Broadcasting for Minorities: The Case of the Celtic Languages

The Celtic languages are a group of Indo-European languages that are still spoken on the periphery of Western Europe. Welsh, Irish, Scots Gaelic, Cornish and Manx are indigenous to the British Isles, and Breton is still spoken in Brittany on France’s west coast. In the past one hundred years the Celtic languages have witnessed a dramatic fall in the number of speakers. In Ireland the percentage of the population that spoke Irish had halved between 1861 and 1926 (Central Statistics Office 2005). In Wales the number of Welsh speakers had fallen from 54 per cent of the population in 1891 to fewer than 30 per cent by 1951 [National Statistics Online (2004)]. In Scotland the situation has proved even more precarious, where recent figures suggest that there are now fewer than 60,000 speakers of Scots Gaelic (McKinnion 2004). In Brittany there has also been a serious decline in the number of speakers throughout the twentieth century. However, determining the size of the Bretonspeaking community is problematic because there is no question on the language in the French census. One study conducted by a private company in 1991 suggested that there were around 320,000 speakers of Breton (Research Centre of Wales 1996).

Keywords

• Celtic Language

• National Identity

• Minority Language

• Identity Politics

• Broadcast Medium

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