Manx were desperate to pretend did not exist’ (Stowell 2005: 399).55 An attempt was also made to introduce language instruction in schools. Education in Man was subject to a modified version of the English Elementary Education Act of 1870, which had made no provision for the language. Repeated petitions to the Whitehall authorities resulted in the decision whether or not to teach the language being allowed to devolve upon individual schools, only one of which opted to implement (and then only for a brief period it transpires) weekly half-hour lessons. Not until 1992 was the language to be reintroduced into the island’s school curriculum. The foremost non-professional scholar in the language during this early period, a sweet-manufacturer by profession and founder member of the society, was John Joseph Kneen (1873-1938). Kneen was a formidable autodidact and heimatforscher who also ran special evening classes for YCG members.56His own writings in Manx, with interlinear literal translations in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1. Music, folklore/oral history 2. History, politics/ the war, poems and prose in standard english 3. “Manx Worthies” 4. Natural history 5. Pieces about Manx Gaelic 6. Poems and pros and prose in Anglo-Manx 7. Pieces in Manx Gaelic From the discreet positions occuped by Manx Gaelic, it can be inferred that it is not the principal focus of the journal’s enquiry. 55 For a balanced and detailed account of late nineteenth century song-collecting, see Belchem (2000: 387-392). 56 Something of the patriotic fervour of Kneen and his contemporaries comes across in ‘The old Kelts had a motto, “No Language, No Nation”... Nationality can only be completely preserved through the medium of our native language. […] Let the Language die and our Nationality goes with it. We become merely West Britons.’ ! 152! English, appeared in the Isle of Man Examiner as early as 1895. These were followed by publication of language lessons, a Manx-English Pronouncing Dictionary, and A Grammar of the Manx Language, compiled in 1910 but not printed until 1931.57 This remains one of the most important primers for the language and superseded fellow YCG member Edmund Goodwin’s Chengey Mayrey Ellan Vannin (1910, reprinted in 1947 as First Lessons in Manx). In the preface, Kneen was moved to note a slackening of commitment in the movement, commenting that ‘Celtic enthusiasm, always of a fugitive nature, sadly waned again during the last twenty years’ (Kneen 1931: 20). This may not be unconnected with the upheavals of the First World War, in which 5 percent of the island’s male population were killed. 6.3. Recording the language Yn Cheshaght Ghailckagh first recorded native speakers of Manx with an Edison phonograph in 1905 (McArdle 2006). Other recordings were made on wax cylinders by Dr Rudolph Trebitsch of the Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschafen in Vienna in 1909, and not long after by W.H. Gill. Sophia Morrison’s recordings have unfortunately not survived (Maddrell 2002: 224). Carl Marstrander, who visited Man in late 1920s and early 30s, made extensive recordings of native Manx speakers. On his first visit he could only find forty people who spoke Manx to any extent and believed there to be only a single native speaker left by 1934, although the 1931 census had listed 529. In 1946 Charles W. Loch visited the Island and was able to identify twenty people he assessed as native speakers (Stowell 2005: 401). !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (YCG Yearly Report, 1913, appendix to Mannin, no. 1 (May 1913): 6). The equation of language and nationhood is a commonplace in Celtic revivalism (cf. Hep brezhoneg, breizh ebet ,’Without Breton there is no Brittany’). 57 The full range of his scholarly production may be found in the bibliography appended to ‘Brief Biography of John Joseph Kneen’ http://www.isle-of- man.com/manxnotebook/people/antiqarn/jjkneen.htm. In 1933, on the recommendation of the Norwegian Celticist Carl Marstrander, with whose assistence he wrote his Grammar, Kneen received a knighthood from King Haakon of Norway. ! 153! In 1947, Éamon de Valera, the Irish Taoiseach [Prime Minister], visited the Isle of Man as part of a tour of Gaelic-speaking nations. In Cregneash, on the southern tip of the island, he met Ned Maddrell, then working as a caretaker, who readily conversed with him in Manx. De Valera replied in Irish and it is thought they were able more or less to understand each other, each in his own Goidelic language. De Valera was interested to discover that Manx was still spoken, albeit by fewer and fewer people, and the following year he had a team sent from the Irish Folk Commission to record the last native speakers. That team, led by Kevin Danaher, made some five hours of recordings of Manx being spoken and sung by fifteen people. These were elderly people who rarely had opportunities to speak Manx and who had some difficulty recalling it. Fifty years later the recordings were re-mastered and digitized, and a book compiled containing the transcriptions and translations, as well as information about the collectors and their informants.Skeealyn Vannin / Stories of Mann, together with CDs of the recordings themselves, was published in 2003. 6.4. Reawakening The post-war period heralded a new phase of revivalist zeal. In the 1950s Douglas Fargher made a significant contribution to the revival efforts by arranging Manx language classes for adults, publishing Manx courses, and other material, and striving to promote the language, in spite of widespread disdain or indifference towards such activity at the time.58 Sound recordings !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 58To the extent that revival movements often depend on the dedication and initiative of charasmatic indivduals, a prospopographical approach is called for. Fargher (1926-1987), whose maternal grandfather was a native speaker, became a founder member of the nationalist, republican group Mec Vannin, which campaigns for a fully independent Isle of Man. As lexicographer, he is responsible for Fargher’s English–Manx Dictionary (1979). Brought up to date with the neologisms coined in modern times, the dictionary was the ‘largest work in or about Manx Gaelic since the publication of the Manx Bible in 1772’. Two years before his death, Fargher forcefully upheld the ‘apostolic succession’ that had underpinned the Revival: ‘without the living reality of the spoken language, which was passed on by them to my generation, which we in turn have handed on, we might as well have “took our Manx books and hoove them onto the back of the fire”’ (Quilliam, L. ‘Douglas