Celtic languages – from decline to revival? – Sorosoro

Print |

Posted by James Costa on September 23, 2011
 
By James Costa, Research Associate, French Institute for Education, Lyon École Nationale Supérieure.

The languages known as Celtic, gathering Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, belong to the Indo-European language family. They form their own grouping, distinct from the Romance, Germanic or Slavic languages. Only one of them is a national language (in competition with English); all of them are considered as “endangered”, particularly by Unesco. Alongside their last speakers, here is an entire group of languages that could well disappear as language of communication before the end of the century.
 
Origins under debate

Much has been written on the Celtic languages and it is difficult to figure out exactly where they come from.

They have fuelled the imaginations of a number of poets, novelists and linguists since 1707, when Edward Lhuyd, a Welsh naturalist with a passion for ancient history, noticed similarities between, on one side, the languages of Brittany, Wales and Cornwall – Brythonic languages – and on the other, the languages of Ireland and the Isle of Man – Gaelic languages.

Lhuyd also linked these languages to Welsh and identified them as “Celtic”, after the Greek name given to the different peoples who had dominated Europe centuries prior.

Ancient authors are the first to mention the presence of the Celts (keltoï in Greek) over a large portion of Ancient Europe, though they do not specify where they originally came from.

Archaeologists lead further back in time, retracing the sources and migrations of the Celts from Central Europe as early as the 7th century B.C. (the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures).

However, this hypothesis is now being challenged by recent studies combining archaeology, linguistics, and genetics, which suggest origins located in today’s Portugal, as well as a conquest of Europe by the Atlantic coast.

At this point in research, therefore, no one can declare for certain which was or were the original sources of modern Celtic languages.
 
Yielding before Rome in the South, the Germanic in the East and North

Nevertheless, these languages, testified by countless toponyms in a large part of Western Europe, were gradually replaced by varieties of Latin in Gaul, Iberia and northern Italy, and by Germanic idioms in Germany, Switzerland and even the Isle of Brittany (today’s Great Britain), where the use of English kept increasing throughout the Middle Ages.

Thus the variety of Breton spoken in the Kingdom of Strathclyde (South of today’s Scotland) yielded before English around the 12th century. In the Southwest of today’s Great Britain, the latest speaker of Cornish is known to have lived in the 18th century.

Left unconquered by Rome, Ireland remained a monolingual Celtic speaker up to the first Norman forays of the 13th century, even though the monks did speak Latin.

Ireland was also the starting point of a gaelicization movement across Scotland in the 3rd and 4th centuries, which led to the local extinction of Pictish, permanently replaced by Gaelic in the 12th century.

 
The Welsh exception

Languages of the farmers and fishermen, and later that of miners in Wales, the “Celtic” languages have been constantly ostracised over the centuries: according to the conceptions of economically dominant groups in Western Europe, the Celtic languages were associated with poverty and a lifestyle deemed as outdated.

The case of Welsh is the only exception in such a context: the year of 1588 witnessed the publication of Bible translated into Welsh – a Bible that still happens to be in use today in various chapels across Wales. If Welsh was the language of God, it could also be the language of Man!
 
From 19th century Celtomania to the 1960s revival

By the end of the 19th century, from Brittany to Scotland, the emergence of an indigenous cultural elite generated movements of cultural demand centred on the very use of these languages. These demands usually encountered the requirements of the growing modern Nation States, originally designed to be monolingual.

The 1960s carried a revival of local cultures worldwide, and various linguistic movements struggled to raise awareness towards the global span of these cultures, and the dignity of these languages.
 
Nowadays?

Now at the dawn of the 21st century, Breton is spoken by fewer than 200,000 people. A census led in the Republic of Ireland reports that about 1,5 million people are believed to speak Irish, although in fact, the language could be spoken by less than 10,000 people. Scottish Gaelic is used by some 55,000 people.
 
The status of Cornish and Manx is unusual:

– the use of Cornish came to an end in the 18th century, although nowadays about 2,200 people speak a variant of Cornish that was reconstructed from medieval texts during the 20th century;

– Manx has been recorded with its last “traditional” speakers: it is now back in use on the Isle of Man, and considered official by the local government.

There again, Welsh seems the only one to be avoiding the momentum of decline: for the first time in a hundred years, the number of people who declared speaking Welsh in a 2001 census was on the increase, and exceeded 600,000 people. A turnaround due to the very strong pressure upheld by activists in the course of the past decades, thanks to which Welsh is now widely present in all sectors of public life; in the media and school as in administration.

Although maybe not as prominently, the revival is also discernible in other Celtic countries and beyond, in North America and Australia. Celtic languages, for the most, are no longer mere languages of common communication outside home – they now have other grounds to express themselves on, identity is one of them.
 
Further into the subject

Abalain, H. (1989). Destin des langues celtiques. Gap: Ophrys.

Crystal, D. (2005). Revitalizing the Celtic Languages. Paper presented at the XI Annual Conference of the North American Association for Celtic Language Teachers. Retrieved from http://www.davidcrystal.com/DC_articles/Langdeath2.pdf

Dorian, N. C. (1981). Language Death : the Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Filippula, M., Klemola, J., & Paulasto, H. (2008). English and Celtic in Contact. New York & Abingdon: Routledge.

McLeod, W. (Ed.). (2006). Revitalising Gaelic in Scotland. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press.
 
On the origins of the Celtic languages

Cunliffe, B, & Koch, J. (2010) Celtic from the West. Oxford: Oxbow.
 
Learning Celtic languages

Costa-Lynch, J. (2005). Le gallois de poche. Paris: Assimil.

Press, I., & Le Bihan, H. (2003). Colloquial Breton. London & New York: Routledge.

Taylor, I., & Robertson, B. (2003). Teach Yourself Gaelic. London: Teach Yourself.

Le Bihan, H., Denis, G., & Ménard, M. (2009). Le breton pour les nuls. Paris: First.

Ó Sé, D. & Sheils, D. Teach Yourself Irish. London: Teach Yourself.